ICE, ICE, Baby?

Friends, before we start, this is a long one.

Its about ICE.
Take time to take a break if you need to.
I’ve had some important thoughts I wanted to share with you, but in order to do so I needed to write for longer.

I hesitated to post this today, in light of what happened to Alex Pretti yesterday.

Silence serves no one when abuses are unfolding so I’m sending this out to you with love for your bruised and hurting heart.

I had planned to write a different post today.
I write to process what I’m feeling.
Words bring focus and clarity to my feelings about the world and myself within it.

As a result, I’ve found myself writing a lot about relational dynamics within close relationships here on Substack.
Because relational dynamics interest me a lot, and affect us all.
I like to be able to bring clarity, if I can, to my thoughts and understanding of relational dynamics that can feel complicated or hidden.
I’m fascinated by hidden power dynamics and how they’re communicated between individuals and groups.

Recently, I’ve been witnessing what’s unfolding in the US and I’ve been having strong feelings about it.

I’ve also been noticing how the dynamics of interpersonal relationships on a small scale seem to translate into systemic relationships on a larger scale.

So I find myself here, typing… about ICE.

Because I’ve been watching the footage coming out of Minneapolis. The ICE raids.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good, and the small children who have been detained.

In the images circulating of recent immigration enforcement actions (the arrests outside homes, the presence near schools, the removal of families) the raid teams appear overwhelmingly male.

Granted, the ICE personnel are masked, but based on overall height, weight, body mass, voice tone and depth, the personnel all seem to be predominantly men.

This interested me, so I googled to see if I could find any official statistics on how many women are involved in immigrant raids.
There aren’t any.

All I could find were some percentages of how many women work in ICE.
Roughly 15% of ICE personnel are women.
Women work across the agency, including in law-enforcement and investigative roles.

And I wondered: Why aren’t we seeing more women on these ICE raids?

Before we go any further, this post is not an exercise in man-bashing or lazy gender stereotyping.

It’s me exploring my thoughts and sharing them with you.

Please feel very free and easy to feel something different to me.

Great, OK, let’s continue…

Thinking about the personnel directly involved in the raids, from my observations, it seems to be a very male-dominated part of the organisation.
That may be a coincidence, or it may be optics, or it may simply be who happens to be on camera.
But even this narrow view of the whole can still be important data.

So, let me start by saying, I don’t think governmental institutions simply just enforce government policy.
I think to a great degree, they also select people for positions based on certain psychologies, reward certain traits, and filter out those not psychologically congruent to undertake what’s required of them.

I think that can be said for all institutions and systems.

And also, I know the simple answer to why I’m not seeing more women on the frontlines of the ICE personnel undertaking raids is “patriarchy”, because women have knocked up against that glass ceiling for as long as we can remember.
Systemic structures that keep women out.
Or, if they enter, subject them to sexism, misogyny and abuse.

But I’ve been wondering if something else might be happening too, and that’s what I want to discuss here.

I started to think about what kind of work the ICE raids involve, and who is willing to do it.

(For me, and the purposes of this post, the question is not whether women are technically eligible to do this work.
The question is what kind of work this is, and who it’s attracting to apply for positions and who it’s repelling.)

Immigration raids are often described in bureaucratic language: “operations”, “enforcement actions”, “removals”.
But the day-to-day reality of raid work is not an abstract concept that we are distanced from.
It is immediate, embodied, and relational.

To carry out this work, a person must be able to:

• enter places where fear is present and treat it as a “procedure”

• override instinctive responses to distress, especially from children

• see domination as “professionalism”

• accept that harm to vulnerable people is a necessary by-product of “doing the job”

• see their actions as part of a moral framework they support, as determined by others higher up
  

This is not a moral judgement about individual agents.
It is a description of the psychological “framework” the role requires.

Undertaking immigration raids demands a significant ability to distance oneself from what the role requires individuals to do.
The ability to see suffering and not feel morally responsible for it.

It requires emotional numbing, not necessarily as a “pathology”, but definitely at the very least, as a skill.
The work cannot be done consistently without it.

This is why institutions that rely on coercion must normalise language that attempts to minimise the harm.
“Processing.”
“Transport.”
“Custody.”

