Look in the Mirror

With the dramatic and painful events in Minneapolis this past week culminating in the killing of another lawfully protesting American citizen, it’s become increasingly common for those outraged at the tactics of ICE and the Border Patrol to refer to them as the “American Gestapo.” That reinforces the rising narrative of ICE as the prototypical jackbooted thugs of a fascist regime, except in this case that regime isn’t Nazi Germany; it’s the current administration in the White House.

One of the themes of my columns, however, is that much of what we are now seeing in America is as American as apple pie — or even more native to our culture, given that apples were only brought to the United States in the 17th century (by French Jesuits). Calling ICE “the Gestapo” does a good job of identifying their tactics as brutal, suppressive and performative — designed to instill fear and enforce control. But ICE, of course, has been around since 2003, created by the post-9/11 Homeland Security Act to unify the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is not an invention of the Trump administration. It is now being expanded substantially and its tactics in Minneapolis — and before that Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland — seemed geared to generating violent conflict with the inevitable protests that then could be used as justification for more enforcement. That part, and the sheer number of agents deployed in one city (which, for now, is only one city at a time at that scale), make today’s ICE and its cousin agency Border Control feel new and different even as they are not.

More to the point, calling ICE the Gestapo makes it seem as if an alien force has suddenly been foisted on us. Here the historical memory and perspective of many African Americans is instructive. In the past few weeks, there have been a slew of social media clips making this point. Saturday Night Live this past weekend (January 24) had a skit in which a white news anchor says how unprecedented it is for federal officers to pull people out of their cars based on how they look and that “this just doesn’t happen in America.” His two Black co-anchors purse their lips and say “Mmm.” The sketch goes on and on in this vein, as the white anchor tries to make it seem as if these acts of state-sanctioned violence are out of the norm when, in fact, they have been a constant if you are not white.

On Instagram and TikTok, the content creator “Ashleytheebarroness” posted a powerful clip a few weeks ago in which she said that ICE isn’t like the Gestapo; they’re like slave catchers. Slave patrols were a powerful army of bounty hunters commissioned by southern state governments that ventured into border states in the era before the Civil War to catch escaped slaves; no trial, no habeas corpus. As brutal as those patrols were in the 1830s and 1840s, the Compromise of 1850 empowered them — making it almost impossible for northern states to prevent them from seizing anyone of a darker skin color — much as ICE has recently been empowered. “Gestapo says this could never be us; slave patrols say this is exactly us,” she explains, noting that slave patrols just needed law and validation. “Slave patrols force a deeper realization,” she continued. “What if the terror wasn’t imported? What if it was foundational? ICE is not a deviation, and it isn’t new … and once you see that, yeah, it’s an oh-shit moment.”

These are powerful reflections, coming from Americans who are saying that these currents of race, violence and terror are not a sudden manifestation of Season 2 of The Trump Show, not a foreign or alien ideology of early 20th century Europe or contemporary authoritarian regimes suddenly popping up in the land of the free. They are an American tradition, an American current and an American legacy that is now being filmed every day.

Does putting what is happening now in the context of a dark past make what is happening now easier to digest? Does looking in the mirror lead to disgust or self-acceptance? I’ve been urging all of us to look in mirrors. The reason is simple: Although more self-knowledge can be intensely painful, it is ultimately the only path forward. Integrating a past that we have routinely buried is a prerequisite to breaking the endless cycle of acting out, and then suppressing memory. As these clips remind us, there are American groups who have a long memory of how power has been abused and how we have yet to come to terms with that.

What is going on now with ICE and Border Patrol and its violent theater is an opportunity to accept that this is all homegrown, and until we get that, then yes, this will endlessly repeat as one side declares it evil and abhorrent and the other declares it law and order. The ancient injunction of the Greek Delphic oracle to “know thyself” wasn’t meant to be fun and games; it was meant as the only way to live as one should. This is yet another opportunity for us to know ourselves — in all of our complicated violence and the backlash against it and all of the better angels of our nature as well.