The Plainclothes Goon Squad
When Reps. Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York were barred last month from entering 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where immigrants reportedly have been detained in inhumane conditions, the two Democrats became the latest in a string of lawmakers refused entry from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. The denial was not surprising. Such refusals are happening with increasing regularity around the country, as it becomes clear that ICE is not a federal agency concerned with even a patina of transparency.
But neither Nadler nor Goldman could have anticipated the manner of refusal: a man in a short-sleeved novelty shirt emblazoned with a large Guinness toucan arguing with them in a hallway.
The shirt’s owner, seemingly unconcerned with its top buttons, allowed an ample view of his chest. He spent a considerable part of the encounter adopting a faux hapless position, hands in his pockets. Yet what William Joyce lacked in basic notions of professionalism, he made up for in his authority. “We’re not going to do it because we don’t have to,” Joyce replied when pressed for a reason for the refusal to allow federal legislators into the building. (Nadler and Goldman soon left, vowing to take the issue up the chain of command.)
Although hardly the most alarming feature of the encounter, Joyce’s appearance was striking. Here was a government official who had received advance notice that he was to meet with two sitting members of Congress on a Wednesday morning. Did he intend to convey disrespect? Maybe. But more notably, a clear throughline emerges between Joyce and an unofficial uniform that has taken root among those assigned to carry out President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. The apparel is pedestrian, but specific in its register of American bro-iness, evocative of a puff-chested dude in a graphic tee. Maybe he’s a divorcee seething with low-hum aggression as he walks into the vape store. “The types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings,” the writer Hamilton Nolan noted.
It’s easy to mock. But accessible masculinity appears to be the aesthetic of the new institutionalized terror in our burgeoning $200 billion police state, as ICE disappears immigrants. Members of this goon squad look like the guys who roam around America’s dead malls. Yes, the aesthetic affords them powerful obscurity, sowing fear and confusion in the communities they torment; they dodge accountability through the use of facial coverings and unmarked cars. But it also makes you wonder about all the other men who look the same and aren’t ICE agents.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/ice-masks-aesthetics-dhs-plainclothes-goon-squad-essay/
Exactly WHY these agents need to at the very least be wearing badges and no masks. Uniforms should not be "optional".
= new reply since forum marked as read
