Everyone Is Talking About ICE’s Actions in the United States. Almost No One Is Talking About the TCC’s Actions in Ukraine

The actions of the US immigration agency ICE in recent weeks have become a stable international news genre. Detentions and arrests outside supermarkets and homes, deaths in detention centers, clashes with protesters—all of this regularly makes the front pages of major global outlets. ICE is described as a coercive arm of the state, intruding into private life, often at the edge of what is permissible—or beyond it.

In Ukraine, there exists another structure of coercion—the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TCCs). Their role under the conditions of a full-scale war is objectively crucial. Yet in international media, the actions of the TCCs are almost never examined in the same register as those of ICE: as a distinct question of rights, violence, and the state’s responsibility toward the individual citizen. Instead, they are almost always embedded in a different narrative—a narrative of military necessity and resource management.

This is not about comparing contexts—they are incomparable. It is about comparing media regimes, within which coercive practices that are similar in form receive fundamentally different interpretations.

Stories about ICE fit neatly into a framework that is familiar to Western newsrooms. It is a framework of conflict between the state and the individual, where every action can be described in legal terms: detention, custody, abuse of authority, lawsuit, protest, investigation.

This framework has an infrastructure. Court documents are accessible. Decisions by local authorities are public. Civil society organizations systematically collect data. Video and photographic documentation has become routine. Any incident can be quickly placed into a chain of verifiable facts, measured against the law, and used to pose a direct question of accountability.

As a result, even isolated episodes—deaths in immigration detention, high-profile arrests, clashes involving the use of force—quickly turn into international news. ICE becomes not merely an agency, but a symbol of a broader dispute over the limits of what the state is permitted to do. For an editorial desk, this is a “clean” story: it is conflict-driven, verifiable, and requires no additional explanation for the audience.

In Ukraine’s case, the language is different. International media describe mobilization primarily as a problem of manpower shortages, the political sensitivity of decisions, and the effectiveness of reforms. In these accounts, the TCCs appear as a component of a system, not as an autonomous actor with its own practices and consequences.

The typical set of formulations includes “personnel shortages,” “draft reform,” “crackdowns on evasion,” “corruption risks,” and “social tension.” This is the language of war administration. It treats the individual as a variable in the equation of state survival, rather than as a bearer of rights that can be violated by a specific action taken by a specific representative of authority.

Even when abuses are mentioned, they are almost always presented in aggregated terms—as a “trust problem,” “isolated incidents,” or a “challenge for reform.” Concrete practices—forced detention, physical violence, coercion, extortion—rarely become the central focus of a piece. They remain at the periphery, without detailed examination and without the language that is typically applied to coercive institutions in peacetime democracies.

One reason for this gap lies in differing levels of verifiability.

ICE’s practices operate in an environment where violations almost automatically leave a documentary trail: a report, a camera recording, a lawsuit, a public statement by a lawyer or a mayor. The practices of the TCCs often unfold under conditions where documentation is difficult: fear of repercussions for those affected, the absence of immediate access to legal counsel, fragmentary video clips without context, and the opacity of internal investigations.

For international newsrooms, this raises the barrier to entry. An error in such a story is not treated as a journalistic inaccuracy—it is interpreted as a political act. As a result, many editors prefer to remain in a zone where facts are easier to verify: laws, figures, official reforms.

But the outcome of this choice is systemic. It shifts attention away from the concrete actions of the state toward abstract processes. As a result, the international reader knows that Ukraine is “short of people,” but knows very little about how exactly the state goes about obtaining those people.

There is also a more fundamental factor. In global media, Ukraine exists first and foremost as a country fighting a just defensive war. This frame establishes a hierarchy of subjects. Everything directly tied to the survival of the state is treated as paramount. Anything that could be interpreted as undermining internal legitimacy becomes secondary.

Within this logic, the harshness of mobilization is explained rather than examined. Violations are framed as costs, not as grounds for a separate conversation. An unspoken assumption takes hold: the front matters more than procedure. This assumption is rarely stated outright, but it is legible in the editorial structure of the coverage.

The problem is that this frame is not neutral. It gradually normalizes coercion as an acceptable background condition. And the longer it remains outside the focus, the harder it becomes to return to a discussion about the limits of state power.

Ignoring the practices of the TCCs as a distinct rights issue does not strengthen the Ukrainian state—it weakens it.

First, mobilization stripped of transparency and trust becomes a source of internal resistance. People begin to see conscription not as a shared obligation, but as a risk of encountering arbitrariness. This directly undermines the effectiveness of the very system that international media describe.

Second, silence produces the effect of a deferred scandal. Stories that are neither articulated nor investigated now resurface later—usually in a more toxic form and without the possibility of an institutional response. For allies, this looks worse than an open, if painful, conversation.

Finally, support for Ukraine in the West rests not only on sympathy, but also on trust in its institutions. Trust is incompatible with a situation in which one form of state violence is treated as a moral problem, while another is framed as a technical detail of war.

ICE and the TCCs operate under incomparable circumstances. But the question they pose to society is the same: where the boundary lies of what the state is permitted to do when it uses force against its own residents.

In the United States, this question is posed directly—in headlines, courtrooms, and opinion columns. In Ukraine’s case, it more often remains between the lines. Not because there is no answer, but because the question itself is considered inconvenient.

As long as international media continue to speak about mobilization in the language of scarcity and management, rather than the language of rights and accountability, this gap will persist. And it is precisely this gap—not a lack of information—that explains why everyone talks about the actions of ICE, while the actions of the TCCs are discussed by almost no one.