It feels there is something faintly unhinged about a British local councillor deciding that the most urgent use of their political voice is to intervene in American immigration enforcement. Potholes remain, social care budgets are stretched to snapping point, but the real crisis to this councillor, apparently, is several thousand miles away, wearing a badge marked ICE.
Yet that is precisely where Joseph Boam and Michael J. Squires chose to plant their flag. Both men, elected as local councillors in England, have drawn attention less for local work and more for loudly aligning themselves with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a US federal agency operating in a country they do not govern, under laws they do not write, enforcing policies they will never be held accountable for.
This is not curiosity about international affairs. It is ideological tourism.
Not foreign policy, just local politics doing cosplay
The moment that crystallised it came on 25 January 2026. As images and videos spread from Minneapolis showing the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, during a federal immigration operation under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Boam logged on to X and posted a graphic bearing the DHS crest with the words ‘I Stand With ICE’ (later deleted). The timing was not incidental. It was immediate. The killing had already sparked outrage, protests, and demands for investigation in the United States. The footage was graphic. The shock was raw. And into that moment Boam injected a slogan.
It landed exactly as you would expect. With fury.
Swift backlash
LBC reported that Boam was ‘slammed’ for the post, capturing the scale of the backlash. People were not confused about what they were seeing. A British councillor was offering public solidarity with an American immigration agency in the hours after a man had been shot dead during an enforcement operation. This was not an abstract debate about borders. It was a live human death, reduced to a branding exercise.
Precision matters. Early online commentary often collapses every federal immigration badge into ‘ICE’, but reporting around the Minneapolis incident described federal immigration officers operating under DHS, with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) involvement cited in US coverage. That does not dilute the point. ICE sits under DHS. The slogan was explicit. ‘I Stand With ICE’ is not a nuanced position. It is a chant, loaded with years of controversy and a record of aggressive enforcement that has made the agency one of the most divisive institutions in American public life.
Even by the standards of the US right, the timing was extreme. Donald Trump, hardly known for restraint when it comes to immigration enforcement, struck a noticeably cautious tone in the immediate aftermath. There were no triumphant slogans, no instant lionisation of the officers involved. When you manage to position yourself to the right of Donald Trump in the hours after a fatal shooting, you are no longer making a political argument. You are performing something else entirely.
An unsatisfactory defense
Boam’s response to the backlash followed a familiar script. Supporters on X insisted he was merely backing law enforcement in general, as if the words on the image were somehow invisible. But slogans mean things. ‘I Stand With ICE’ is not a neutral statement of respect for the rule of law. It is a declaration of allegiance in a culture war that treats enforcement agencies as avatars of strength and those on the receiving end as collateral.
Squires, meanwhile, was drawn into the same storm after sharing and amplifying similar pro-I.C.E material. Posts were deleted, screenshots circulated, clarifications floated. The pattern remained. Two British councillors had chosen to wade into an American tragedy not with caution or empathy, but with applause.
The question that inevitably follows is why this matters in Britain. Why spend so much time on a tweet?
Political signalling but at what cost?
Because politics is made of signals. When elected officials publicly cheer hardline enforcement thousands of miles away, they are not conducting foreign policy. They are advertising instincts. They are telling you how they view power, coercion, and the acceptable use of force by the state. I.C.E is not some distant, neutral bureaucracy. In the United States it is associated with family separations, aggressive raids, and repeated allegations of excessive force. To rush to its defence in the wake of a killing is to take a very clear moral position.
And it is a position taken without risk.
Boam will never have to sit in a Minneapolis community meeting and answer questions from a grieving family. Squires will never face scrutiny from a US oversight committee. They can posture safely from England, insulated from consequence, secure in the knowledge that the human cost belongs to someone else. That is not courage. It is politics without responsibility.
The performance of politics
There is also a deeper emptiness at work. British immigration policy is already harsh, already failing, already crying out for scrutiny. Asylum backlogs grow, detention expands, and human suffering is quietly normalised at home. Engaging with that reality would require detail, trade-offs, and accountability. It is far easier to import American culture war aesthetics, paste a DHS logo onto a timeline, and feel tough by association.
This is what happens when politics becomes aesthetic rather than practical. Logos replace law. Slogans replace solutions. The performance becomes the point.
Lost in all of this is the human fact that triggered it. Alex Pretti was not a metaphor. He was an ICU nurse, someone whose working life involved keeping strangers alive at their most vulnerable. When public figures respond to a death like that with instant ideological chest-beating, something has gone badly wrong. Disagreement about immigration enforcement is inevitable in a democracy. Reflexive celebration in the face of a killing is not.
The blunt truth
British local government is supposed to be dull. It is meant to be about bins, schools, roads, care. When councillors start auditioning for American culture wars instead, it raises real questions about priorities. This episode is not a one-off lapse in judgement. It is a glimpse of instinct. A movement that claims to speak for ordinary people but instinctively sides with distant armed state power in the hours after a civilian has been killed is telling you where its reflexes lie.
Here is the blunt truth, stripped of slogans. If your first response to a man being shot dead is to cheer the badge rather than pause for the body, you are not strong on borders. You are simply empty where the conscience should be.
If your politics needs a foreign gun to feel brave, it is not patriotism, it is cowardice with Wi-Fi.
