How ICE Sees You.

And what ICE thinks they're doing.

Optimus Prime protects Americans from ICE. (by Daniel Warren Johnson)

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to overgeneralize unfairly to make a nevertheless true point.

One of the last conversations I had at work before we all fled for COVID was with a friend — a very good guy who’s a very conservative Catholic (principled, not racist, not horrible) — and we were talking about the then-upcoming 2020 election. I said the Republicans may do OK if they can beat their cruelty problem. He blinked What cruelty problem?

Sure — laugh, or at least snort — because it actually is funny. But it’s a reminder that how we see someone is not how they see themselves.

Now, ICE is absolutely fascist and objectively racist but that’s not what ICE and CBP think they’re doing. So accusations of fascism and racism largely fall on their deaf ears.

• ICE and CBP leadership these days, however, do know exactly what they’re doing. ICE and the Trump Administration openly uses racist dogwhistles and language to recruit, according to a New York Times investigation and a parallel examination by the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

I also don’t think ICE and CBP agents are a monolith. I’m sure some are conflicted about what they’re doing and some are horrified by what they’ve joined. (ICE recruits join at a staggering rate and quit at a staggering rate.)

• Another Important Caveat: I don’t think every member of ICE or CBP are personally racist in that they believe that nonwhite people are inherently genetically inferior to white people. Some are what I call civilizationalists — people who believe that European-origin, Judeo-Christian civilization and culture (ie. Christendom) is morally and intellectually superior to all other civilizations. Put another way, civilizationalists aren’t bigoted against nonwhite people, they’re bigoted against nonwhite civilizations and cultures. You can sincerely be a civilizationalist without being personally racist. This is my disagreement with people who refer to Christian nationalism as white Christian nationalism. (Yes, I understand the sometimes racist history of Christian nationalist thought and the oftentimes hard overlap between it and white supremacy.) I’m saying you don’t have to be racist to be a Christian nationalist — you can be one without being the other. This may be a distinction without a difference — because it’s still bigotry — but it is a real distinction that will matter later. (If only because you can’t deprogram a Christian nationalist of their theological beliefs by calling them racist because they don’t view race as core to their belief.)

So I think calling ICE and CBP members fascist or racist is too easy. It’s not fully accurate. I also think it’s too easy to say they simply crave power and the authority of a badge and carte blanche to beat people up and use a gun.

Now, that said I nevertheless think that those organizations believe in a coherent narrative — a new one set by Trump and Stephen Miller.

• (Most organizations have internal narratives that explain to themselves what their mission is and what its members work to do. To say that all members of an organization sincerely believe in an organization’s narrative is an overgeneralization but tends to be mostly true most times rather than perfectly and absolutely true all the time.)

Belief in that new narrative helps explain why ICE agent Jonathan Ross called Renee Good a fucking bitch after he killed her, and why an unnamed CBP officer said Boo hoo to a protester after they killed Alex Pretti, and why an unnamed ICE agent quipped to a Minneapolis resident If you raise your voice I will erase your voice, and why after several ICE and CBP agents were caught on video in separate incidents in the days following Good’s murder saying to Minneapolis residents some version of You’d think you’d have learned how to shut up and comply with our orders after what we did to Renee Good. I don’t think they’re doing and saying these things just out of sheer cruelty.

Previous to the Trump era, ICE and CBP’s internal organizational narrative was pretty typical and normal for a federal law enforcement agency: We find and arrest people who have illegally entered the United States and commit crimes here. That really was about it.

Now I think the narrative is more like:

Immigrants from poor countries come here for financial gain because they know that if they can successfully cross the border, liberals — who set up the immigration and welfare systems — will subsidize immigrants’ entire lives off the backs of hardworking red state Americans. Once here, those immigrants can sit back and be lazy and/or commit as many crimes as they want and hardworking Americans can’t do anything about it and liberals force those Americans to accept it and force them to pay the taxes to subsidize those lazy people’s lives and force Americans to accept becoming victims of crimes in lawless cities. (Sanctuary cities aren’t sanctuaries from persecution; they’re sanctuaries from personal accountability.) Lazy, predatory immigrants and deluded liberals who control the spigot that allows immigrants in and protect immigrants when they’re here make the lives of hardworking Americans impossible, unaffordable, and dangerous. I can’t afford the life I want and I am afraid to walk the streets because of all of them — immigrants and liberals alike. The “takers” take and take and take and take from the hardworking Americans who are the “makers” — and the woolly-headed so-intellectual-they-have-no-common-sense liberal minority protects the entire “taking” system.

Now — finally, at long last — we have a President who will fight back and now finally I can get in the game and take back American streets from the predators and rip out the “taking” system by branch and root. This now is a righteous war in the streets to end all the predation and all our victimization once and for all. We have to fight doubly hard to take back clear ownership of the blue sanctuary cities and we can’t let liberals’ protests stop us and continue the predation. Good Americans have to own the streets through force and authority and we cannot be cowed by their shouting at us. They sass us because they don’t respect hardworking Americans or what America is supposed to be. When they sass us or defy us they are just reaching into our pockets for our money and telling us hardworking Americans just have to accept being mugged and that we have to take the abuse. Now we will own the streets again and we will take America back and we will punish them until they accept that their day in the sun is done.

And I think that’s why they fight. They think they’re defenders. And they think we’re trying to destroy everything that’s good in their world. Yes, that narrative is completely bigoted but…

They think they’re heroes.

And they are wrong.