When Reps. Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York were barred last month from entering 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where immigrants reportedly have been detained in inhumane conditions, the two Democrats became the latest in a string of lawmakers refused entry from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. The denial was not surprising. Such refusals are happening with increasing regularity around the country, as it becomes clear that ICE is not a federal agency concerned with even a patina of transparency.
But neither Nadler nor Goldman could have anticipated the manner of refusal: a man in a short-sleeved novelty shirt emblazoned with a large Guinness toucan arguing with them in a hallway.
The shirt’s owner, seemingly unconcerned with its top buttons, allowed an ample view of his chest. He spent a considerable part of the encounter adopting a faux hapless position, hands in his pockets. Yet what William Joyce lacked in basic notions of professionalism, he made up for in his authority. “We’re not going to do it because we don’t have to,” Joyce replied when pressed for a reason for the refusal to allow federal legislators into the building. (Nadler and Goldman soon left, vowing to take the issue up the chain of command.)
Although hardly the most alarming feature of the encounter, Joyce’s appearance was striking. Here was a government official who had received advance notice that he was to meet with two sitting members of Congress on a Wednesday morning. Did he intend to convey disrespect? Maybe. But more notably, a clear throughline emerges between Joyce and an unofficial uniform that has taken root among those assigned to carry out President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. The apparel is pedestrian, but specific in its register of American bro-iness, evocative of a puff-chested dude in a graphic tee. Maybe he’s a divorcee seething with low-hum aggression as he walks into the vape store. “The types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings,” the writer Hamilton Nolan noted.
It’s easy to mock. But accessible masculinity appears to be the aesthetic of the new institutionalized terror in our burgeoning $200 billion police state, as ICE disappears immigrants. Members of this goon squad look like the guys who roam around America’s dead malls. Yes, the aesthetic affords them powerful obscurity, sowing fear and confusion in the communities they torment; they dodge accountability through the use of facial coverings and unmarked cars. But it also makes you wonder about all the other men who look the same and aren’t ICE agents.
“You don’t know where they’re from. You don’t have any idea who they are, and they are given carte blanche [authority],” said Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics and a professor at UCLA. She likens ICE agents to the Nazi-era Sturmabteilung, also known as Brownshirts, many of them unemployed men and former soldiers who terrorized German towns with chaos and violence. “They were the rabble-rousers and drunks,” Ravetto-Biagioli said. “They looked like a bunch of ‘bros,’ as you might say in common parlance, and angry men who felt disaffected by being on the losing side of World War I.”
If what we are witnessing is indeed the arrival of fascism in the United States, it’s helpful to understand ICE’s bro aesthetic as a small feature of a larger repudiation of things outside the right’s liking: gender fluidity, increased transgender visibility, MeToo, reproductive rights. The result has been a hyperfocus on traditional gender norms, embraced in the faces and fashion across MAGA.
Accessible masculinity is the aesthetic of the new institutionalized terror in our burgeoning $200 billion police state. Members of this goon squad look like the guys who roam around America’s dead malls.
“I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living,” Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous German filmmaker whose work fueled Nazi propaganda, once said. Riefenstahl is given a special focus in Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag argues, among many things, that perceptions of cleanliness and purity were integral to fascist power, especially when performed in unison.
Officers who reportedly pin down and punch immigrants may not conjure ideas of beauty to you and me. But for Trump and his ilk, ICE inspires a reverence that mirrors Riefenstahl’s. “These officers are doing a tremendous job,” the president likes to say. “They’re great patriots.” On Truth Social, Trump has praised agents for demonstrating “incredible strength, determination, and courage.” Squint and you start to get the picture that ICE belongs to a larger MAGA cultural project to imbue American life with a virility. We like the strong, silent type—the cowboy. What better way to make a state crackdown look like an American reclamation—a project of the anti-government party—than to have cops dress like an average guy with a gun?
Yet for all the presidential admiration and immense financial priority ICE enjoys, morale among officers is said to be at an all-time nadir, laying the groundwork for a hellish recruitment effort to meet Trump’s plan to carry out the “largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” Images of the everyday man in a snapback hat and jeans—turned “heroes” in the eyes of the most powerful man in the world—are instrumental to ICE’s recruiting. The group has set out to hire a staggering 10,000 more officers quickly, thanks to the Republican spending bill.
“It’s a uniform that is accessible to anybody, so that any person can feel like they can become an ICE member,” Alison Kinney, author of Hood from the Object Lessons series, told me.
For apologists, the aesthetic makes it easy to argue that these are ordinary American men simply doing their job. Consider the Ku Klux Klan hood. Today, it provokes terror. But in the early days of the Klan, defenders were quick to point to the hood as evidence that these were just good ol’ boys engaging in play. As Georgia state Rep. John Harrison Christy told Congress in 1871: “Sometimes, mischievous boys who want to have some fun go on a masquerading frolic to scare the negroes, but they do not interrupt them, do not hurt them in any way. Stories are exaggerated.”
What kind of person grows up to be an ICE agent? It’s hard to know what those now working for ICE, created in March 2003, had in mind as adolescents considering future career paths.
But my mind traces back to the dudes I knew as a kid, growing up as a first-generation American and a kid of color in suburban New Jersey, where the concept of my “otherness” arrived early. One feature I found striking then, as I do now, is that reminders of this “otherness” nearly always came from boys; I can’t recall an encounter in which my Korean background was called out by a girl. The pattern created the impression, even as a kid, that boys enjoyed a special permission to deploy such taunting. That boys, by their very nature, couldn’t help themselves. It was fun. Wasn’t I having fun, too?
A similar cruelty animates ICE’s harassment of immigrant advocates, the volunteers who show up to court to observe hearings and assist immigrants. Now grown men, these agents shove volunteers, lock people in elevators where they push all the buttons—“we’ll just go for a little ride,” one volunteer recalls an agent telling her—threaten, and sexually harass. Such actions are followed up by public notices from the Trump administration that the project of horror is, in fact, very enjoyable. Here’s a meme about sending people to an El Salvador megaprison. You’re having fun, right?
That ICE is an agency rife with allegations of sexual abuse against detainees is not surprising. “He grabbed my breasts,” a detainee named Maria told the New York Times in 2018, describing an assault by a male guard. “He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts. He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.” Today, as Republicans work with the president to shield ICE from outside transparency, you can imagine that the opportunity for sexual assaults is skyrocketing.
It is not an accident that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a woman, is at the top of this hierarchy, with her literal face prioritized by Trump to help sell his brutal immigration policy. “She’s like the most delicate, beautiful, tiny woman,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said, defending Noem after security at her press conference violently removed Sen. Alex Padilla to block him from asking questions. “What actual testosterone dude goes in and tries to break Kristi Noem?”
Here, a woman’s perceived beauty appears to serve as cover for the incredible cruelty of the men beneath her. Their critics, like Padilla, must lack “testosterone.” Today, like yesterday, the same rules of the boys’ club prevail.
ICE’s aesthetics—the choice to look like a plainclothes goon squad—doesn’t just help the agency keep its secrecy. It helps another mission: to make it seem like this is all normal. Because you know this American man. And he might do bad things. But he isn’t so bad, is he? And you’re having fun—even if you’re cringing—right?
