ICE Agents Should Not Feel Comfortable In Our Communities
ICE officers take their uniforms off when they go home. Our communities need to identify, isolate, and hold them accountable even when they aren't clocked in.
At the end of the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, Standartenführer Hans Landa, the primary antagonist of the story and a Nazi SS military official tasked with hunting down Jewish community members in France, is held down in a forest as two of the films protagonists, American soldiers 1st Lieutenant Aldo Raine and Private First Class Utivich, as they discuss Landa’s life after the war. Landa had made a deal with the American military: allow the murder of other high-ranking military officials, including German leader Adolf Hitler, and escape the war without punishment.
The two Americans found themselves at an impasse, acknowledging that the German officer was likely going to be able to reintegrate into his newfound society the moment he took off his uniform, saying:
When you go to your little place on Nantuckett Island, I image you gonna take off that handsome looking SS uniform of yours, ain’t ya?… I mean if I had my way, you’d wear that goddamn uniform for the rest of your pecker suckin life. But I’m aware that’s ain’t practical. I mean at some point ya gotta hafta take it off.
In that moment, Raine and Utivich make a choice, choosing to carve a swastika into the forehead of Landa, a mark he cannot simply take off.
This scene played in my head shortly after seeing the news of the execution of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Video footage of the murder showed armed ICE officers stopping their vehicle in front of Renee’s as she seemingly waved them through, demanding she exit her car. As she attempted to drive around the officers now swarming her, one aimed his sidearm at her and fired through her window. Worse yet, further videos and witness testimony indicate that shortly after the shooting, ICE officers refused medical personnel access as they tried to provide support to Renee.
The officer who fired the fatal shots was unfortunately masked and fled the scene shortly after the murder. Identification of the man has thus far been unsuccessful, no doubt made more difficult by his agency, which seems to have no interest in disclosing his name or any other information as it prioritizes protecting its own.
That ICE officer, now a murderer as well as the footsoldier of a fascist paramilitary agency, will go home, take off his mask, shed his uniform, and go on with his life. Sadly, he is far from the only one. When we think of ICE officers, we oftentimes think of them as being the faceless, violent federal agents we see on the streets, but they take their uniforms off at some point. When they do, they continue to exist to those around them as parents, spouses, neighbors, patrons at local bars, members of local clubs and organizations, and more. Without their badge and uniform, they exist as any other member of our communities, functionally anonymous despite the harm they’re taking part in.
This insulation from the repercussions of their actions enables them to continue putting on the uniform when they need to get to work the next day. They face scorn and disapproval when the ICE logo is printed across their plate carriers, but that’s where it oftentimes ends. They go home, and they can unwind, decompress, and ultimately compartmentalize the stress of their work when they kick their feet up at the end of the day. This is a status quo that has to change.
I wrote recently about the need to exclude Zionists from our social and political spaces, citing the harm they are complicit in and the need to hold these actors accountable for what are ultimately genocidal views that support the continued existence of a settler colonial project as it oppresses millions. ICE officers should be treated no differently.
Like with Zionists, communities have a moral obligation to ensure that ICE agents feel no comfort in any space, social, political, or otherwise. They should be run out of every place they attempt to find community in, made pariahs by merit of their fascist views and participation in a fascist paramilitary agency. These officers may be our neighbors, but they are not part of our communities. They forfeit such a claim when they signed up for an agency tasked with destroying communities across the nation and doling out violence against those the state deems “undesirable”.
These officers should be identified, their names and faces known by those in the places they call home. They should be accosted at every place they show their faces, be it their local grocery store, a community event, a book club, a gym, their church, or any other space they might seek refuge and community. If we are to stand against fascism and the violence of ICE, we must make participation in such an agency an act that makes it impossible to separate their work life from their personal life.
These are people signing up to make a living terrorizing and even murdering their fellow man, individuals who saw a sign-on bonus and weighed that against the lives of the people they might permanently change for the worse, only to find the money more valuable. Their decision was made easier with the knowledge that they would be able to take off the uniform and retain their social circles. It is our responsibility to ensure that those social circles and any broader sense of belonging are stripped from anyone who chooses to wear an ICE badge around their neck.
Our system is not going to hold them accountable as they’re advancing its interests, so our communities must. That starts with identifying ICE agents taking residence in them and making it clear that their work defines their lives, whether or not they don their uniform. An ICE agent is an ICE agent, whether they’re kicking in the door of an immigrant’s home or shopping for groceries at their local market. If our response to them is inconsistent, only responding negatively when they are on the job, they’ll continue doing their jobs for as long as they possibly can.
After all, you’d want to know if a Nazi was your neighbor, wouldn’t you?
one of the ice agents that raided the library i work at was one of our patrons, who was retired, and reentered the workforce just to do this. absolutely horrifying how comfortable he felt snitching on our citizenship classes in a place he’s acted as a member of our community for years
Notice how ICE dominates feeds while food quality, medical gatekeeping, and cost-of-living crises barely trend. Outrage isn’t about impact—it’s about control of attention.