Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Taking most of a week off, as I’ve just done, is impossible in the Trump 47 era. Since I last attacked the keyboard, we got our first American pope, the mayor of Newark was arrested by federal agents, and Qatar is bribing the president with a $400 million plane, along with 57 other things. I’ll try to squeeze in as much as I can.

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Hey, remember that documentary that Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson put out there a few years back with the fear-soaked title, The End of Men? This televised moral panic about the feminization of modern American life featured men indulging in all sorts of gross-out quackery to reconnect with society’s lost manhood, like drinking egg yolks.

In the program‘s most iconic moment, a man claiming to be an expert in what he calls “bromeotherapy” shows his cure for today’s low-testosterone male. A nude man gets his testicles tanned in a bizarre scene that looks oddly like a modern crucifixion, under this dude-bro’s theory that red LED lights bring a kind of resurrection.

I’m dubious myself, but if this Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire”-inspired technique actually does work, I’ll tell you my first candidate for getting zapped down there: the performatively male officers who work for America’s alphabet soup of Department of Homeland Security agencies — especially U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its little sister, Homeland Security Investigations.

They are suddenly everywhere all at once — waiting for hours in unmarked cars before pouncing in their blue jeans and untucked shirts, never wearing a badge but almost always donning a ski mask or a full-blown balaclava, even on 80-degree days. They epitomize America’s de-evolution from G.I. Joe to Mort from Bazooka Joe, but with less maturity than that, as they push around teenage girls and octogenarians, and are barely believable when they command, “We are the police!”

These dubious tactics — which are meant to intimidate undocumented immigrants and the American people writ large — instead reek of the agents’ own fear and paranoia. That came to a head last Friday in a shocking incident in which these masked desperados went wild over a lawful inspection of Newark’s new ICE detention facility by three New Jersey members of Congress and the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka.

The mayor was there to check out the facility’s alleged multiple violations of Newark law, but instead masked agents arrested him, charged him with “trespassing,” and detained him for several hours. After the chaotic scene, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told CNN that the congressional group had “stormed” the ICE facility, that a Congress member had “body slammed” a female ICE agent, and that all three lawmakers might be arrested.

The feds’ promised video didn’t reveal any “body slamming,” but it did show these face-hiding 298-pound weaklings jostling 80-year-old U.S. Rep. Bonnie Coleman Watson. If these craven agents ever formed a hip-hop group, they’d have to call them, ICE Low-T.

I’ve been highly focused these nearly four months on Donald Trump’s so-called mass-deportation policy, and the biggest problem is the policy itself. Although the total number of deportations isn’t what POTUS 47 wanted, the crimes against humanity are piling up: Calling Venezuelan makeup artists and youth soccer coaches “gang members” over misread tattoos and shipping them to a Salvadoran gulag, along with a “mistakenly” deported father of three. College students imprisoned for putting their name on a student newspaper op-ed. Teen tourists strip-searched at the Honolulu airport and sent back to Germany.

But it’s also hard not to notice the paranoid style of these ICE and HSI agents and other assorted goon squad members, epitomized by their “uniform” of no uniform, no badges and the hastily pulled up ski masks. There’s no longer a need to debate whether an overbearing U.S. security apparatus could become a kind of “secret police.”

This already is a secret police, hiding their faces on public streets so you have no idea what they are doing in your name.

“Why is it considered acceptable for ICE enforcers to wear masks to hide their identity...?” asked the extreme left-wing Sociali... oh wait, that’s actually a quote from an article posted by the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute, which also fretted about an American secret police. There’s no question that the sight of Stasi-like tactics on the streets of Massachusetts or California is a moral stain that U.S. history won’t be able to easily wipe away, even after Trump and his blackmasks are gone.

I do have one question, though: Why are Homeland Security’s ICE agents such cowardly wusses, so afraid of the public they claim to be protecting and serving?

Why, for example, did apparent ICE agents wear no badges, with one donning a balaclava, to grab two people in the Charlottesville, Va., courthouse, and then have an anonymous ICE spokeswoman claim there could be charges for two citizens who dared to ask these agents to identify themselves or show an arrest warrant.

Why did (again, apparent) ICE agents “storm” — to use one of their favorite words — one of the most bucolic mountain hamlets in America, the Berkshires’ Great Barrington, Mass., wearing tactical gear, brandishing assault rifles and even bringing a battering ram, all to arrest some unarmed men in a cineplex parking lot?

Is it really the new masculinity to rip a mother away from her newborn baby and her teen daughter, as the macho, macho men of ICE did in Worcester, Mass. last week? Can you ever be “father of the year” material when you arrest a dad at a gas station in Oxnard, Calif., and just leave his two young children sitting in his truck?

Over the weekend, I emailed DHS’ McLaughlin to see if she could answer some of my questions, or at least explain why so many of their agents hide from the American people behind masks. She responded, “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as police while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected gang members, murders (sic), and rapists. Attacks and demonization of our brave law enforcement is wrong. ICE officers are now facing a 413% increase in assaults.”

It’s not clear what backs up that statistic, and whether DHS’ number includes incidents like Newark or Charlottesville, where no one assaulted ICE agents but regular citizens simply wanted to know, who are these masked men? You won’t be shocked to learn there are growing reports of assaults not against ICE but by men pretending to be ICE officers — aware that masked and unbadged males attacking people is such a familiar sight that it offers cover for their crimes.

