With activists in frog costumes protesting ICE facilities, first in Portland and now spreading across the country, it got me wondering—what would the Ninja Turtles think about ICE?
As a kid born in the early eighties, the turtles had a huge impact on my life. I played the games, collected the figurines, and watched the TV show and movies. When I played with my friends, I was always Leonardo, and I saw Splinter as a wise teacher.
Looking back on the series now, as an adult who ironically fights corruption through media activism, it's wild to examine how a children's program from the 1990s inadvertently exposed the fundamental contradictions of state power that we see manifested today in institutions like ICE.
Consider the basic premise: four mutant turtles and their rat sensei living in New York's sewers, contributing to public safety while remaining fugitives from a society that would imprison them if discovered.
This mirrors precisely what we observe with undocumented immigrants in the United States—people performing essential labor, strengthening communities, raising families, yet forced to exist in a perpetual state of precarity by design.
The Foot Clan in this narrative operates remarkably like modern enforcement agencies. They recruit from vulnerable populations, exploit economic desperation, and maintain power through systematic violence.
When we examine ICE's actual function—not its stated purpose of "security," but its documented practices of workplace raids, family separation, and collaboration with private prison corporations—we see the same mechanisms of social control.
The Turtles wouldn’t be down with that. They’d likely back the simple, humane fix: a real path to citizenship, an end to for-profit detention, protection for kids who grew up here, and fair hearings granted for everyone.
The turtles would treat immigration as a working-class issue, not a culture-war prop.
They'd argue working people deserve a real path to citizenship.
Let neighbors who have lived here for years come forward, pass background checks, pay a reasonable fee, and get on the books. Let the kids who grew up here stay for good. Let families from disaster or war-torn countries keep protection until it’s truly safe to return.
Instead of wasting billions on mass deportations, which requires making our bloated bureaucracy even bigger, save billions by cutting the red tape.
For a fraction of the cost of mass deportations, we could staff immigration offices to clear cases fast. Family visas could be overhauled to reunite families in years, not decades.
Work permits could be rewritten to follow the worker, not chain them to a boss.
In immigration court, most people stand alone against a trained government attorney. That is not a fair fight. Give people lawyers so every person's constitutional right to due process is preserved.
We should also end the detention business model.
Replace cages and private prison contracts with community check-ins, legal support, and case managers that already get people to their hearings without terrorizing neighborhoods.
Stop turning traffic stops and workplace raids into deportations. Go after wage theft and union-busting, not the workers who keep the lights on.
In response to this, critics will often yell “open borders!” in bad faith, given nothing above suggests anything remotely close to “open borders.” To me, these solutions just sound like reasonable fixes to a broken system.
What's really extreme is Trump's agenda of mass deportations, quota-driven ICE raids targeting mostly nonviolent, working-class people, and expanding the detention-industrial complex, wasting billions of tax-payer dollars in the process.
The fact that basic humanitarian policies are portrayed as “radical” by elites in power and the status quo warriors among the public while a militarized bureaucracy is normalized and glorified tells you everything about how propaganda systems work today to manufacture consent.
In a world with a functioning, non-partisan independent media, the mass deportation industrial complex Trump is building would disturb all of us, if we weren't so conditioned by party loyalties.
That said, we saw consent manufactured under Obama too.
He expanded immigration detention and oversaw record removals. Independent progressives criticized this at the time, while loyal Democrats mostly looked away, and loyal Republicans said it still wasn’t cruel enough, demanding more raids, more cages, more spectacle. That bipartisan habit of calling cruelty “security” paved the runway for Trump’s open-air version of the same agenda.
So where do we learn a different way to keep a city safe? The Ninja Turtles have more lessons.
One of the most revealing things about the TMNT world is that the Turtles are treated as “criminals” not because they’ve harmed anyone, but simply because of what they are.
Their existence violates a rule written by someone else, for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety. And that mirrors our current system more closely than most people want to admit: the vast majority of undocumented immigrants have committed no crime in any meaningful sense. Their “illegality” is a political designation — not a moral one — created and sustained because it is useful to powerful interests.
