However, the scale and intensity of the response to the mere suggestion of their presence is reflective of the increased awareness of ICE overseas, and the extent to which the actions of some agents have caused anti-American sentiment.
“We know that today, a lot of people in the world are looking at us, because we are hosting the Olympic Games. It’s not just a sporting event, it’s important for all the world,” said Alessandro Capelli, the secretary of the Milan branch of Italy’s Democratic Party, the main opposition to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
Donald Trump with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Credit: AP
“We would like to say that the fight for human rights all over the world, it’s our fight [too]. We are citizens of Milan, we are citizens of the world. We are watching on TV what ICE is doing in the US, so for us it’s quite a normal thing to show our solidarity with people who are fighting.”
Asked how news of the ICE deployment had been received across Italy’s political spectrum, Capelli said: “It’s an interesting question. Obviously, the democratic and left part are moving with more courage, while [people] in the right say something [like], for example: ‘We don’t like a lot the method of ICE.’ But we have a problem: Steve Bannon is a friend of Giorgia Meloni and [Italy’s deputy Prime Minister] Matteo Salvini, so they have to explain to us how this friendship is going.”
Jocelyn Frederick, an American homemaker who is originally from Florida but has lived in Italy for almost 20 years, suspected the announcement that ICE, specifically, would be coming – and not Homeland Security – was deliberate.
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“We’re used to hearing about Homeland Security being involved in major international events,” she said.
“We hear about that happening, and especially for anti-terrorism, but that they would be using the ICE, it sounds like it’s a show of force: ‘We’re bringing our agents. We’re showing that they are strictly connected to [JD] Vance and the administration.’ Like, they’re coming with him. That’s what doesn’t really make sense.
“Some people [in Italy] will say, ‘We need ICE here too,’ and then there’s other people who are just very clearly very against it. The majority of people who I speak to are very upset about what’s going on in America in general.”
Down Corso Garibaldi, which runs to the south of the piazza and leads to the metro station from where many of the protesters emerged, there was an unfortunately named bar and gelataria: Icebound.
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