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Words have meanings. ICE is not a paramilitary, they're a law enforcement organization, regardless of whether you approve of the laws they enforce or the ways they enforce them. They are also not "making people disappear without due process." They are sending people back to their home countries. There is nothing illegal or evil about doing this, there is barely a square inch on the entire planet where you will not be deported if you do not have a citizenship or a valid visa. America is the only major country on the planet where people think that basic immigration enforcement is evil.
What you are describing is called "attempted murder of a police officer" and it's kind of a big deal. People are allowed to try to prevent their own murder. Whether or not you, in hindsight, from the comfort of your keyboard, are able to see a way that the outcome could have been different, does not make it less legally justified because the law in its wisdom does not require the victims of crimes to be omniscient when they are deciding how to defend themselves.
This strikes me as a motte and bailey - what does "basic immigration enforcement" mean? I don't object to deporting people. I object to grabbing them off the streets without warning. It's the difference between serving an eviction notice to a tenant-turned-squatter, and physically throwing them out without even letting them grab their stuff. The latter is inhumane behavior even in cases where a normal eviction notice would be legitimate and justified.
Now, maybe you want to argue that illegals are too good at evading detection, so that if immigration officers simply presented them with an order to leave within 10 days, they'd simply skip town while staying in the country - making immediate arrest the only viable recourse. Last time I got into this on this forum, we got quite deep in the weeds of this question. But even if I were to grant that the current circumstances demand these extraordinary measures, extraordinary measures is what they are, and describing them as "making people disappear" is not an unfair characterization.
The scope of the issue at this point is essentially intractable. The 'brutality' of ICE is partly a calculated effort to change the vibe enough to encourage more self-deportation of illegal immigrants.
I live in a SEA country with roughly 20-30% of the population allegedly made of illegal immigrants from neighboring poorer countries. I see immigration checkpoints and forced deportation of illegals fairly frequently, yet nobody external to this country cares too much about it. Obviously the lack of birthright citizenship in this country means there's far less issues with 'wait one of the 20 people we caught with no paperwork, minimal English and in a sketchy workplace situation was actually born here, MASSIVE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION' that abounds in the West. The vast majority of people with the resources to make it to the USA are facing a low-moderate decrease in living standards from being removed, they're not being sent to Mordor or 'disappeared'
This is fair, and worth repeating. But my primary concern is not with the long-term decrease in living standards once they're back home - my concern is with the inordinate amount of suffering involved in grabbing someone from their home without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years, etc. It's the difference between having to move, and having your house burn down. That (and of course the threat of violence during the raids themselves) is what I referred to as "brutal". That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids. Not the end goal of sending the illegals back to their country of origin.
Nothing can convince me that a not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant morally "deserves" that kind of treatment. You can make a pragmatic argument that, in practice, this is the only way to ensure they are deported at all, because they would otherwise vanish into the night the moment the officers' eyes are off them. But that just begs the question of how we got to that situation. It should not be beyond the state's capacity to "tag" an individual once identified by law enforcement, such that if they have not left the borders within [X] days they can instantly be tracked down and arrested. I'm taking ankle monitors, hell, maybe daily check-ins of some sort. Just something so that no human being has to suffer the inordinate stress and grief of being torn from their home literally overnight without the chance to put their affairs in order - an amount of suffering which is totally out of proportion with the very diffuse amount of harm that any given not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant causes by their continued presence in a host country.
I seriously do not comprehend this level of bleeding heart. If you sneak into a country illegally it comes with the territory that the life you build there will be precarious and liable to be snatched away at a moment’s notice. If we let people pack up all their possessions and move at their leisure then we are imposing no penalty on them, there would be no deterrence. There should be a degree of fear associated with living in a country illegally, ideally this will make some number self deport.
I suppose part of it is that think of illegal-immigrant status - particularly for people who outstayed a visa, rather than coming in illegally - as… well, not not a big deal exactly, but not the kind of thing that prima facie justifies any kind of retaliatory violence. Outstaying a visa seems more comparable to filing your taxes wrong than driving without a license, and still more similar to driving without a license than to drug trafficking. It's the kind of rule-breaking where if a critical mass of people do it at a time, it begins to harm the country in aggregate, so obviously the government takes measures to prevent it - but where a given rule-breaker isn't much more morally culpable than a jaywalker or someone who forgets a stray $50 on their tax reports.
To put it another way, I recognize at a rational, central-planning level that there must be limits on immigration, but I don't feel any personal animus against someone who circumvents those limits on the margins. My gut reaction isn't "this is an evil thing to do", it's "well, that seems a bit selfish in the grand scheme of things, a more virtuous person would think about the big picture and refrain from adding another straw to the camel's back… but eh, it is not given to just anybody to instinctively think like a central planner about the diffuse economic effects of excess untaxable unskilled labor, this is just some poor shmuck cutting corners and were I in their circumstances I might have taken the same leap". By all means we should try and take broad-level measures so that the opportunities for ignoring the rules close, but, as much as is possible, we shouldn't take this out on the actual human beings involved, who aren't doing anything that emotionally resonates with me as egregiously "immoral".
All of which being said, I'm also just a strong believer in kindness/charity/the Golden Rule. Even in cases where my gut reaction to a crime is disgust or resentment (and there are such crimes, illegal immigration just isn't among them), my higher conscience still generally tells me that to the extent that such a thing can be achieved while still suitably deterring further crimes of the same type, the individuals at issue should still be treated as well as possible - should still be given as much of a shot at happiness as possible without putting innocents at a disadvantage. Presumably your underlying moral principles differ somewhat.
Recent experience says that you can't have both of these. Because this makes you subject to the very attack that has caused these sorts of ICE shenanigans and the general polarization around immigration: anyone who knows you're squeamish in this way can exploit it by refusing to enforce immigration laws on a local level and then hammer your empathy when someone from ICE finally gets that guy who's slipped past for a half-decade.
At which point, you'll be put in a position to pick a side and end up like everyone else.
My belief is that there are ways to enforce immigration laws that would both cause less harm to the immigrants, and be harder for activists to turn into causes celebres, that have been largely left untried. They amount, in a nutshell, to putting less energy into violence and more energy into surveillance. It should not be the case that once you've found an illegal immigrant your choices are between "lock them up right away" and "they disappear into the ether in-between court dates". There are, it seems obvious to me, technologies (social and literal) that could be employed at scale to make this kind of evasion obviously impossible and not worth attempting - freeing the authorities up to be more chill with identified illegals thereafter, which would in turn make quixotic attempts to run away less and less appealing in a virtuous cycle.
If you are going to strongly stake out this position, I think you have an obligation to spell out what technologies those are. Ankle monitors? Those are usually used for people with ties to the place they are living, as it's much better at monitoring compliance than preventing flight. Common sense tells me recent arrivals with no strong ties to the community would simply throw the ankle monitor in the trash and hitch a ride out of town.
What else are you envisioning?
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