Immigration agents flooded U.S. airports this week on a purported mission to help the understaffed Transportation Security Administration units dealing with hourslong security lines during a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown. Though the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were supposed to speed things along, reports have not identified any beneficial impact of their presence, beyond the occasional distribution of bottled water or wayfinding assistance.
Mostly, the airport ICE agents have been depicted leaning against walls, staring at their phones, and watching beleaguered TSA workers suffer through another day without pay. They exude both intimidation and ineptitude: Their visible weaponry shows them to be capable of unspeakable violence, while their nonchalant bearing suggests they are unconcerned with the appearance of productivity or professional decorum.
And though Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has encouraged airline passengers to wear nicer clothing for their flights, the airport ICE agents are dressing like they were ripped directly out from under their PlayStation controllers.
In flannel, hoodies, and beanies, these guys are making no pretense about having important business—or even an official role—at U.S. airports. They’re mugging for cameras in random baseball hats, strolling around in jeans and casual overshirts, chitchatting with one another in every color of cargo pant mankind has yet to discover. They’re showing up to work in T-shirts that would get them sent home from a shift at GameStop. Befitting an agency whose current hiring spree is an indiscriminate roundup powered by white-supremacist dog whistles, the officers look less like a regimented unit of government employees and more like a Confederate reenactor meetup at the local Hardee’s.
Unlike most other law enforcement bodies, ICE has no standard uniform and a lax dress code. Sometimes, agents are kitted out in military gear and camouflage, cosplaying as special-ops warriors in Home Depot parking lots. Other times, they’re dressed like average schmucks in wraparound sunglasses and windbreakers, the better to ambush their targets in public places. The officers currently loitering at airports across the country are splitting the difference: They’re wearing bulletproof vests that identify them as ICE agents, but over outfits that look better suited to rotting on the couch with a blunt and a box of Tagalongs than performing a supposedly critical security role.
Law enforcement uniforms serve two main purposes. First, they identify wearers as agents of the government. Second, they seek to project authority, thereby engendering respect, or at least compliance. But over the past year, ICE officers have drawn attention for their diminishing interest in doing either of these things. Carrying out a deeply unpopular immigration agenda by snatching up doctoral students, pastors, and 5-year-old boys in bunny hats, they hide their faces and badges from a judgmental public, blurring the line between state employee and everyday thug. They call the people they’re ostensibly tasked with protecting “bitches” and patrol the streets in pants with giant holes in the crotch. It’s not that they’re trying and failing to look like upright officers of the law. They’re actively attempting to communicate the exact opposite.
Why? Because for all their warfighter posturing, ICE agents get a certain kind of power from seeming like a ragtag layman’s militia. They envision themselves as members of Donald Trump’s personal security force, exempt from the legal and regulatory strictures that—to varying extents—keep other law enforcement units in line. More ideologically driven than the military, more openly hostile than a police department (and with about one-third of the training), ICE is cultivating an image of unpredictable brutality. That guy with a beanie on his head, an oversize sweatshirt under his vest, and a scruffy beard on his face? He looks like an unshowered airline passenger about to fly to Milwaukee who somehow sneaked the handgun on his waistband through security. The dude in a plaid button-down and walking shoes? He’s got a red-pilled-history-teacher-who-just-got-fired demeanor about him that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. The dead-eyed man (pictured in the first photo) wearing his very own camo hat emblazoned with an American flag patch, plus a ludicrously unkempt goatee? I’m simply asking where he was on Jan. 6, 2021.
His was far from the most egregious ICE facial hair on display at American airports this week. Another agent, on duty at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, sported a red Amish-style beard so long it threatened to get caught in his vest. (Fashion over function, I guess?) Most police departments require beards to be short and neatly trimmed, if they don’t mandate a fully clean-shaven face. Even uniformed members of the U.S. Park Police—the most lumberjack-coded law enforcement entity of them all—can’t wear beards on their woodland patrols. Those rules don’t apply to ICE; the more slovenly, the better. The fact that the political leaders of this administration’s anti-immigrant agenda are all clean-shaven only highlights the doomsday militia look of its foot soldiers.
The point of all this sloppy dress is to make clear that ICE is largely populated not by careermen intent on judicious execution of their duties, but by random MAGA guys with chips on their shoulders. Stationed in the TSA line or on a city streetcorner, they are the menacing tentacles of Trump’s regime, there to taunt passersby with a visual reminder of the president’s unscrupulously wielded power. Sometimes, the job requires a skin fade and Nazi-esque greatcoat. Other times, a neck beard and graphic tee get the point across just fine.