Bluesky

After a month’s worth of vicious and empirically vacuous assaults on the basic operations of the federal government, the Trump administration is zeroing in on the prime target of most of its campaign rhetoric: the supposed menace of undocumented immigrants.

For a decade now, the specter of the criminal, drug-addled interloper from the southern border has been the centerpiece of MAGAworld’s gothic political fabulizing. When he’s not likening immigrants to Hannibal Lecter, Trump has spoken of them as “poisoning” the nation’s lifeblood, or depicted them as all-purpose purveyors of mayhem and fentanyl. (Never mind that one casualty of Elon Musk’s cross-agency killing spree is a USAID program to curb the production of fentanyl in Mexico.)

So amid the DOGE squalor and the push to broker a Putin-directed conclusion to the Ukraine war, the White House posted a video to its social media accounts showing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent manacling and menacing undocumented immigrants as they prepared to board a deportation flight at Seattle’s Boeing Field.

The video has no soundtrack or voiceover—it’s clearly intended to give the viewer a vicarious sense of being on-site as detained immigrants, who are only potentially guilty of civil legal infractions, get treated as dangerous criminals. No immigrant’s face is visible, contributing further to the intended dehumanization of people in ICE detention, and the general mood of punitive license on the part of ICE personnel.

It’s clear that, amid the barrage of feckless Musk-branded rhetoric about the corruption and incompetence of the federal workforce, the White House video is meant to serve as a model of what federal employees should be doing: stripping away the humanity and livelihoods of foreign-born people.

Lest this seem a rhetorical exaggeration, the White House posted the video on X with the tagline “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—an informal acronym popularized on YouTube to denote videos that produce a pleasurable response by highlighting certain distinctive and soothing sounds, like a whispering voice. Here the only prominent sounds are those of shackles and chains attached to a group of people denied any agency over their movements or life choices, so it’s not hyperbole to say the Trump White House is making slavery porn the hallmark of its immigration agenda.

And the video got precisely the response it was seeking. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger writes, “The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to ‘let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,’ speculation about when ‘some of our corrupt politicians would be going the same way.’” Elon Musk, eager as always to display maximal MAGA sycophancy, drafted the fanboy reply “Haha. Wow,” alongside emojis depicting a troll and a gold medal.

Such sadistic pile-ons are standard fare on X, which Musk has transformed into a firehose of fascist rancor. But the fratboy triumphalism takes on a far more sinister cast when you find out what happens to deported migrants when they step off the ICE planes. Many have been transported to Guantánamo—the notorious holding site for detainees in the Global War on Terror, designed to exert total coercion without legal constraints.

And immigrants from countries that the United States can’t, for various reasons, return them to are now streaming into Panama, which has agreed to “protect” them there in an effort to ward off the Trump administration’s threat to reassert US sovereignty over the Panama Canal. (Panamanian law forbids the formal detention of immigrants for more than 24 hours without a court order, hence the euphemistic talk of protection.)

In a pair of chilling dispatches, a team of New York Times reporters has chronicled the sequestration of some 350 immigrants in a Panama City hotel, which armed guards prevented them from leaving (some protection), and their later relocation to a camp in the jungle. During their week-long hotel layover, the Times reported, at least one person allegedly attempted suicide, and another broke a leg trying to escape.

All the people interviewed by the Times said they were political asylum seekers, directly contradicting a claim from a flack for the Department of Homeland Security: “Not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.” Since the reporters were forbidden to speak to the deportees face to face, some were reduced to trying to spell out their plight from their hotel window:

In one window visible from a sidewalk below the hotel, a woman clawed at a latchless glass pane in an attempt to escape. When she noticed journalists below, she held up a piece of paper that read “Afghan.” She made hand motions that indicated an airplane, then her head falling off. The message seemed to be clear: A flight home meant death.

One deportee that the Times team managed to reach by cell phone is Artemis Ghasemzadeh, an English teacher from Iran who converted from Islam to Christianity—an act of apostasy that Iranian Sharia law treats as punishable by death. She said she was part of a group of 10 such converts, including several children—a grim indictment of the MAGA movement’s alleged dedication to fight the persecution of Christians. A Chinese refugee tersely laid out his recent crash course in political realism: “I thought: America is a free country with respect for human rights. I had no idea it was like a dictatorship.”

All this, mind you, was in advance of the first 100 refugees’ repatriation to their longer-term home—a detention camp in the Darien Gap jungle, which connects Panama to Colombia. Ghasemzadeh, who was in this detachment, told the Times that the facility “looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages. They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.” She also said the compound was overrun with cats and dogs; just as the camp’s security team confiscated the deportees’ phones, she managed to text to the reporter who’d been interviewing her, “Please help us.”

Back in 2004, at the height of another brand of American triumphalism shorn of its surly bonds during the initial US invasion of Iraq, shocking and gruesome images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, 20 miles west of Baghdad, proved pivotal in marshaling public opinion onto a more skeptical footing about America’s imperial errand in the Middle East. But that was when Donald Trump was a reality-TV attention whore, Elon Musk was a nondescript Paypal brat, and social media hadn’t laid permanent siege to the remnants of the country’s moral imagination.

Now MAGA acolytes gleefully LARP at the kind of brutality made notorious by Abu Ghraib guards, while self-described Christian conservatives exult in the repatriation of their fellow believers into the care of regimes poised to kill them. It turns out that multiracial democracy ends neither with a bang nor a whimper but to an ASMR soundtrack of jingling handcuffs.