In both worlds, criminality isn’t an action. It’s a status imposed from above, and that status is deeply profitable.
Label people “illegal” and you create a class of workers who can be threatened, underpaid, and controlled. It’s why the immigration system operates as it does: not to protect communities, but to maintain a supply of cheap, exploitable labor while providing a convenient scapegoat for the economic anxieties generated by neoliberal policy.
Workplace raids, detention centers, and high-profile enforcement spectacles aren’t evidence of a “broken” system — they’re the intended mechanism of a system built to discipline the vulnerable while shielding the powerful.
The irony is that the simplest solution is the one we almost never hear from the people who claim to care about “law and order”: change the designation.
Give people real pathways to citizenship and the entire contrived category of “illegality” dissolves. The crisis disappears because its foundation was paperwork and political theater, not public safety.
In response, people argue this would “destroy America,” but the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Major studies by the National Academies, CBO, and many labor economists find that immigrants—especially when allowed to work legally—tend to boost economic growth and tax revenues, have little overall negative impact on native wages, are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens, and face high levels of workplace exploitation that legalization can help reduce.
Legalization strengthens labor standards for everyone because employers can no longer use fear to suppress wages or ignore workplace protections. Far from overwhelming the economy, bringing millions of workers into the formal system increases contributions to Social Security and Medicare, expands consumer spending, and reduces the enormous public cost of detention, deportation, and border militarization.
The fear that citizenship would trigger economic collapse rests on a mistaken assumption that undocumented people are a burden rather than contributors. The reality is that they already work, pay taxes, raise families, support local economies, and perform essential labor that the country depends on daily.
The difference is that legalized workers cannot be exploited as easily. Countries that have enacted broad regularization programs, such as Spain and Portugal, have seen increased worker protections, improved economic outcomes, and stronger community integration. The idea that America would collapse if it treated people humanely is not supported by history or data. It is supported only by those who fear losing a system that profits from inequality.
Fortunately, millions of people are rejecting the logic that treats immigrants as a threat.
Across the country, immigrant-led and multiracial, working-class coalitions are doing exactly what the Turtles embodied: protecting the vulnerable when official institutions either fail or become predatory.
Community rapid-response hubs in Los Angeles and Chicago help families threatened by raids. Neighborhood patrols in San Diego warn immigrants when ICE agents sweep through. Mutual-aid groups organize legal support, safe-passage rides, and emergency childcare. Faith communities shelter families during enforcement crackdowns.
These are not acts of defiance for their own sake. They are acts of protection rooted in the simple belief that people deserve safety regardless of paperwork.
If Splinter taught anything, it’s that real defense of a community happens from the ground up, not through state violence imposed from above.
This is why the real extremism today lies in the Republican Party's vision: wasting billions of dollars mobilizing military assets for domestic deportation operations, expanding private-prison profits through human suffering, and tearing apart families who’ve been here for decades.
If we're to take seriously the values embedded in the TMNT world—protecting the vulnerable, building inclusive communities, confronting systemic oppression—then the conclusion is obvious.
The Turtles would recognize ICE as embodying everything they opposed: institutionalized violence against the powerless, family separation as policy, fear as a tool of governance.
Bernie Sanders' immigration platform, by contrast, simply acknowledges what any rational observer understands: immigration reform strengthens communities, improves wages for all workers, and enhances public safety by ensuring everyone can interact with authorities without fear. These aren't radical ideas—they're policies that work successfully worldwide.
What requires explanation isn't why we should treat immigrants humanely—that should be self-evident.
What requires explanation is how we've allowed the normalization of concentration camps for children, militarized raids on workplaces, and mass deportation machinery that profits from human misery.
The Turtles faced the Foot Clan's brownshirts with community solidarity. The frog activists protesting ICE detention centers understand this.
Common-sense immigration reform points to the world the Turtles fought to build; militarized dragnet deportations point to Shredder’s vision for the world.
