Burgerland does not have secret police

I'm sorry, every time I read a comparison between secret police and plain clothes officers, I feel obligated to post this rant:

If you believe that "plainclothes officers" are the same as secret police, you know jack shit about the Gestapo, the Stasi and MSS or even ICE, all of which are undoubtedly secret police forces.

Officers in plain clothes are just that, they are a part of the normal law-enforcement operation, operate under the law and report to normal chiefs, normal prosecutors and normal courts, inside constitutional limits. Even if the justice system is rigged, racist, out of whack, and heavily skewed, they still operate inside of it, they're just sneaky about it.

Secret police on the other hand are often embedded as special units in organizations that otherwise operate as intelligence services and are therefore not easily recognizable to outsiders. A secret police force is an entirely different animal than just a couple of sneaky police officers. They are a quintessential feature of authoritarian regimes. Either de facto or even de jure unbound by constitutional limits, they are a tool of political repression and preemptive, unlawful violence. They are the ones who disappear people, they often run their own secret prisons and interrogation centers.

The fact that ICE is more and more morphing into a secret police service is FAR more alarming than the existence of plain clothes officers in the US.

de jure unbound by constitutional limits
That by definition makes it lawful and by definition is operating "inside of it".
- Wouldn't a law that exempts a law enforcement agency from constitutional limits be an unconstitutional law - and therefore an illegal law - and therefore not lawful?
- What you mean is that a 'secret police' is legally allowed to not have to follow laws that normally apply to other citizens or government agents, and thus, they are operating legally.
  This is correct.
  It is also correct that the secret police essentially become a class unbound by laws that apply to others, normally, and that this distinguishes them from other classes of people.
  Mhm, yep.
  Yep, these are both correct, if you have a secret police, your society has another tier, another class of people with anothet set of legal rights and responsibilities.
  Historically, that is quite common, with women often having far fewer legal rights, with slaves or various underclasses having less rights, yep yep yep.
  All of that is and was 'legal' by the legal standards of those societies.
- That is some impressive mental gymnastics.
I would like to point out that many different law enforcement agencies, of many kinds, in the US, use plainclothes officers.
ICE, FBI, ATF, DEA, etc etc... Pick any agency you want, or a local police department, or a large urban metro one, or a county one, or the state patrol, or the US Marshalls... probably literally all of them historically have used plainclothes agents at one point or another, used them for surveillance and HUMINT, even used them for arrests, sometimes with fairly heavy armanents and in large numbers, planted informants in organizations, etc.
While the meme here is clumsy by way of just contrasting 'plainclothes' vs 'secret police'... plainclothes agents are essentially a tactic, which certainly often is used by 'secret police', agencies that meet your definition.
I get the line you are drawing, and it is a useful one, but unfortunately the situation is not that simple.
Fuck, a plainclothes 'secret shopper' often acts as a neutered kind of security guard for loss prevention at a supermarket or w/e, though of course they don't have any jurisdiction beyond the property.

ICE aka Schutzstaffel

Wrong. ICE is Sturmabteilung (SA).
okay, so we'll call them 'shit waffles' now. cool.

This just made me realise that shows with undercover police dressed in fake moustaches and long hair vastly underestimate the average citizens ability to recognise wrap-around Oakley's, a tucked in shirt and a $15 haircut.