I’m pretty sure you’re exactly backwards. You’re arguing against people who think use of the term “thug” is appropriate for ICE. The whole point of the term “euphamism treadmill” is that using this or that word doesn’t affect the underlying social malady. Rather than moving the discourse further, it stays stuck in place. So yeah, this discourse is on the treadmill, but so are you, playing word games rather than being concrete about actual social conditions.

ICE are a kind of police in theory. In practice there are many contradictions present between ICE and police. ICE are federal, police are local; ICE are part of DHS, a private army accountable to only the president, police are accountable to local politics. ICE are primarily concerned with immigration, police are generally not involved in immigration enforcement. All over the country, police and ICE are beginning to clash, cops don’t like that ICE makes them look bad, they don’t like their total unaccountability, they don’t like the way ICE creates more chaos and disruption. Its not a universal condition, and for now its mostly nascent, and may never be practically exploitable by left wing movements concerned with abolishing both institutions. But those conditions objectively exist and pretending they don’t actually harms our movements since we act according to vague abstractions rather than concrete reality.

Applying any vague abstraction to actual struggle is how you get sectarianism, which actually neuters our movements. Sure they’re cops, fine. But they are also different in many ways. Public sentiment against ice is overwhelmingly negative, and there is much more support for abolition of ICE than police. So even in popular understanding they are different.