Editorial: At St. Louis airport, ICE parks its arrogance

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Oct 20, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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It’s not just masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that are prowling America’s streets incognito. Turns out even ICE’s vehicles — one of them, anyway — are also hidden behind a veil of menacing secrecy that would be more appropriate in some third-world totalitarian dystopia than in what is putatively the most free and open democracy on Earth.

That’s the illuminating takeaway from a bomb scare at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Part of the airport was temporarily shut down the night of Oct. 7 because an unmarked truck with no license plates was found parked unattended outside the airport's Terminal 1.

After an appropriate airport response that included a bomb-sniffing dog, an evacuation and a call to a bomb and arson unit, officials finally determined the mysterious truck was an ICE vehicle, left unattended while immigration agents were in the airport making an arrest.

The nation has become all-too-familiar with ICE’s chilling tactics as deployed under the Trump administration: the abusive treatment of immigrants and Americans alike; the strutting masked cosplay by poorly trained agents hurriedly hired to carry out the administration’s militarization of Democratic-controlled cities; the reportedly dire conditions inside immigration detention centers, which history may well condemn alongside such national shames as Japanese internment.

But amid all this evidence of ICE’s brutality and recklessness, no one should lose sight of the fact that the agency today is also epically incompetent. Seriously, who leaves an unmarked truck containing tactical equipment and ammunition outside an airport terminal? Did they not see all the signs about unattended vehicles?

Or maybe — as is too often the case with ICE’s agents — they just decided mere civilian law doesn’t apply to them?

The St. Louis region, like so much of America, has tangled with ICE before during the current administration’s frenzied attacks on both legal and illegal immigration.

There was the incident in April, in which two Hillsdale police officers working under contract with ICE showed up unannounced at the nearby Ritenour School District in northwest St. Louis County asking about three middle-school students. The appearance of officers in tactical gear frightened a playground full of sixth graders out for recess in the heavily Hispanic district, prompting their teachers to quickly lead them back inside.

There was the arrest in May of Boanerges Flores, 53, a custodian at Maplewood Richmond Heights Early Childhood Center, a law-abiding Nicaraguan refugee living and working legally in the U.S. He was nabbed by ICE while dutifully attending a routine court hearing on his pending asylum case — not nabbed for any crime, but because the administration has moved to deport asylum applicants even as their cases are still pending. As we asked about Flores, this is Donald Trump’s “worst of the worst”?

Then there was the horrifying story of Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, a 25-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living legally in the St. Louis area pending her asylum case. After her husband was deported back to Guatemala after a minor traffic infraction, González de la Cruz made the difficult decision to “self-deport” and follow him, as the administration pressures immigrants to do by breaking up families.

The couple was later found dead in a Guatemalan sugarcane field, having been tortured and executed; their 1-year-old American-born daughter was found dehydrated and crying beside their bodies. So much for the cruel ignorance of those who say asylum-seekers are just fabricating their claims of being in danger in their home countries.

Obviously, the brief inconvenience caused by ICE’s airport snafu was nothing on the scale of any of this. But it was a timely reminder of the arrogant, untouchable mindset that defines this agency in the Trump era.

As the Post-Dispatch's Mark Schlinkmann reports, ICE has offered no explanation for its airport lapse. No one should expect one. An agency that cavalierly commits all of the above outrages — not to mention gunning down two Americans on the streets of Minneapolis for engaging in constitutionally protected protest, only to have their president slander them as terrorists — clearly doesn’t have to worry about accountability to anyone.