From Minnesota to Milan now: ICE officers will be deployed in Italy during the Winter Olympics beginning on February 6. For days, Italy’s government under the post-fascist and Trump-friendly Giorgia Meloni had denied a possible presence of the now worldwide notorious immigrant-hunters from the USA at the Games, but now it is official. ICE personnel are arriving as part of the U.S. security forces that accompany the U.S. delegation.
Just on Monday, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi had dismissed such rumors in this direction as a “polemic about nothing” and stated, “ICE as such will never operate in Italy” – then added, “until now” the Americans, like everyone else, had not listed the presences that would be on-site here in Italy in the wake of the delegations.
The minister then received a nudge from the U.S. Embassy in Rome, which announced that, just as “in previous Olympic Games,” “diverse federal agencies, including Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative component of ICE,” would be on site in Milan.
Only a few hours earlier, Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani had kept a distance from the United States, commenting on the shocking images from Minneapolis with the words that the footage showed “abuses,” and that “there is a big difference between the arrest and the killing of an armed man.”
“Not the SS is coming”
Most Italians and the Italian media share this view. When on Tuesday evening all TV news broadcasts prominently reported the coming of ICE to the Olympics, many channels accompanied the report with videos of the shooting of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, which had shocked the world.
Since then, the Meloni government has been trying to limit the damage. Sometimes it says that only “three to four” ICE officers are coming, other times it mentions ten. Interior Minister Piantedosi, however, clings to his original denial with hair-splitting — because the U.S. security personnel are not “operational” in Italy, but would merely be on duty at the U.S. Consulate in Milan, at the local U.S. operations center. And Foreign Minister Tajani also had to state now that “not the SS is coming,” that there are not “masked officers with assault rifles” on the way.
The opposition sees it differently. Milan’s mayor from the centrist-left Democratic Party (PD), Beppe Sala, who usually does not resort to sharp tones, declared on a radio program that ICE is “a militia that kills.” The mayor added that he feels “not protected” by Interior Minister Piantedosi and that it is clear that “they (the ICE officers) are not welcome in Milan.” He closed with the words: “Can’t we say no to Trump just this once? The ICE agents must not come to Italy because they are not in line with our democratic way of ensuring security.”
And Milanese PD deputy Matteo Mauri followed up. “The same government that defines itself as sovereign then does not defend the dignity of Italian democracy, but is only capable of saying, ‘I obey’ to Trump,” Mauri explained.
Giorgia Meloni herself remains silent. She has good reason. A year ago Donald Trump still enjoyed 42 percent approval among Italian voters, but that figure has now fallen to only 22 percent—a clear sign that many of Meloni’s and Matteo Salvini’s supporters are increasingly opposed to him. The antipathy is likely reinforced by incidents such as last weekend in Minneapolis. There ICE agents stopped a car carrying a crew from Italy’s state broadcaster RAI on board and shouted that if they continued filming, the ICE officers would “smash the car windows and drag you out.”
What is certain now is that Italy’s opposition will not give up. Next Wednesday, Interior Minister Piantedosi will have to appear before the House of Deputies for a discussion about the ICE deployment in Milan. Already next Saturday, however, all opposition parties are planning a rally in the Olympic city. Participants are to come with whistles, just as the people protesting in Minneapolis for weeks have been doing.
