The Trump administration is purchasing more than $7 million in bulletproof armoured smart vehicles from a private Canadian company headquartered in Brampton, ON.
The American federal agency who has procured this sole-source contract is the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE, which is led by Trump-appointed Director of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem.
As first reported by The Independent, Roshel LLC was selected for the sole-source contract because they “possess sufficient inventory to meet the required delivery schedule and the salient characteristics identified by ICE.”
The Trump administration has since denied that the deal exists and falsely claimed that Roshel is an American company.
Roshel sells themselves as a leading North American arms manufacturer trusted by government agencies, law enforcement, and international partners worldwide. Their marketing material claims that they have already done business with the US Department of Homeland Security and Canada’s Department of National Defense.
Roshel’s Chief Executive Officer, Roman Shimonov, immigrated to Canada ten years ago from Israel. His colleague and Chief Operating Officer, Maria Tkacheva, hails from Russia – and also immigrated to Canada in 2016.
Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States that same year – and is suspected of colluding with Russia to help him win the 2016 election.
Roshel claims they have a “commitment to supporting allies and providing cutting-edge solutions across the globe.”
Canadian firm supporting a hostile government
It is no secret however that the President of the United States wants to annex our country and make us the 51st state – and he has arguably already begun doing so through intimidation, the crippling of our domestic economy through his illegal and extortionary tariffs, a refusal to obey international laws, sabotaging trade agreements, and the arbitrary abduction and detention of Canadian citizens.
The so-called US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra has acted as a perfect extension of this behaviour – sneering at any Canadian who dares question these almighty plans to conquer our sovereign country in the same style as Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine or Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Palestine.
Daryl Johnson, a national security expert who served the US Department of Homeland Security under both Democratic and Republican administrations says the current Trump administration is taking a dangerous and aggressive Christian nationalist posture against the world – and that by doing so, Trump may provoke confrontation from former allies.
“It’s Christian nationalism. That’s a dangerous extreme interpretation of the bible. They’re coddling those types of people and movements,” he said.
ICE as a tool of persecution
In a phone interview from West Virginia in December 2025, Johnson expressed concern for the way the US has changed under Trump. He also had a number of questions for why the United States would be purchasing armed vehicles from Canada while simultaneously threatening Canada with invasion and annexation.
“From my perspective, why does ICE need these armoured personnel carriers to be built? Are they expecting immigrants to become more violent? They’ve had some attacks at immigrant detention centres. Are they expecting more? What is the threat,” he asked.
No one can really explain why ICE still exists today, including Johnson.
The website says that their “primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control.” Respectfully to whoever wrote that, every piece of objective evidence would suggest this “mission” goes far further than these bureaucratic platitudes.
“The way ICE has gone about these deportations is breeding a lot of fear and paranoia among average Americans,” Johnson said.
“When you bring in armed vehicles and swat teams, it’s just the wrong way to go about it. It instills a lot of fear. The vast majority [of immigrants] are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. They’re using these rough handed militarized tactics and they’re causing the very people that they want to deport to become violent – it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy,” he added.
ICE today has been compared to the Nazi Germany SS, or Schutzstaffel – Adolf Hitler’s monstrous paramilitary guard and self-described ‘political soldiers.’
Black and brown families have had little recourse under the Trump administration but to capture their violent interactions with ICE agents across the United States using their phones – an act of desperation, yes, but one that did once deliver justice to the family of George Floyd when the racist police officer who murdered Floyd was caught on camera, rendering his brutality undeniable in a court of law.
ICE did not exist before 9/11 – it was hastily conceived by former US President George W. Bush in part to ease the minds of white America, and in part to bide time while he and David Frum could come up with a plausible excuse to invade Iraq to uncover all those mythical “weapons of mass destruction” and “axes of evil” and so on.
So why does ICE still exist today? What is their real mission? Exactly who do they still need to secure “the homeland” from?
“All business is kind of built on who you know – networks of people. But it definitely has the appearance of impropriety,” Daryl Johnson said of this sole-source contract between a Canadian company owned by former citizens of Russia and Israel and the Trump administration in the United States.
“This is definitely something I would refer to law enforcement to investigate,” he said.
Ford applauds Roshel contract
When Ontario Premier Doug Ford heard about this deal between an Ontario arms manufacturer and the Trump administration, his reaction was a resoundingly positive one.
“I love that,” Premier Ford told Global News. “Thank goodness that the Americans are ordering them off us.”
“I’ve been through that plant. They make great military vehicles. Now we need the federal government to start ordering some off them as well,” he said.
Mere months ago, Ford was seen wearing a MAGA-like hat that said ‘Canada is not for sale’ – appointing himself the country’s best person to defend Canada from the United States, despite the fact that the Ontario Premier has no constitutional authority over international diplomacy, and has identified himself as a lifelong Republican and former Trump supporter.Ironically, the hat Ford wore was later discovered to have been designed by a company led by a likely Trump supporter, and had not even been fully manufactured in Canada.
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