this machine is fascist: what the white house's mockery of ICE's victims tells us about its style of governance
the cruelty is the point, but so is the brazenness
On March 28, the official White House account on X posted a cartoon image of a sobbing Dominican woman being arrested by a stone-faced ICE officer. The photo was an AI-generated rendition of the kidnapping of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who ICE had disappeared from Philadelphia, and who, according to the agency now expelling people from the country without trial, had previously been convicted of drug trafficking.
The disgust the post inspired was, one imagines, the point. Another day in Trump's America, another day of owning the libs by shoving the administration's wanton cruelty in everyone's faces. Fascists were quick to draw attention to Basora-Gonzalez's alleged criminality, as if that were remotely the point. My own abolitionist beliefs aside, most Americans likely would not have objected to the arrest itself. What people found sickening and appalling was the glib mockery of a woman who had already been subjected to state violence.
Generally, governments put on a show of solemnity when engaging in violence, giving the impression that their hands are forced to such action. The ceremony and ritual around arrests, trials, and punishment in the democratized west serve to legitimize the power of the state by demonstrating a level of paternalism and constraint. Like a father who, prior to physical child abuse, says, "This hurts me more than it hurts you," these practices distance the state from its own brutality. There is an understanding that, were the state to be seen as relishing violence, people would cease to feel that its power is legitimate. The social order would not hold.
Historical philosopher Michel Foucault lays this paradigm out in his seminal text, Discipline and Punish. Central to his notion of biopower is the idea that governments have, over time, moved to obscure their violence, shifting from sovereign power to disciplinary power. Whereas punishment during the age of monarchy was doled out capriciously and publicly based on the monarch's personal reasoning, today it is carried out behind closed doors and justified by a legal framework and a philosophy of justice. States don't draw and quarter people in the public square anymore. Instead, they execute them behind closed doors. As the phrase goes, the iron fist is cloaked in a velvet glove.
The White House's AI-generated propaganda can be seen as a direct refutation of biopower. With all the tact of a snickering high school bully laughing at the scrawny kid he just shoved off the bleachers, this administration has cast off the velvet glove to reveal the iron hand beneath, and then raised a big, fat, iron middle finger. The question is, why? It does not take much brainpower to understand that such displays of state power serve only to weaken the state, and that the best way to preserve such power is to draw attention away from it.
It is said that President Johnson was known to unfurl his dick (which he nicknamed Jumbo) out of his trousers, often cornering senators in the bathroom to ask, "Have you ever seen anything as big as this?" Given the juvenile attitude of this administration, those within it may simply be so thrilled to find themselves holding the terrifying power of the American state that they cannot help but crudely show it off. But, of course, by sexually harassing his fellow politicians, Johnson was proving his impunity in all arenas. If he could force them to look at his genitals, he could abuse them in matters of politics. Here, too, the brazenness may exist to send a message. "We can kidnap you off the street, and there's nothing you can do about it but cry."
For whom, though, is this messaging intended? Is it aimed at undocumented immigrants, or is it a knowing wink toward the rank-and-file fascists who voted this administration into power? If the former, one imagines that the goal is simply to add insult to injury. If the latter, such a message could only land well for those who are so radicalized that it is impossible to see themselves in the sobbing, Latino woman, and who identify with the white ICE agent. Racial supremacy and the right of the white man to dominate and abuse this abuela is the plainly visible subtext. But you already knew that.
As I observed in a recent TikTok video, ICE has always been a violent, racist operation, and the White House Ghibli tweet serves only as another in a long line of mask-off moments. Aside from the bone-chilling development of deportations without due process, was deportation that much more humane under Obama or Biden? Then, as now, people were brutally arrested and shoved into detention centers, often for years on end. Lives were upended and families separated. Small children were and still are made to stand trial without a lawyer.
But now, the White House is making fun of the people America brutalizes and imprisons. Now, the violence is not obfuscated. It is celebrated. That is worth taking note of because it sends a clear message: some of you are above the law, and the rest of you are animals being hunted for sport.
-MAM