Immigration officials swarmed US airports this week in a move aimed at helping Transportation Security Administration units deal with hours-long security lines during the Department of Homeland Security’s partial shutdown. Although the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were supposed to speed things up, reports have not indicated any benefit from their presence, other than the distribution of bottled water or assistance in finding the way.
Mostly, ICE airport agents are shown leaning against the walls, looking at their phones, and watching the beleaguered TSA workers suffer another day without pay. They show fear and ignorance: Their visible weapons show that they can commit unspeakable violence, while their indifference suggests that they do not care about the appearance of production or professional decorum.
Although the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has encouraged passengers to wear nice clothes for their flights, ICE airport employees dress as if they were pulled out from under their PlayStation controllers.
In flannels, hoodies and beanies, these guys don’t pretend they have any important business – or even a legitimate role – in a US airport. They’re looking for cameras in baseball caps, they’re walking around in jeans and oversized shirts, they’re matching every color of cargo bridge that people don’t even know about yet. They’re going to work on T-shirts that will get them sent home from the GameStop shift. Befitting an institution whose recruitment is a random procession of white dog whistlers, the officers look less like an organized group of government workers and more like a Confederate reenactor meeting at a Hardee’s.
Unlike other law enforcement agencies, ICE does not have a standard uniform and a loose dress code. Sometimes, agents are put in military gear and camouflage, playing as special ops fighters in the parking lot of Home Depot. Sometimes, they are dressed like schmucks in sunglasses and windbreakers, the better to lurk where they want in public places. Officers roaming airports across the country split the difference: They wear bulletproof vests that identify them as ICE agents, but on top of that they look more like rotting on a bed in a mess with a Tagalong box than performing a supposedly important security role.
Law enforcement uniforms serve two main purposes. First, they identify those who dress as representatives of the government. Second, they want to project authority, so they command respect, or at least compliance. But last year, ICE officials drew attention for their declining interest in doing either of these things. By carrying out an unpopular immigration scheme by abducting medical students, clergy, and 5-year-old boys wearing bunny hats, hiding their faces and badges from a judgmental public, they blur the line between a government employee and the everyday criminal. They call people who seem to be tasked with protecting “businesses” and patrolling the streets in pants with huge holes. It’s not like they’re trying and failing to look like good law enforcement officers. They are trying hard to say the opposite.
Why? Because for all their combativeness, ICE agents find some kind of power in what looks like a ragtag layman’s army. They see themselves as members of Donald Trump’s security force, exempt from the laws and regulations that – in different ways – keep other parts of the law in line. More ideologically motivated than the military, more hostile than the police department (and about a third less trained), ICE cultivates an image of unpredictable brutality. That guy with a beanie on his head, a big sweatshirt under his vest, and a stubble on his face? He looks like a shirtless airline passenger about to fly to Milwaukee who somehow managed to slip a handgun into his hip for protection. The dude in the plaid button-down and walking shoes? She has a teacher-with-me-with-a-new-found self-confidence attitude. The dead-eyed man (pictured in the first photo) wearing his camo hat emblazoned with an American flag patch, along with an incredibly sloppy goatee? I’m just asking where he was on January 6, 2021.
He was a far cry from the ugly facial hair ICE displayed at American airports this week. One agent, who worked at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, had an Amish-style red beard so long that it threatened to get caught in his vest. (Fads pass, I guess?) Most police departments require beards to be kept short and neatly trimmed, if not mandate that the face be completely shaved. Even the uniformed members of the US Game Police—the most lumbering law enforcement of them all—can’t wear beards on their forest patrols. Those rules do not apply to ICE; the messier you are, the better. The fact that the political leaders of this anti-immigrant agenda are all clean-shaven only highlights the doomsday appearance of its foot soldiers.
The point of this sloppy dress is to make it clear that ICE is not so much staffed by employees who are willing to do their jobs smartly, but by MAGA guys with chips on their shoulders. Standing in a TSA line or on a city street corner, they are the menacing tentacles of the Trump administration, mocking passers-by in a way that reminds them of the president’s unassuming power. Sometimes, the job requires skin darkening and a large Nazi-esque outfit. Sometimes, neck beards and graphic tees just get the point well
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