Any kid can see that. Why can’t we?
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library for people who want to change the world.
"The turtles fight crime not support it."
The turtles fought the Foot Clan and Krang, but neither were immigrants in any meaningful sense relevant to the topic. One was a criminal organization led by Shredder. The other was a colonizer with a private army bent on world domination.
Stopping an organized crime syndicate is nothing like targeting families, workers, and refugees for a civil or misdemeanor border violation.
The Turtles defended vulnerable people from exploitation and corruption; they didn’t raid homes, separate families, or punish people for seeking safety. Pretending that fighting ninjas bent on control of a city is the equivalent to supporting ICE is a category mistake that blurs the line between real criminals and working class people who don't have paperwork.
Maybe this isn't common knowledge yet, but the vast majority of undocumented people have committed no serious crime, and immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens. Anyone is welcome to fact check that for themselves. There's reams of data to back that up.
"They were literally fighting aliens all the time."
In TMNT, “aliens” aren’t a stand-in for migrants. They’re stand-ins for invading militaries, criminal syndicates, or world-ending threats.
The turtles weren’t fighting ordinary civilians seeking safety or a better life. They were fighting beings trying to dominate, exploit, or destroy New York. To equate families crossing a border with Krang’s armies erases the core moral distinction in the story: the turtles defend the vulnerable and resist violent power, they don’t target harmless people simply existing.
"The Ninja turtles were the original ICE. Where do you think all the foot clan came from? Even though Splinter was technically an immigrant."
The Foot Clan aren’t immigrants. They’re a criminal organization led by a supervillain.
Stopping an organized crime syndicate is nothing like targeting families, workers, and refugees for a civil or misdemeanor border violation.
"No one is illegal...but they do commit illegal acts."
The question is, should we spend billions of our tax dollars on a vast dragnet operation to arrest and detain and deport people who have committed a misdemeanor or civil infraction, or should we find less expensive and more humane ways to solve the issue at its root?
I think our police resources would be better spent on dealing with actual felonies and violent crimes.
"TMNT is ICE bro shredder came here from Japan and started a criminal empire"
Shredder isn’t an “immigrant” the Turtles oppose — he’s a violent crime boss trying to take over New York, which is why they fight him. That has nothing to do with ICE, whose real-world targets are overwhelmingly families, workers, and longtime residents, not criminal kingpins.
"So let the illegals live with you. You talk big but you won’t do it. Go ahead, let the Somalis, Venezuelan, African and/or Mexicans live with you since you want to defend and protect them so much.
And you want to talk about concentration camps? Have you actually seen one? Did you actually look up what German Concentration Camps looked like and the horrific atrocities that took place there? If you spoke against Hitler or his army you were publicly executed and tortured. You have no idea what you are talking about when you sit there and try to compare Hitlers Germany to Modern day America.
You do remember when Biden and Obama was deporting people they had them in cages with no roofs, no water, no beds, and only outhouses for bathrooms. They literally had children roasting in the blazing sun without water. This is all proven. Videos and pictures. But y’all clowns don’t want to talk about that, y’all just want to sit and pretend like it never happened and then try to paint Trump and ICE as bad guys. It’s so funny that everything you call Trump is pretty close to how Obama and Biden were, but you guys don’t really care now do ya? All you care about is hating trump, nothing else. Anyways, you have a good day."
The idea that caring about humane immigration policy means you must personally house people is not a serious argument.
We don’t apply that standard anywhere else. Supporting public schools doesn’t require you to educate children in your living room. Supporting firefighters doesn’t mean you house people whose homes burned down. We build systems because the problems are collective, not individual. Immigration is no different. Humane laws, legal pathways, and functioning institutions are how a society manages migration - not private charity from random individuals.
On the concentration-camp point, no one is claiming the United States is Nazi Germany. The comparison people make is about categories of harm, not equivalence. A country can run detention centers that violate human rights without running gas chambers. The term “concentration camp” predates the Holocaust by decades; it means mass confinement of civilians without trial, and multiple historians - including Jewish scholars, Holocaust educators, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s own researchers - have stated that US detention conditions fit that definition, even though they are not extermination camps. Saying so is not disrespecting history. It’s applying historical vocabulary accurately so abuses do not escalate.
