Weaponizers of Fear
The same day that Trump Homeland Security director Kristi Noem was in the Bronx recording a predawn immigration raid, cast- and crew-members of the CBS show FBI were gathered on a street near where I live in Brooklyn. As cameras whirred, extras dressed in desert-camouflage and riot helmets, “FBI” emblazoned on their backs, brandished very real-looking automatic rifles and prepared to storm a building. How that scene ultimately played out won’t be known until the episode airs. But Noem almost instantly went live. Costumed in a bulky “ICE/Police” vest, she declared to the camera that she was out to “get dirtbags off our streets” and posted her video to Elon Musk’s X platform by 7 a.m.
The final cuts of these two shots might exhibit some similarities; in terms of staging and script and even wardrobe, political stunt-mongering borrows a lot from popular entertainment. Yet while an episode of FBI might be forgotten on viewing, Noem’s posting of her ride-along has immediate and lasting real-life impact, given its place not only in the larger Trumpian propaganda campaign against immigration, but also as a tool in the psychological terror campaign the administration is waging on migrants as human beings.
The Bronx raid, it should be noted, was carried out in accordance with New York’s sanctuary guidelines regarding the apprehension of the undocumented suspect, who further is said to be a gang member. Arrests like these, along with deportations to follow, have long been U.S. policy, carried out by administrations of both parties. What Noem recorded and posted was not so out of the ordinary. Why she did it is something else. The reason to make the distinction is to keep incidents like this from drawing attention away from what happens as a result of them: the wave of fear they send through the entire population of migrants in the United States—parents and children, citizens and noncitizens, documented or otherwise, the vast majority of whom have committed no crimes.
This fear is increasingly evident in reports from around the country since the Trump administration lifted Biden-era rules prohibiting ICE agents from entering schools, churches, and hospitals. Schools in particular are becoming sites of worry and anxiety, as parents, panicked by scenes of well-publicized immigration raids, keep their kids home for fear they or themselves might be seized, and as teachers are trained how to respond to federal agents pounding at school doors. Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark writes that in his conversations with parents, educators, and legal experts around the country, he senses “a palpable psychic toll.” Many administrators and teachers he spoke with didn’t want their names published out of concern they, their schools, or their students would be reported and targeted. One principal, Carrasquillo writes, “likened this state of growing, ambient fear to the anxious vigilance they have developed over the years around school shootings.”
Creating “ambient fear” is a favored tactic of torturers, terrorists, and tyrants. They use it to intimidate their subjects—individual captives or entire populations, vulnerable minorities or political foes—into silence or self-subjugation, or as the case may be, self-deportation. Fear distorts decision-making capabilities. It strips people of courage, as many learn on reading 1984 for the first time. And because it’s contagious, fear is also an efficient weapon—it spreads of its own volition, compounding itself along the way.
There are some people who’ve committed serious crimes and whom the Trump administration has legal justification to arrest and deport. There are millions of anxious others that it does not—including the thousands of legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, whose memories of being smeared by the Trump campaign last summer remain fresh. But no matter. The point is to terrify, break down resistance, take away a person’s ability to act. Even if people have little immediate or legitimate reason to be afraid, that’s not the point. Even if they’re not “illegals” or “dirtbags,” they need to be disabused of the notion that they’re safe. They need to be reduced to a constant state of anxious vigilance. This explains the spate of panicked but incorrect reports of ICE conducting raids in schools and churches; an atmosphere of anxious vigilance is conducive to the spread of misinformation, just as anxious vigilance following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 fueled the spread of misinformation. The sower of fear revels in the chaos he’s created and enjoys the suffering he’s causing. So fear is also cruel, and cruelty remains the point for Trump and his people, as it was the first time around.
But fear is also the tool of cowards. Only cowards have the need to resort to it, because they can’t admit that their aims are devoid of compassion or concern for human dignity and thus fail on moral grounds. Only a coward like Noem would need to record and post her adventure in the Bronx; it’s a case of compensating for her own terrified insignificance as one more dubiously qualified Trump loyalist. Only a coward like Trump would need to implement his vision through a stage-managed blitz of executive orders; he’s terrified of a deliberative process that would expose his agenda as the malignancy that it is and thus prevent it from being realized. (His demand that the prison camp at Guantanamo be used to house deportees is the latest but likely not the last of illustrative examples.)
None of this is to dismiss or minimize the real dangers that migrants (or LGBTQ people, or political foes, or government employees) may face from Trump. It is not to suggest that in some cases the fear isn’t justified. It is only to caution against the (understandable) impulse to treat every new statement or stunt or provocation in itself as a singular catastrophe in need of real-time response or condemnation—an ineffective use of time and energy that leads to mental exhaustion and invites despair. Against a psychological campaign of terror, calm focus and clear-eyed perspective can actually be demonstrations of courage and hope—two things that the weaponizers of fear, possessing neither, naturally fear the most.
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