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Milan: Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Milan ahead of next week’s Winter Olympics to protest the impending arrival of ICE agents, who will assist and protect the United States delegation led by Vice President JD Vance - sparking widespread confusion and anger across Italy.
A crowd of at least 1000 gathered in the Piazza XXV Aprile near the city centre on Saturday for a flash demonstration organised by centre-left political parties and trade unions, where those in attendance blew whistles - a growing symbol of the anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis since the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
An anti-ICE demonstration ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.Credit: AP
Protesters held signs bearing messages such as: ‘ICE only in the spritz’, ‘ICE? No, grazie’, ‘The only ICE we want in Milan is the one under the skates’, and ‘With ICE, we make granita’. Meanwhile, loudspeakers played the new Bruce Springsteen song ‘Streets of Minneapolis’, written in response to US President Donald Trump’s mass immigration crackdown.
The event forms part of a ferocious backlash in Italy to revelations that personnel from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be travelling to Italy for Milano-Cortina 2026 “to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations”.
One of many signs at the rally.Credit: Vince Rugari
Initial reports, absent of detail about the specific nature of their role, gave rise to fears that ICE agents could be unleashed on Italian citizens in the same manner as they are seeing in social media clips and on television screens - prompting the mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, to declare them as “not welcome” in his city, which is hosting the opening ceremony and several events, including figure skating and ice hockey.
“This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips,” Sala said.
It was later clarified that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a unit of ICE, would be working out of a control room at the American consulate and serve in a support role, and that the personnel who would be in Italy would not be the same as those involved in immigration operations in the US.
It is common for ICE operatives to fly to major sporting events around the world, including the Olympics, to serve in precisely that function.
However, the scale and intensity of the response to the mere suggestion of their presence is reflective of the increased awareness of ICE overseas, and the extent to which the actions of some agents have caused anti-American sentiment.
“We know that today, a lot of people in the world are looking at us, because we are hosting the Olympic Games. It’s not just a sporting event, it’s important for all the world,” said Alessandro Capelli, the secretary of the Milan branch of Italy’s Democratic Party, the main opposition to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
Donald Trump with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Credit: AP
“We would like to say that the fight for human rights all over the world, it’s our fight [too]. We are citizens of Milan, we are citizens of the world. We are watching on TV what ICE is doing in the US, so for us it’s quite a normal thing to show our solidarity with people who are fighting.”
Asked how news of the ICE deployment had been received across Italy’s political spectrum, Capelli said: “It’s an interesting question. Obviously, the democratic and left part are moving with more courage, while [people] in the right say something [like], for example: ‘We don’t like a lot the method of ICE.’ But we have a problem: Steve Bannon is a friend of Giorgia Meloni and [Italy’s deputy Prime Minister] Matteo Salvini, so they have to explain to us how this friendship is going.”
Jocelyn Frederick, an American homemaker who is originally from Florida but has lived in Italy for almost 20 years, suspected the announcement that ICE, specifically, would be coming - and not Homeland Security - was deliberate.
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“We’re used to hearing about Homeland Security being involved in major international events,” she said.
“We hear about that happening, and especially for anti-terrorism, but that they would be using the ICE, it sounds like it’s a show of force: ‘We’re bringing our agents. We’re showing that they are strictly connected to [JD] Vance and the administration.’ Like, they’re coming with him. That’s what doesn’t really make sense.
“Some people [in Italy] will say, ‘We need ICE here too,’ and then there’s other people who are just very clearly very against it. The majority of people who I speak to are very upset about what’s going on in America in general.”
Down Corso Garibaldi, which runs to the south of the piazza and leads to the metro station from where many of the protesters emerged, there was an unfortunately named bar and gelataria: Icebound.
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