ICE Masks
The administration has us right where it wants us.
You may be horrified by the footage of ICE apprehensions, their evident brutality, the grotesque use of force, but Stephen Miller wants to accustom us to the look of savagery. He figures that a few more rounds of Kristallnacht-style glass breaking will soften us up for the still-worse-to-come. That’s standard operations for fascist regimes. You have to prepare a populace for ultimate force by testing the limits with sub-ultimate force.
The other factor here is self-deportation. There are millions of immigrants in the targeted group, far too many for ICE to handle, even with the infusion of Big Beautiful Cash from the Big Beautiful Bill. The Trump-Miller tag team won’t be able to spend it fast enough to build a hundred new alligator internment camps to receive undocumented deportees-in-progress. It would be far easier and more efficient for immigrants to self-deport.
That’s exactly what Goebbels achieved in Germany. By constant harassment, marginalization, and violence, he drove German Jews into the visa offices by the thousands. It didn’t take much violence—just enough. They did the work of exile at their own expense, paying confiscatory taxes at each step of the way. Think of a SWAT team from ICE as a mobile Kristallnacht. For a person without documents, it signifies that Sauron means business.
The most sinister feature of the process is probably the masks. The warriors from ICE look like galactic storm troopers, Death Star emissaries sent by Darth Vadar himself, with no difference between the face shields and balaclavas worn by the ICE teams and the black-and-white polycarbonate of their fictional counterparts.
My guess is that they function like masks always do, breaking the ties that bind us to civilization and divorcing the individual from the call of conscience. You can be anything behind the camouflage of a mask, accountable to no one, not even yourself. The mask transforms the wearer into another being, dancing around the fire, instincts unleashed. All is wild, eruptive, deniable. A mask allows us to enter an altered state. disrupting the community at the gathering of the tribe, reminding us of the forces of danger and menace. The murderer always prefers to stand behind a barrier, even when acting on behalf of the state. That was precisely the dynamic between the great shift in Jew-killing, between the Holocaust-by-bullets to Zyklon B pesticide. Gas was much easier when it was released anonymously into chutes, instead of a bullet to the brain of a nursing mother.
The paradox is that masks also change the potential victim. When we see each other face-to-face, there is at least a chance that we will lead with humanity. But when a mask is interposed between assailant and victim, the target no longer has the full status of personhood. He becomes a generic object viewed through eye slits, and the constraints that operate in normal society are drained away in the encounter. A helmet can be protective for the one who wears it, but it also has the potential for amplifying violence. The wearer no longer sees the fullness of vulnerability. It is as if the scene is flattened into a video game. This is the moral problem of drone warfare, of soldiers sitting at desk chairs with joy sticks, training lethal weaponry on far-away subjects. You will argue that this problem applies to all weaponry, that it places all victims at a comfortable distance, but there is something especially troubling about a drone.
Many people, of course, are calling out this offense, and I hope that you will be supportive of their efforts. Scott Weiner, a state senator from San Francisco, is one of them (Scott Wiener for Congress). Alex Padilla is another (Alex Padilla for U.S. Senate). But I hope that you will keep an eye on all these good people. Write a fan letter or send a contribution, even if it’s only symbolic.
We are talking here about the dynamics of intimidation, the way an unscrupulous administration creates fear and trembling in the name of nefarious, harmful initiatives. Imagine yourself as a child in Los Angeles, witnessing a swarm of mask-wearing ICE agents, circling the hapless adults in your family. We are morally required to do anything to protect them.