Dispatches from Trump's Monstrous ICE Raids — and a Look at the Agents Carrying Them Out

Our Ashley Bishop recounts her warped, surreal day chatting with Trump's ICE agents seconds before they arrested undocumented immigrants in NYC.

Yesterday morning, I went to 26 Federal Plaza, where New York City houses its Immigration Detention Center and immigration court. As in other places across the country, ICE had stationed themselves in the lobby and hallway outside of federal court — waiting to arrest immigrants as they walked out.

Before I give my full dispatch, here’s the playbook for the arrests unfolding in many immigration courthouses, as explained by Congressman Dan Goldman, who recently had a tense exchange with plain-clothed, masked ICE agents. Goldman’s explanation from Morning Joe:

“What the Department of Homeland Security is doing is they’re going into court, they’re dismissing their own case, removal case, against immigrants. In many of those cases, the immigrants have done what they’re legally allowed to do which is to file asylum claims. Asylum is a lawful pathway to come into the United States. The Department of Homeland Security is dismissing their own cases—which voids out the asylum claim—the immigrants are then leaving court, going downstairs into the lobby of the building where my district office is, and there a number of ICE agents, plain clothed, unidentified, wearing masks, who arrest them and send them into a different removal proceeding called expedited removal—where there’s minimal due process and there’s not enough time for them to refile their asylum claim. So these are people following lawful process, following the proper immigration proceedings for people who are seeking asylum, which is a lawful pathway. And instead what’s happening is they're being hoodwinked essentially and arrested. So these are people are doing it the right way, who are non-violent, non-criminal, and they’re getting arrested.

Before I even passed through security and got up to the 12th floor immigration court, the first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of heavily armed ICE agents simply milling around. As expected, the hallway outside of immigration court was lined on one side with police, and at least one IRS-CI agent (the IRS’ criminal investigations unit); the other side packed with a dozen or so armed ICE agents — one wearing a gray balaclava to conceal his identity.

There were a handful of other journalists, almost exclusively from smaller, independent outlets, pacing the hallway alongside ICE agents — all of us waiting for the arrests to start.

As people often do when idling in small spaces with other people, little bursts of small talk broke out. The agent wearing the balaclava joked with a journalist that he would take it off for a paid photo op. Another agent’s phone rang — the ring tone turned out to be “The Joker” by The Steve Miller Band. “Some call me a space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love…” It was so obviously inappropriate for the setting, that it drew a few laughs, and someone else couldn’t help but finish the lyrics.

[WATCH Ashley’s ON-THE-GROUND report on ICE arrests from the courthouse]

A couple of agents mindlessly talked about their kids; while another couple of police sitting at a desk gossiped a little too loudly about someone learning that the women they were dating “did porn” (apparently the romantic partner was offended as they didn’t know she was into that). A little later, one of the ICE agents said to the room that they were ready for lunch and we all murmured in agreement.

Throughout the morning and afternoon, I watched ICE agents give people — who they might later detain — directions to the bathrooms down the hall. I watched several agents attempt to lead one man, who clearly understood little English, in the right direction, while simply causing him more confusion despite their efforts to help. Eventually, one agent got up and walked him over. He returned with some embarrassed laughter, telling the group the confusion was his fault.

The longer we were idling there, the more we all talked — and most of the ICE officers were, quite frankly, pretty nice. Of course, obvious questions like how someone could do this for a living, and why they would choose to, were verboten — no one wants to be the person bringing down the mood. And by bringing down the mood, I mean ruining the tenuous truce we were all relying on to do the jobs we had all accepted, by virtue of necessity, that the other was going to do. They were going to arrest innocent people and we were going to do the only thing we could do: document it.

The usual rules of the social contract seemed not to apply within this one hallway. Still, the frank awareness in which everyone was discussing their own roles began to resemble a grim, surreal ritual.

When the first arrest happened — a man perhaps in his mid-to-late 20s, his expression blank and utterly dejected — the man wearing the gray balaclava, and another ICE agent, were already leading him over to the elevator bank before most of us knew what was happening. Then one of us caught wind of the suspicious movement and started running, camera out. And then we were all running.

