Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been forced to delete a graphic claiming that its job is to stop illegal "ideas" from entering the United States.

"If it crosses the border illegally, it's our job to STOP IT," the graphic on ICE's since-deleted X post reads. Among the things that could "illegally" enter American soil, the agency listed "people, money, products, ideas."

In a statement to Futurism and other outlets, ICE media lead Mike Alvarez insisted that the graphic was posted in error.

"That post was sent without proper approval and should not have been shared," Alvarez told us. "'Ideas' should have said 'intellectual property.'"

Ahead of that statement, however, ICE received ample backlash from those perturbed by the concept of ideas being considered illegal in a country founded on principles of free speech and religious assembly.

"The idea that ideas can be illegal," columnist David Rothkopf posted on Bluesky, "is actually the only idea that's illegal in this country."

Chillingly, ICE's deleted thought police post was made around the same time that the Associated Press reported that Homeland Security, the agency's parent organization, raised the specter of anti-semitism when pressed for evidence on a contentious student deportation.

In a memo leaked to the AP, Homeland Security lawyers claimed that Columbia student and organizer Mahmoud Khalil — a Palestinian-Syrian green card-holder who was forcibly taken into ICE custody in March on State Department orders that his visa be revoked — was guilty of no actual crime, save for his beliefs regarding Israel and Palestine.

Considered one of the leaders of Columbia's pro-Palestine encampment movement last year, Khalil was, as State Department secretary Marco Rubio put it in a document cited by the memo, participating in "otherwise lawful" activities amid his student organizing. Because he's not a full citizen, however, his activities fall under the purview of the State Department and HomeSec — and, they claim, "severely undermine" the American objective of combating "anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States."

As the AP notes, the 30-year-old student activist maintained his innocence in a letter sent from the ICE facility he's being held at in Louisiana.

"The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broad strategy to suppress dissent," Khalil wrote in that March 18 missive. "Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs."

It seems, unfortunately, that he was right — especially because several other visa and green card-holding students have also been similarly detained and deported since Khalil was arrested in the middle of the night on March 8, and hundreds more have had their student visas revoked.

In other words, ICE's graphic was unintentionally too honest: the thought police are real — and proud of it.

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