Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”
The prospect of travel excited this applicant. And in fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job.
A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she had had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team.
A CBP agent in Arizona said his favorite part of the job was riding horses through the mountains. The staff of the EMT Hazardous Agent Mitigation & Medical Emergency Response team (Hammer) said that he traveled with his ambulance all over the world, loading it into massive C17 airplanes and then sleeping beside it midair. He said it was “almost like camping.”
The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