ICE agents swarmed the man in front of the elevators, exercising the needless aggression you would expect. Mixed in were immigration lawyers, and journalists, jockeying for a better angle. There was momentary chaos before the balaclava-clad agent, and his colleague, led him into the elevator. I caught a glimpse of his face before the elevator doors closed, and disappeared him into the chaos of the immigration system.

After a brief pause, the cameras dropped, everyone exhaled and then returned to their stations on either side of the hallway to wait for the next arrest — the next life to be irreparably harmed.

This pretty quickly became a numbing pattern. Someone would exit immigration court, the same ICE agents we’d just been chatting with would move toward them, and we’d rush over with cameras ready. If attorneys were present, they would calmly advise them: “You don’t have to give your name. You don’t have to answer. You don’t have to confirm your identity.”

If ICE deemed them detainable, they were shoved into the elevator, and the doors closed us out. Rinse and repeat.

“You must’ve gotten some good video?” the man in the balaclava asked my cameraman Jon and I after this first of several arrests. The mix of sincerity, and something else I couldn’t quite identify — maybe deeply buried shame or the outward expression of knowing that you’ve been caught in a lie you have no choice but to address — took me aback. My brain seemed to need a second or two to process the question before being able to respond to say that, well, we had certainly tried. We made some more chit-chat before drifting off.

For months now, we’ve watched ICE agents carry out despicable acts against innocent people with a sort of monstrous callousness I couldn’t have imagined without seeing it filling up my social media feeds and pages of news outlets. But here were these brief flashes of humanity, however fleeting they might be, in a group so rightly and so fully demonized that even I was caught off guard. Perhaps shamefully so.

So, what was going on — I thought ICE agents were all monsters all the time? As I clearly needed to be reminded: while some are monsters, some have been made to be monsters.

And that could prove a vulnerability.

While ICE itself doesn’t release statistics on its demographics, we can make some guesses from their hiring practices. We do know that ICE prefers to hire from military and law enforcement backgrounds, which tend to pluck people from working class backgrounds, with median incomes ranging between $38,000 to $81,000 (which you’ll know cannot support a family in most places in this country, especially in a city like New York or LA).

The majority have a high school diploma or GED, while only about 30 percent have a bachelor’s degree. And as far as racial make-up, ICE likely mirrors that of its recruitment pools, which disproportionately draw from communities of color. For example, Latinos make up roughly half of Border Patrol agents. So, like the military and law enforcement more broadly, ICE could represent a pathway toward economic stability for working people who feel they have limited options. And, if capitalism is good at anything, it’s adept at exploiting working people’s vulnerabilities to extract a profit.

Given all of this, it’s entirely possible that there will come a point, if the ICE raids and protests continue with the same austere ruthlessness, those who have been made to be monsters — by a system that prides itself on privileging profits over all else — could hit their breaking points. Now that ICE is targeting workers at places like Home Depot and 7 Eleven, under the orders of Stephen Miller, agents are bound to have people they know detained and disappeared, too. They may even be forced to do the detaining and disappearing.

I write all of this cognizant that the ICE agents I made idle chit-chat with were likely on their best behavior, so as to not become more of the story than they can help by virtue of doing what they have been hired to do: stand as one of many nodes in a system of violence ripping through innocent people’s lives. I write this also with the awareness that several agents, including the man concerned enough to wear a balaclava to hide his identity — for fear for his safety or maybe something closer to repressed shame — showed me the only spot in the hallway that actually had cell service, knowing that I was using my phone to send out clips of them arresting immigrants. And when the balaclava-clad man left, he said “bye guys,” maybe not like friends, but something close to co-workers you’ve shared a not unpleasant afternoon shooting the shit with.

When I left, my phone battery drained from taking and sending videos of the ICE brigade’s mass arrests, I said goodbye to the journalists I had been pacing around with, gave an awkward nod in the direction of the agents of terror, and headed for the elevator.

So, in closing this out, I have one request: Stay in the streets and let’s hope those who were made to be monsters break soon.

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