The Sexual Politics of ICE
Trump's nativist paramilitary is also a misogynist militia.
ICE, I have written before, has become the personal paramilitary of an authoritarian despot, staffed up by men who are attracted to white supremacist propaganda and who probably couldn’t hack it in the military or traditional law enforcement. But ICE is also a profoundly macho and misogynist force, part of the kind of antifeminist crackdown that is prototypical of authoritarian regimes.
I spoke with Jessica Yellin of News Not Noise about ICE and misogyny, and I hope you’ll watch and listen to our discussion — I will send it around as soon as it is published (she really is so excellent, please also subscribe to her Substack and follow her on social media if you don’t already). And I thought I’d expand on our conversation here.
ICE Recruits Fragile, Angry, and Insecure Men
The first thing to understand is that ICE recruitment is aimed at men who want to feel powerful, who want to bond with other men by committing social acts of violence, and who are drawn in by Nazi slogans. Also: Men with daddy issues. Here’s one ICE propaganda poster, promising heavily-armed father-son bonding (and, I guess, something for bored Fox-News-pilled old men to do):
And here’s another, encouraging men to fantasize about bonding with their “absolute boys” by grabbing people off the street and stuffing them into 1980s-style econovans, the kinds of vehicles associated with kidnappers, rapists, and child molesters:
The Department of Homeland Security, the president, and the vice president regularly post heavily edited videos of ICE raids, often set to high-energy music, that feature agents kitted out in tactical gear as if they’re going into combat, invading peoples’ homes and hauling brown and black people out in handcuffs. What the videos don’t tend to show: The lack of actual criminals being apprehended, or the US citizens being wrongfully arrested, or the human beings being brutalized, killed, or sent to foreign torture prisons with no due process. ICE agents have killed several people, with Renee Good only being the most prominent. Many people in ICE custody have died, with at least one of those deaths being ruled a homicide. Journalist Judd Legum recently found that ICE is not paying for detainees medical treatment — a policy that will almost certainly mean that detainees do not get medical treatment when they need it. That kind of medical neglect will no doubt kill people, and denying medical care so that detainees perish has been a signature move of some of the worst genocidal regimes in human history (Anne Frank died not in the gas chambers but of untreated typhus in Bergen-Belsen).
Men whose masculinity is fragile may be more prone to violence — they are more likely to interpret disagreement as disrespect, and to see disrespect as a challenge to their status. Men who feel that their masculinity is being compromised are more likely to act out with physical aggression — and “your masculinity has been compromised” was a major talking point during the Trump campaign. In its recruitment ads, ICE promises masculine restoration. In other words, ICE is a force of men who have felt small and have now been empowered by an administration that tells them they’re manliest of men, hands them guns and tactical gear, gives them precious little training, explicitly tells them they will be held to virtually no legal or moral standards, and sets them loose on a public it has warned is full of not just criminal illegal immigrants, but un-American subhumans, among the worst of whom are AWFULs: Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.
Of course these small, insecure, and incompetent men brutalize the people they’ve been told are domestic terrorists — including women.
Trads or Terrorists
The second thing to understand about this moment, and particularly about why the supposedly gender-traditionalist right has shrugged off men shooting women in the face, men dragging women around by their hair, and men otherwise brutalizing women and children, is that the Trumpian right very much divides women into two categories: “Good” women who obey, and bad ones who don’t. And they are very much obsessed with forcing all women into obedience.