Each term removes the human body and the singular person from the sentence.
The choice of language matters.

Over time, this becomes the emotional standard expected for the role.
So people who cannot maintain it leave, burn out, transfer, or never apply in the first place.
People who can maintain it, or who find meaning, status, or identity within it, remain in the role.

In effect, the functioning structure of the system asks:
Can you live with becoming the kind of person who does this repeatedly?

This is how institutions shape themselves without ever issuing an overt directive that says, “Only a certain kind of person is welcome here.”

I know it might seem obvious to say this but it’s important to be overt:

When looking at those involved in ICE raids, it seems to be that people who are comfortable functioning within hierarchy, obedience, and state-sanctioned force are the ones who are applying for the positions and being given the roles.

This is not unique to immigration enforcement.
It appears in prisons, policing, militaries, and corporate structures where harm is bureaucratised and responsibility is diffused across the whole system.

Over time, the organisation ends up staffed by people who can live with what the work requires.

Which brings us back to what I’m specifically noticing about the videos of ICE raids and the apparent absence of women ICE personnel involved in them.

It’s my belief that women have a different relationship with vulnerability, due to size and physical strength, socialisation, responsibility within family roles, and lived experience of male violence.

For many women, harm is not experienced as the outcome of a rule or policy, but as something immediate, happening between people, with consequences that are felt and carried.

I don’t believe this is due to any innate virtue or sensitivity.
I believe it reflects how responsibility, expectations of empathy, and exposure to vulnerability are carried through interpersonal relationships, and how difficult it becomes, as a result, to treat harm as distant or purely procedural.

When you look at ICE personnel involved in immigration raids in Minneapolis, where the targets are frightened parents, very young children, and families being pulled apart, the cost of participating is much harder to see in an abstract way.

So, to return to my original observation, the absence of women ICE personnel taking part in these raids matters.
As information.

Men, as a group within the constraints of the patriarchal system they grow up in, are more heavily socialised to experience hierarchy as meaningful.

From childhood onwards, many boys are placed in situations where they are ranked against each other.
At school, in sports, in games, and later in work, they are encouraged to compete, to win, and to see comparison as normal.

Authority figures in these settings are usually male, and obedience to them is presented as sensible and necessary.
Respect is often tied to position or title rather than to how authority is exercised or wielded.

In these environments, control over others is frequently reframed as leadership rather than as a problem.
Force, or the threat of it, is ever-present in the background of these experiences as something that ultimately maintains authority.

Over time, this teaches boys a practical lesson:
Hierarchy is not just a way of organising people.
It is where status, identity, and meaning are rooted.

When men later enter institutions structured around rank and obedience, those systems often feel very familiar.
Carrying out orders can feel like fulfilling a comfortable role rather than making a personal moral decision.

I don’t believe these traits are innate in men.
They are cultivated, rewarded, and reinforced.

In contrast, women are more likely to experience harm relationally.
Socialisation and lived experience train women to quickly recognise and take note of who is being affected, how, and what the harm is.

When harm is distant or theoretical, many people can tolerate it.
When harm is happening in front of us, and is directed at children or families, tolerance becomes much harder to maintain.

This difference does not make women morally superior.

It does, however, largely determine who is willing to take on roles that require routine and very visible harm to people who are ultimately powerless.

There is no rule preventing women from applying for ICE positions that involve raids.
There is no policy preventing women from being assigned to raids.

Despite this, raid teams remain overwhelmingly male.

Why?

Institutions that rely on force need the people who can shut down their inner resistance and still feel justified in what they’re doing at the end of the day.

When you look at the absence of women from immigration raid teams, it suggests to me that many women may be less willing to make that adjustment.
Not because they are morally “purer”, but because many women do not want to be part of systems that normalise violence. Because they are systems women have experienced from the other side, and often been victimised by.

I’m not suggesting women inherently have more integrity than men.
But I do believe more women are actively walking away from systems that perpetuate cruelty as normal behaviour.

It would be easy to explain this pattern solely through misogyny: hostile environments, harassment, exclusion, male “gatekeeping”, because obviously all of that exists and isn’t in any way insignificant.

But misogyny alone does not explain the uneven gender imbalance we are seeing in these raids today.

