What if the most dangerous expansion of federal power wasn’t led by soldiers or spies—but by spreadsheet?
The Cold State is a searing investigation into how ICE—the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—transformed from a post-9/11 panic response into a sprawling, largely unaccountable machinery of surveillance, detention, and deportation. This is not just about immigration. This is about infrastructure: how a system built under the guise of national security evolved into a permanent domestic force operating far beyond its original mandate.

Through blistering analysis and decades of historical parallels, the book exposes ICE’s startling similarities to the rise of the Nazi SS—not for shock value, but to dissect how authoritarianism takes root not through revolution, but through routine. From billion-dollar budgets and no-bid contracts to data-driven raids and detention-for-profit economics, The Cold State lays bare how modern enforcement is algorithmic, privatized, and largely invisible.

Inside, readers will confront the political theater of "reform," the lethal indifference of ICE’s detention network, and the legal acrobatics that allow agents to operate outside constitutional norms. As the book argues, ICE doesn't need ideology to function—it runs on bureaucracy. No policy debate, no election, and no executive order has succeeded in dismantling its infrastructure. Because this machine wasn’t designed to change. It was designed to last.

The Cold State isn’t a warning of what could happen. It’s a forensic autopsy of what already has. With chilling precision, this book shows how fear becomes policy, policy becomes process, and process becomes power—cold, permanent, and increasingly beyond reach.