Italy clarifies ICE’s role during Winter Olympics as public backlash grows

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Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at the Winter Olympics in Italy will “work exclusively in their diplomatic premises”, as Rome sought to quell a growing furore over the agents’ arrival in the European country. 

Italy’s interior minister Matteo Piantedosi discussed the matter with US ambassador Tilman Fertitta, a billionaire businessman and friend of President Donald Trump, on Tuesday. The presence of ICE agents among American security personnel during the upcoming Milan Cortina Winter Olympics has generated a fierce backlash in Italy amid shock at their tactics used during Trump’s immigration crackdown in the US.

The ministry said late on Tuesday that the ICE personnel dispatched to the event, which starts next Friday, are from the US Department of Homeland Security’s “investigations team” and will be working out of an “operations room” being set up at the US consulate in Milan.

“Their analysts will work exclusively within their diplomatic premises and not on Italian territory,” the statement said, adding that their main role was to “consult their own databases and provide support to other actors”.

“It is worth reiterating that the investigators . . . are not operational personnel such as those involved in migration controls on US territory but referents exclusively specialised in investigations, who have no authority whatsoever on Italian territory,” it added.

The DHS on Tuesday also affirmed that Olympic security operations were “under Italian authority”.

Personnel from 20 federal agencies — led by the US diplomatic security service — are part of the American security contingent for the games, the US state department said earlier this month.

“Obviously ICE does not conduct immigration enforcement operations in foreign countries,” DHS wrote in a post on X. “At the Olympics, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is supporting the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service and host nation to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organisations.”

Many Italians are appalled by the aggression of ICE agents towards US citizens protesting against Trump’s immigration crackdown. Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed by an ICE officer earlier this month. Federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse with Italian ancestry, in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Tapping into the public revulsion, opposition politicians have denounced the spectre of an ICE contingent on Italian soil and criticised Meloni for failing to stand up to Trump by blocking the agents’ entry. Italians are also shocked by the role of Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, himself the descendant of immigrants from Italy, in the brutal crackdown.

“ICE is not welcome in Milan,” the city’s mayor Giuseppe Sala said. “The Olympics are a moment of peace and fraternity, but then we let this militia, [which] has been killing people in the US, in? It’s a contradiction I cannot accept.”

Centrist MP Carlo Calenda, leader of the small Azione party, said on Monday that “ICE must not set foot in Italy”, describing the federal immigration agents as an “out-of-control militia.” An online petition calling for “Trump’s squadrists” — a reference to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary “Blackshirts” — to be kept out of Italy has gathered more than 45,000 signatures.

Meloni’s government has tied itself in knots struggling to quell the controversy.

On the sidelines of a Holocaust Day remembrance event on Tuesday, foreign minister Antonio Tajani said the US homeland security personnel at the Olympics would be counterterrorism experts — not the masked, gun-wielding agents seen on the streets of Minneapolis.

Then in a reference to the Nazi paramilitary organisation that Adolf Hitler used to crush his political enemies and carry out genocide, Tajani added: “It’s not as if the SS are coming.”