You’re also correct that Obama and Biden expanded detention and committed serious harms.
If you take the time to read the article, you'll see I made that exact point.
As I wrote in the piece, many of us on the left said this loudly at the time - including the same activists being criticized today. Criticizing Trump’s policies is not ignoring past abuses; it’s recognizing that the solution is to end the machinery of cruelty altogether, not defend it when “our” side uses it and condemn it only when “their” side does.
And on the claim of “illegals”: people are undocumented because the United States has designed a system with almost no legal pathways for the majority of migrants, even those fleeing violence or reuniting with family. The paperwork the law demands often does not exist. That’s a policy failure, not a moral failing of the people affected by it.
This isn’t about loving or hating any politician. It’s about building an immigration system that is fair, efficient, and humane - something neither party has gotten right. The goal is not to score points but to reduce suffering and create policies that reflect basic human dignity.
Wishing you a good day as well.
TMNT were basically ICE. Besides all this made up fun stuff, lets get to the solid factual stuff. Are there sizable dangerous gangs who came through the Mexico boarder unlawfully? Do our hospitals treat people who have no documentation? What percentage of them pay in full?
The TMNT–ICE comparison still collapses fiction into reality: fighting cartoon super-villains and organized criminal syndicates is not the same thing as a federal agency whose day-to-day work overwhelmingly targets families, workers, and longtime residents, not cartel leaders.
Real gangs are investigated by multi-agency criminal task forces, not by mass workplace raids or neighborhood sweeps.
Conflating the two is how enforcement against serious crime gets rhetorically used to justify collective punishment of civilians.
On the “solid factual stuff”: yes, some organized crime crosses borders, just as it always has in every country on earth. But study after study shows immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit violent crime than native-born citizens.
On hospitals, yes, emergency rooms treat undocumented patients because federal law requires care regardless of status—and that’s a moral baseline, not a loophole.
Many do pay, often in cash, payment plans, or through community clinics; the larger cost driver in U.S. healthcare is not migrants but price-gouging, insurance middlemen, and administrative bloat.
Using rare gang cases and ER anecdotes to define millions of people is not “factual rigor”; it’s cherry-picking to justify a predetermined narrative.
That's right kids! Break the law! Lol, yeah, don't think the turtles would have supported this, but dream as you want, anarchist fools.
The turtles “broke the law” constantly. That’s the entire premise of the franchise. They were fugitives who lived outside official systems because those systems treated them as threats rather than as people. Their moral compass wasn’t obedience. It was protecting communities when institutions failed to.
And that’s the point of the analogy: legality and justice aren’t the same thing. History is full of unjust laws that good people challenged - from segregation to anti-labor statutes to bans on interracial marriage. Calling for humane immigration reform isn’t anarchism. It’s saying the law should reflect basic decency rather than punishment for its own sake.
You are putting LIVES at risk and causing others to willfully disobey laws put in place. Don't like them? Contact your Congressman. Good day.
We are not encouraging people to break the law. That's a bad faith assumption. Read the article if you're curious to know what our position is. Also, we had laws and enforcement before ICE. ICE is a relatively recent invention.
Again, you can bat at straw men or you can read our article which lists the solutions we suggest. It's about fixing immigration not promoting anarchy. I mean sheesh. 
This is what happens when people don't read before commenting.
Stop supporting criminal invaders you pos
Calling people “criminal invaders” doesn’t make it true - it just replaces thinking with hostility.
Crossing a border without authorization for the first time is a misdemeanor, not an act of war, and most migrants are fleeing violence, poverty, or political collapse that they had no hand in creating.
Treating desperate families as enemies solves nothing, inflames hatred, and distracts from the real forces that destabilize economies and create displacement in the first place.
If we actually want security and stability, we need solutions rooted in reality, not scapegoating.