ICE, the 22-year-old federal agency, started out badly and is ending up worse. Its actions and agenda are both unnecessary and morally repugnant. ICE is gross.
And yet, people choose to work for this agency, doing this work, without getting paid any more to do it than they could just as easily be earning in a job that didn’t involve doing things that were dishonorable and demeaning and thus becoming someone who was both dishonored and demeaned.
I have, like Jonathan V. Last, struggled to try to get “Inside the Mind of an ICE Agent.” Last focuses his attention on this woman:
Last describes the video in which this woman participates in the ICE abduction of a graduate student. The student was studying here legally with a valid visa, but her visa — like thousands of others — was revoked by ICE. Why? So that they could declare her suddenly “illegal” and abduct her. The woman circled above is:
… one of the agents who arrested Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk last month. The raid was headed by ICE, but it’s unclear what agency this woman works for.
If you watch the video, this female agent comes in the second wave. The first agent to make contact with Öztürk is a man who bumps her, as if by accident, and then grabs her phone out of her hands. It’s clear that, initially, Öztürk thinks she’s being mugged. But then another man comes in behind her. She is quickly surrounded and they begin to pull off her backpack. Eventually they handcuff her and lead her to an unmarked vehicle.
If this happened in Oaxaca, you’d assume it was a cartel kidnapping.
Last’s post includes the full video, which is frightening, but also unambiguous. You cannot watch that video without clearly and obviously understanding that Öztürk is a victim and that she is being victimized by … well, by the Bad Guys in this story. There’s simply not a way to watch a frightened woman being abducted off the street by unidentified, masked people with guns without those people appearing to be the Bad Guys in the story you are witnessing.
We can, of course, try to spin scenarios in which they might be something other than what they appear to be. But those scenarios are all contradicted by both what we see here — Öztürk’s genuine fear and confusion. And they are all contradicted by the facts of the matter, which is that this was simply an innocent person living here in America. A person who followed all the rules and was here completely legally and appropriately until the rules were suddenly changed without her knowledge.
The Bad Guy status of the ICE agents in this video must have been every bit as obvious and unambiguous to them as to anyone else witnessing this unfold. So, again, Last wonders what the ICE woman may have been thinking:
Was this sort of enforcement action a new experience for her? Öztürk committed no crime and was in the country legally up until the moment the secretary of state personally revoked her visa—but he did so without informing Öztürk. She had no way of knowing that her legal status had changed. The government made a change to target her, without her knowledge, and then had her arrested.
Is that the kind of job this agent signed up for?
Does she think that it is proper for the government to create conditions to change an individual’s legal status without informing them? Does she think it is morally acceptable to accost a law-abiding person on the street? Does she think Öztürk needed to be handcuffed?
To be a woman walking the streets alone is to be vulnerable. Did this agent have any problem being part of a group of men who ambushed a young woman walking the streets by herself?
Would she agree to participate in such an enforcement action again?
I was reminded of Last’s questions when I read this story yesterday, “ICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted.” The ICE “raid” — inside a courthouse — at issue in this story also involved plainclothes agents with no badges or warrants. One of them was wearing a balaclava to hide his face. Their “arrest” looked more like a kidnapping.
Two women who witnessed this arrest asked to see some badges or a warrant or anything that might prove that these masked, armed abductors were not — as they appeared to be — criminal kidnappers from the notorious Tren de Aragua gang who might be kidnapping this man for ransom. The ICE agents refused to produce badges or a warrant. But they are now threatening to charge those women with obstructing an official abduction.
An ICE spokesman said that anyone questioning the legitimacy of these no-badge, no-uniform, no-warrant, masked arrests was “shameful.”
Who was this ICE spokesman? Well: “‘It is shameful,’ wrote an ICE spokesman who declined to be named in a Saturday morning statement …”
The spokesman feigning indignation here declined to be named because he is — like everyone else — acutely aware of exactly who and what is actually “shameful” here. He is to ashamed to allow his name to be used just as the agents are too ashamed to carry any identification or even to show their faces in public.
They know. They can smell it too. And the stink is just as bad to them as it is to normal people and to decent people.
The behavior of ICE agents demonstrates that they know what they’re doing is shameful and wrong and dishonorable and ugly. And they’re scared, because they know all of that and they also know that they’re outnumbered.
They’re hiding behind masks or insisting on not being named because this is the only way that anyone could do the kind of work they do.
So we need to make them famous. Unmask them. Name them. Identify them.
Some might characterize what I’m saying here as a call to “doxx” these agents or to expose them, but part of the point here is that names and faces are the difference between the police and the secret police. An agency that is behaving like the secret police cannot be allowed to remain secret.
But we also need their names for another very important reason. Names matter here because without knowing someone’s name you cannot say to them, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.”
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