In July, President Trump and Congressional Republicans rammed through a sweeping budget bill that invests over $100 billion in ICE and border enforcement. In recent months, ICE agents — often masked, wearing plain clothes, and without anything to outwardly identify them as agents — have escalated their campaign of terror on immigrant communities at the direction of this administration, worsened after Trump rescinded policies that once restricted immigration enforcement in locations like domestic violence shelters, hospitals, and churches. Predictably, all of this has resulted in chaos and devastating state-inflicted violence — and a chilling rise in civilian violence against women.
A letter from the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) addressed to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials, which was shared with HuffPost, alleges that civilian men are impersonating ICE agents to kidnap and sexually assault immigrant women. It wouldn’t be difficult to do as ICE agents increasingly wear plain clothes, conceal their faces to avoid accountability, and are not required to wear paraphernalia to identify themselves as officers. ICE has also directed its agents to detain undocumented people they encounter incidentally, even if the agents don’t have an arrest warrant.
The allegations are horrifying: A North Carolina man has been accused of posing as an ICE agent, threatening to deport an immigrant woman, then kidnapping and raping her; police in New York are searching for a man suspected of posing as an ICE agent, assaulting and trying to rape a woman, before robbing her and fleeing the scene in broad daylight.
“All our lives, we are taught to fear masked men in unmarked vehicles,” the DWC wrote in an August letter to the administration. “We learn we should run from such men to avoid being kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or killed. Yet, ICE is increasingly conducting raids and arrests in masks, plain clothes, without visible identification or badges, using unmarked vehicles — tactics that cause confusion, terror, and mistrust among the public.”
Lawmakers in the California legislature and in Congress have introduced legislation to address horrific scenarios like these, by requiring ICE agents to have proper identification and prohibit them from covering their faces. This could be a step in the right direction.
But we can’t bury the deeper, driving forces behind why this is happening. This phenomenon is only possible because of the outsized power that state agents — ICE, police officers, prison staff — have always had to abuse and control women and victims' bodies. Civilians are impersonating state agents to assault vulnerable women and victims because state agents — under every presidential administration — have always been able to do this.
The reason civilians would even think to pose as state agents to get away with sexual violence is that, nationwide, state power in a range of forms is routinely wielded to perpetrate gender-based violence. Unmasking ICE agents is important, but it’s a Band-Aid on a broader, systemic crisis.
Sexual abuse, often inflicted on children, is rampant across the immigrant detainment system. In one survey, 40% of police officers self-reported acting violently toward their spouses or children, and 60% of prison rapes are committed by guards and staff.
Sexual assault is the second-most common form of police misconduct, according to one study. From 2013 to 2014, an Oklahoma City police officer, Daniel Holtzclaw, was accused by 13 Black women of exploiting his state power to sexually abuse them. (Holtzclaw was ultimately convicted of assaulting eight of those women, and sentenced to 263 years in prison.) Over the last decade, cops in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, and other states have similarly been ousted after being accused by local women of stalking or harassment.
It wasn’t until 2022 that Congress passed the Closing the Law Enforcement Consent Loophole Act, ending a practice that previously allowed cops to defend themselves from allegations of sexually abusing people in their custody by claiming the encounter was consensual — which, some legal experts have argued, is impossible due to the massive power disparity between a state agent and a detainee. BuzzFeed reported in 2018 that 35 states have no laws to prohibit supposedly “consensual” sex between police officers and a person in custody.
All too often the government and legal system enact violence on victims while protecting assailants, which amounts to state violence: In one survey, about a quarter of victims who called 911 due to a domestic violence incident reported being arrested or threatened with arrest themselves. It is estimated that just 3% of rapists will ever spend a day in prison, while a 1999 survey of a women's maximum security prison in New York found that 90% of incarcerated women were survivors.
Outside of directly carceral contexts, just look at abortion bans, which grant lawmakers sweeping access to and power over our bodies. In 2020, a whistleblower alleged that a doctor at an immigrant detainment center had nonconsensually sterilized women; ultimately over 40 women claimed that they’d been subjected to invasive medical procedures while in ICE custody.
To be clear, men wouldn’t be posing as ICE agents and assaulting women if ICE didn’t exist. Its very existence — and the vile policing of immigrants in this nation altogether — dehumanizes immigrants and renders them exponentially more vulnerable to a range of violent acts, including gender-based violence.
Laws like the Laken Riley Act — which subject any undocumented immigrant who is merely accused of one of several crimes such as shoplifting to potential, indefinite detainment — are devastating for immigrant domestic violence victims, whose abusers or traffickers can potentially threaten to report them for made-up crimes if they don’t comply, experts have warned.
The Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act, introduced in January, would similarly render immigrant abuse victims exponentially more vulnerable to detainment, should their abusers wield the common abusive tactic DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender) to accuse them of abuse.
These pieces of legislation rely on white supremacist tropes that portray immigrant men and men of color as predatory and violent toward white American women. There is no crime statistic that could ever justify this nation’s shameful treatment of immigrants — and, that said, US citizens are substantially more likely to be the perpetrators of violent crime than noncitizens.
Citizen men appear to be the ones posing as ICE to assault immigrant women. And the Trump administration is shipping immigrant men to horrific, foreign prisons that effectively operate as torture sites — in some cases to face brutal sexual violence — and wielding any imperfection in an immigrant's record to justify it, much like how our patriarchal society treats rape victims who are “imperfect” victims.
Among the most upsetting aspects of this rising crisis of violence against immigrants and women is how predictable it was. Of course men believe that if they pose as the state they can perpetrate the same violence the state often does to terrorize and violate women and victims, especially victims in more precarious positions. But unmasking ICE isn’t enough. The agency must be abolished, and the root causes of state and carceral violence must be addressed.
