ICE Just Bought Itself a Spiffy, $7.3 Million Fleet of Armored Oppression Vehicles … From Canada

No doubt you’ve been reading various stories recently about the brutal tactics and wanton cruelty of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as it attempts to appease Glorious Leader’s inflated quotas for the rounding up of undocumented immigrants in American (primarily blue) cities. There was the 19-year-old college freshman, for instance, detained and deported to Honduras over Thanksgiving break, a country she hadn’t been to since she was seven years old. And there’s still the nearly two-month-old case of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, the L.A. man who was arrested by ICE according to eyewitnesses and friends, only to vanish off the face of the Earth following a medical emergency. There’s one thing, however, that any of the military fetishists in the audience know has been missing from these accounts of governmental sadism run amok: Really cool, Halo-looking armored combat vehicles! Thankfully, ICE has just used some of its massively expanded budget to address that very real and very pressing need, dropping a reported $7.3 million on 20 new mobile oppression units. Oh, and they didn’t even buy American, either–the vehicles apparently hail from an Ontario-based company.

To begin with: There’s no looking past the inherent creepiness and obvious fascistic overtones of ICE proclaiming not only that it NEEDS a new expansion to its existing fleet of military-style combat vehicles, but that it needs those vehicles immediately, which is part of the stated rationale for why Canadian producer Roshel LLC was chosen. The Roshel Senator Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) features CEN B7 ballistic armor that is “designed to stop a .50 caliber round,” and also sports an especially armored underside that according to the company can defend it against the equivalent of “an 8 kilogram TNT blast” from below. Everything about this vehicle’s description and capabilities points toward an obvious use case: In full-on combat, not against paltry threat of stones and fireworks being hurled by theoretical protesters, but against serious military hardware. Do we really need to point out that ICE surely does not need such vehicles in order to stomp all over the civil rights of residents of Chicago or Portland, or the newly begun ICE raids happening this week in Minneapolis and New Orleans? Just where are they expecting all of this .50 caliber machine gun fire to come from, exactly? How many IEDs does ICE tend to encounter in New Orleans’ French Quarter? Or could it be that the main reason for such testosterone-fueled excess is simply to project that manly, performative “warfighting” aesthetic that the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can’t resist?

Just try not to get aroused, watching this bad boy tool around Toronto with its 360 degree mechanical turret.

Such purchases have been made possible by the garish expansion of ICE’s budget set forth by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which allocates the agency $170 billion over the course of the next decade. That not only gives ICE a bigger budget than the majority of world militaries; this year’s total budget alone ($28.7 billion) stands at roughly three times the funds that ICE had to play with in 2024. That can buy you a whole lot of shiny new objects for your campaign of terror and intimidation. As the ACLU put it: “We are witnessing the build out of a national paramilitary policing force that could be used to intimidate people and consolidate President Donald Trump’s power.”

There’s an extra layer of irony, meanwhile, in ICE going seemingly out of its way to purchase millions of dollars in armored vehicles not from an American manufacturer, but one in Canada–specifically one headquartered in Ontario, the very province that enraged Trump with a series of anti-tariff TV ads that aired on American airwaves in October during events like MLB’s World Series. Trump subsequently threatened to hike Canadian tariffs by another 10% “over and above” current levies, because never let it be said that he’s not extraordinarily easy to provoke. The company in question, Roshel LLC, attempts to style itself as at least partially American, likely for the sake of these very optics, and did reportedly open a plant in Michigan at the end of last year, but in addition to the thoroughly British spelling of “Roshel Defence Solutions,” there’s little to suggest an American operation. According to The Independent‘s perusal of Roshel’s corporate marketing materials, “[a]ll processes… from R&D to painting, are facilitated on-site,” at the four plants the company operates in Ontario.

And it’s not that ICE didn’t have plenty of entirely American alternatives–according to the justification document it filed on Nov. 26, it merely chose Roshel Defence Solutions because it wanted its new toys faster. Where several of the American options (Alpine Armoring, CITE Armored, Lenco Armored Vehicles) told ICE that they could deliver some or all of the requested order within the span of a few months, ICE chose Roshel because it could have the complete order expedited (presumably at greater expense!), delivering all 20 vehicles in only 30 days. As I’m sure you’re probably worrying about at this point, waiting any longer “would significantly impact ability to deploy mission-critical resources in a timely manner,” according to the same ICE document. So apparently, ICE is saying that within the next month, it really needs its new fleet of people-snatchers that can repel military machine gun fire and high-explosive charges. Uh, what exactly do they know about this Christmas season that they’re not telling us?

“Roshel is uniquely positioned to fulfill this requirement within the necessary timeframe, having confirmed immediate availability of vehicles that fully meet ICE’s specifications,” says the document, in reference to vehicles that look like something straight out of Battlefield 6. “While other sources were consulted, they had limited quantities available or none could fulfill the entire requirement within the required period of performance, nor meet all technical requirements.”

Sounds like bad news for all the U.S. citizen insurgents out there who were hoping that they might be able to throw a sandwich hard enough to penetrate ICE’s mighty vehicles and be successfully convicted of assault as a result, unlike the gentleman in Washington D.C. who got off scot-free for such a heinous crime. Unless you’ve got some kind of armor-piercing bologna, those ICE heroes are going to remain blissfully free of mayo or mustard, for only $375,000 per armored Canadian death wagon. When you think of it that way, it’s almost a bargain.