You know who doesn’t wear masks, and attach their names to every public action they take? Judges — even New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed by a man who’d entered her home, and who continues to speak publicly for greater public safety. Salas has more courage in her pinky than the entire ICE and HSI crew in Newark.

The most cowardly part of the ICE gambit is that many seem to know their history — that immoral regimes don’t last forever, and that some day they could be called to account for their bad actions, once people figure out who they are. They know that “just following orders” didn’t cut it as a defense in 1945, and it won’t work here.

I don’t know what body part you’d need to zap with red LED lights to turn the lost boys of ICE into real men — to give them a deep tan that would also fill them with human compassion, especially for women and children, and the ability to act in ways that you’d actually be proud to show your face in public. That would be a sign of true masculinity, I think, but then I’m clearly no expert in “bromeotherapy.”

Question: [Pennsylvania Sen. John] Fetterman is clearly under more pressure to resign than ever. Certainly unlikely to happen but one never knows...Given that, an overview of what happens if he does resign and who may replace him would be helpful. — @toodkbailey.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: There is so much to unpack around Fetterman, the freshman Democrat whose former aides have complained of increasingly irrational behavior in his recovery from a major stroke and a hospitalization for depression in 2022-23. That’s in addition to alarming many of his early supporters with a seeming political drift rightward. I agree that Fetterman has dug in and that resignation is extremely unlikely, If that happened, Gov. John Shapiro — no Fetterman fan — would pick his replacement with some early buzz around the runner-up in the 2022 primary, former Rep. Conor Lamb. The more likely outcome is a strong Democratic primary challenge to Fetterman in 2028 — assuming he even seeks another term as a Democrat.

It may not be the most representative sample, but readers who responded to last week’s question about changing shopping habits in the Trump tariff era have done exactly that, stocking up on imported foods or speeding up a new car purchase. “Yesterday, my spouse came home with three 5 lb. bags of coffee and promptly asked me with real worry, ‘Do you think this will be enough?’” wrote Julian Ziomek, an artist who’s also been hit with higher prices for the pigment he uses. “Biggest regret: Not buying a replacement for my 2002 Subaru Forester, which I expected to keep for another year or two,” said Marcy Chestnut. “Now I have to be especially careful of my 4-wheeled baby.”

📮 This week’s question: It’s certainly been a rocky 21st century for the Roman Catholic Church. Has the elevation of Pope Leo XIV as first American pope and a counterbalance to MAGA Trumpism changed your opinion about the church, or religion and spirituality more broadly? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Pope Leo XIV” in the subject line.

The MTV videos of Duran Duran and Dexys Midnight Runners may have faded out, but the decade of the 1980s continues to shape our world. Just ask the two most influential Americans on the world stage: Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV, who each entered that Reagan-led era as largely unshaped young men and got launched into very separate orbits.

The odyssey of 1977 Villanova grad Robert Prevost reminds me — as someone four years younger — of so many idealistic boomers eager to change the world yet not sure how, in an era when the Vietnam War and civil rights movement were over, and the domestic scene was easing into a right turn. It was a moment when suddenly Central and South America and a highly visible battle for freedom and justice in a heavily Catholic, Spanish-speaking world — punctuated by a new leftist spiritualism known as “liberation theology” — captured many imaginations. Especially when the Reagan-led U.S. government was arming the bad guys.

It’s unlikely that the young Prevost, who earned his master’s degree in divinity from Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union in 1982 and entered the priesthood, had any ideological agenda as he headed south for Peru in 1985, at the height of that era. But the young priest instantly adopted the struggle of his host country’s poor masses who were often caught in the crossfire between a repressive government in Lima and far-leftist guerrilla fighters led by the Shining Path. “He saw the reality of poverty,” a Pennsylvania priest, Father Rich Mullen, who worked with the future Leo in the coastal city of Trujillo, said in a recent interview. “That’s when the seed was sown.” Another longtime friend, the Rev. Paul Galetto, told The Inquirer: “Having been a bishop in Peru and South America, I’m sure [Prevost’s] focus is on immigration and the movement of peoples.”

Sure enough, in his final year before last week’s ascension to the papacy, Prevost criticized Vice President JD Vance in a swipe over the Trump regime’s immigration policies and voiced support for climate action and for social justice in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 police murder. Pope Leo’s status as a role model for empathy and compassion in opposition to the Trump regime is already well-defined.

Of course it’s well-known that Trump’s path to world leadership was also forged in the 1980s — by embracing the dark side of the decade. The real estate mogul’s gospel of gilded prosperity took off in the moment of “greed is good” on Wall Street, even if many of his actual business ventures began failing at the dawn of the ’90s. In seeking to retain the glamour of his wealth, Trump also focused on those less fortunate than him — not as souls but as potential marks for his next scheme, which eventually became national politics. A battle for the soul of America and for the planet has been joined, on a collision course set in the 1980s.

Nostalgia for the relatively no-drama presidency of Barack Obama is totally understandable, what with the current mess we are in. We can easily forgot the days when we were furious that Obama seemed to betray his great potential for change — none more so (for me, anyway) than May 13, 2013. On that date, I raged against Obama‘s Justice Department secretly obtaining phone records from The Associated Press in a leak probe that showed true contempt for the First Amendment. I wrote: “The war on whistleblowers, the treatment of [Chelsea] Manning, and now this investigation of journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised transparency but has been one of the most secretive — all to the detriment of the public’s right to know." Read the rest: "The day the Obama administration went all Nixon on us."

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