Women work in dangerous and physically demanding roles equally alongside men in policing, the military, in intelligence, and in prisons.

What I think distinguishes the work of ICE raids in Minneapolis now isn’t just the danger or physical demands involved.

I believe it’s how evident the harm is.

The people being harmed aren’t abstract enemies.
They are families in their homes, or going about the mundane daily tasks of life.
Frightened parents.
Very young children.

This makes the work harder to make peace with morally.
And less attractive to people who do not want to set their conscience aside.

Power doesn’t just coerce others.
I fundamentally believe it often changes the people who hold it.

When we look at who ends up doing this work, we see what the system expects from people and who people entering the system are very likely to become.

If an institution’s most visible employees come from a narrow psychological profile and specific demographic of the population, that points to a pattern.
It reflects the kind of person who can do the work and still see themselves as decent.

A state can only separate families and detain children if it can find people willing to do it and keep doing it, day in, day out.
Looking at who does that work, and who doesn’t, can make how the system is built more visible.

The can reveal the moral frame it operates within.

So with ICE raids, we are clearly seeing male dominated authoritarianism, accepted systemic violence, state sanctioned abuse, and no legal constraints.

This strikes at the very heart of what democracy means.

I believe the absence of women on ICE raid teams suggests that the work is suited to people who can:

Easily see harm as intrinsically part of doing their duty

Handle creating and witnessing fear as part of the job

Believe harming others is part of their service to the world

It suggests to me that many women, when faced with that choice, decide not to do this work.

They don’t make a stand and they don’t announce it, instead they simply don’t take part.

I don’t think that absence of women is random, and it also isn’t insignificant.

It tells us something about the kinds of people a society needs in order to carry out certain actions, and the kinds of people institutions lose and harm when those actions become normalised.

Because the men who are taking part in ICE raids now in Minneapolis will be fundamentally changed by what they do.

Whether they realise or not.

For better or for worse, in the true meaning of that statement.

And the violence they are engaged in and enabling doesn’t just harm the people they are abusing. It harms them too. And the people closest to them.

They become even more numb to their own feelings.

Further trapped in the system they are upholding.

That we are not seeing women on the frontline of these ICE raids in Minneapolis gives me hope.

In an age where women are not excluded across the board by misogyny, women seem to be very definitely walking away from those roles that would involve violence towards others who are vulnerable.

As women we may not hold the political power in the numbers we would like in order to be able to change our systems from the top down.

And yes, there are women within government and within ICE who are doing work that enables and supports the work of the ICE raid teams.

But, looking at the possibility that very many women are simply quietly refusing to engage with this kind of work that violates, abuses and harms the vulnerable, and are simply not present on the front lines of these ICE raids does mean that we do hold power to change things from the bottom up.

Women have power from the bottom up here because this kind of violence only happens if enough people are willing to keep doing it.

Policy doesn’t remove families from homes or take children away. People do.

When fewer people are willing to take on that work, the system starts to strain.

Fewer people apply. Fewer people stay. The work gets concentrated in a smaller, narrower group.

That makes the system more rigid and more extreme, and it makes what it’s doing harder to hide.

It becomes more obvious who is doing the work, and what that work actually involves. These systems rely on looking ordinary, like this is just another job, done by all sorts of people.

When women, who are otherwise present across policing, the military, prisons and government, are missing from this specific role, that sense of ordinariness breaks down.

The abuse becomes more visible.

The system becomes more brittle.

And that brittleness limits how easily this work can be sustained, or defended.

I believe this is already happening.

The images of groups of angry men, abusing vulnerable people, are being filmed precisely because they look and are clearly so extreme.

As far as ICE is concerned, women seem to be choosing non-violence, and that absence of women is quickly making the violence within the system much more brittle and much more visible.

Because although the men are masked, their actions are not.

And the violence they are engaged in is intensifying as the morally corrupt system itself causes those doing the job to adjust to the extremes of what they’re being allowed to do without legal constraint.

I don’t think that’s meaningless, especially in light of what’s unfolding in Minnesota right now, where hundreds of federal immigration agents have been deployed and at least four children, including a five-year-old, have been detained in neighbourhoods and near schools, sparking fear and a huge community response.

Absence can be a type of resistance too.

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