In the weeks since an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, an unarmed US citizen and mother of three young children, federal officers have met protesters in Minneapolis with a tunnel vision of violence. These men have smashed car windows. Tear-gassed kids. Hauled off screaming women on their way to the doctor. Went door to door, carrying guns, asking neighbors about where to find “the Asian” families.
Last weekend, predictably, federal agents again shot and killed someone.
The Trump administration may be starting to show small signs of regret after its lies about Alex Pretti’s killing proved too much for Americans. But make no mistake: The wind-down is about quelling a PR crisis amid tanking poll numbers—not regret for their terrorist-like behavior. President Trump and his inner circle still insist that rounding people up and crushing dissidents brings peace to American cities besieged by the assault of having an immigrant community. In fact, some, like Steve Bannon, are calling for further escalation. “If you blink in Minneapolis, you’ll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to New York,” Bannon said on his podcast, the aptly titled War Room, on Monday. “[Trump must] put the insurgency down immediately.”
Agents dress for the war they want. They march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
The pretext of this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Greg Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.
“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash bang grenades hanging off of them,” Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, said. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”
The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.
When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities they invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.
These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood type patches, despite little evidence that it would ever be needed.
What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Greg Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi-wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.
“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man. I’m a real badass.’”
The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood type patches, despite little evidence that it would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.
Above in their hotel rooms, federal agents return to their dead mall aesthetics to once again demonstrate “the paradox of this fascist movement.”
“This administration sees all of that as a benefit,” journalist Radley Balko, who writes the criminal justice newsletter The Watch, wrote over email. “They want to terrorize immigrant communities. They want to be seen as an occupying force. They’ve been clear about this. They want to make immigrant communities so fearful that they’ll self-deport, and they’ll tell others to stop coming here. Making immigration officers as scary and intimidating as possible is part of the strategy.”
The result has been a mix of violence and lethality at the hands of federal officials. But as Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic, MAGA’s imagination of Trump’s men as warrior-like figures belies the fear behind their body armor. It also seeks to conceal the ham-fisted follies that have been paired with their false pretexts of war: jacked-up men in military gear falling on their asses; inebriated ICE agents threatening immigration checks on sheriffs who catch them drunk driving; ICE officers, some resembling the “overweight” men Pete Hegseth complains about, failing to arrest a delivery worker as he shouts, “I’m not a US citizen!” Above in their hotel rooms, federal agents return to their dead mall aesthetics to once again demonstrate what Kraska describes as “the paradox of this fascist movement.”
“Yes, it’s being run by incompetent buffoons,” Kraska told me. “This all seems like silly, immature, B-league stuff. But at the same time, it’s just as dangerous as any movement we’ve seen.”
You can see the same “badass” theatrics play out in DHS’s social accounts, where videos of immigrant arrests “flood the airwaves” and are celebrated to thumping music. Some are viewed by millions; others are shared by the president of the United States. So an uncomfortable question emerges: Does ICE roam the streets hoping to be featured in such videos? It certainly seems that way. A report from the Washington Post showed the DHS social media team eagerly hoping to go viral from arrests.
If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection. ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility.
The same theatrical throughline exists all the way up to Kristi Noem, who, despite a resume completely devoid of any law enforcement background, landed a job as Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary. What Noem did have, as I wrote in March, was the seemingly altered face for the job. It’s all about content.
It strikes as ironic, then, that cameras have emerged as one of the most powerful means to resist ICE’s violent tactics. Wielded by protesters, these devices have been critical in dismantling the Trump administration’s lies about the people they fatally shoot. If it is a war—an invasion!—then the administration said it could do whatever it wanted. It could separate families; it could hunt down immigrants. Well, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe dressing up like soldiers and beating up everyday people, when filmed, looks bad. For an administration so obsessed with content, they forgot that, at some point, backlash tends to follow those who go viral.
