Gangsters of Benevolence
Dom Rottman
28 January 2026
Murder, while fashionable for hundreds of years, is particularly in vogue. The trendsetter is United States–famous for murder around the globe–Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a law enforcement agency–the sort of entity known for murdering people–tasked primarily with enforcing immigration law and investigating transnational crime. While murder and violence are the haute couture of law, incidents thereof are still garish anomalies. Law enforcement isn’t supposed to kill citizens. Historically, these anomalies and their perpetrators have been treated as just that, exceptions that lead a narrative of endless regret, introspection and psychoanalysis (he was a “bad apple,” he was unwell, he was racist, he shouldn’t have been hired, he was surrounded by corruption, etc.). But with the second Trump Administration many have noted an important shift in narrative strategy–while killing is still atypical overall, the administration and its allies will perform olympic feats of rhetoric to justify it, even if it means outright lying. One of the consequences of this strategy is that it takes the killer out of the narrative, which means that the ubiquitous, semi-rhetorical “how can this be?”s of these tragedies cannot refer to how a particular individual was led astray or slipped up but rather how a government can so flagrantly get away with such state sanctioned violence—something which the left has been preoccupied with for decades. There is indeed a material explanation for ICE’s sudden explosion. Formed under the Bush administration in 2003, the agency had its funding gradually increase under the Obama, Biden, and—to an exorbitant degree—Trump administrations—recently to the order of 75 billion dollars as a part of the budget reconciliation in July 2025 (the infamous “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act), in addition to the ~10 billion dollars in standard appropriations. Calling this fiscally irresponsible of the party of small government is an understatement. It’s not even clear that the Department of Homeland Security can use all of this funding effectively, even if it wanted to. Recruitment efforts reflect gross mismanagement, with exorbitant signing bonuses, starting salaries, and continually lowering hiring standards that are all still insufficient to meet the agency’s desired force, to say nothing of its level of competence. With a handwave broadly gesturing at today’s economic and social crisis and an exclamation of “material conditions!”, the sudden appearance of undisciplined, gun-toting mooks and goons across America’s cities becomes explainable–with the suffix doing most of the lifting. Presenting the equation of bad economy + disenfranchisement + alienating forms of life + capitalism + pathologization + hundreds of thousands of dollars is a powerful but limited framework that can, to an extent, answer “how can this be?” But I think we need to ask better questions. Starting with better answers.
Saying that ICE recruitment manipulates those who are economically down on their luck and/or a part of a disenfranchised, unemployable lumpenproletariat due to deficiencies in education, health, etc. is a valid but easy answer. A less common but still feasible supplement is that ICE just manipulates good—or at least neutral—will. This has material appeal because it explains both sides of the ICE budget: everyone from the paper-pushing bureaucrat who has been with the agency for years to the LARPing camacianeri eager to execute citizens in broad daylight, to the companies they call to offer contracts to—all of whom are integral parts of a literal enterprise of violence: $30 billion are allocated to ICE’s “operational and procurement costs” while $45 billion is allocated to detention. Violence and evil are, once again, banal: boring, stupid, and bureaucratic. But people aren’t clamoring in fear and anger about bureaucrats, even if they mathematically should be. There’s a difference between ticking a box and shooting someone. All ICE workers—both those behind the gun and behind the desk—make a choice at the end of the day, but the phenomenological difference between ICE the vigilante apparatus and ICE the “deportation-industrial complex” is a significance which defies value.
If this is true of how people react to ICE, it’s reasonable to assume the difference is as significant and obvious for prospective recruits. It’s imaginably much easier to dupe someone into filling out a form with the domino effect of supplying a pillow to a prison cell than violently seizing people from their home or workplace. Likewise, I doubt those who choose to join ICE imagine themselves as a box-ticker form-filler stuck in a cubicle—that’s not how it’s advertised either. Recruits probably imagine themselves on patrol, performing the noble service of rounding up illegal immigrants for their country—whatever that might look like in their heads or in practice. What’s bizarre is that, at this point, the left feels compelled to psychoanalyze the group of recruits both potential and actual: Right wing insurrectionists and extremists, or the disturbed outcasts of society, forming a true basket of deplorables. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this speculation, and ICE recruits may be all, some, or none of those things–but I don’t think it’s particularly charitable or helpful. Isn’t it possible that their reason for signing up has nothing to do with pathology or ideology, and is simply because they want to do exactly what Homeland Security claims: to keep the country safe? Aren’t catching criminals and enforcing the law supposed to be good things? Someone who joins ICE as an opportunity for cruelty would, Ironically, be forced to admit that the entire purpose of ICE—and perhaps law enforcement altogether—is a sham. Putting all of this together, my contention is this: The material conditions behind ICE recruitment—the prospect of a healthy career, salary, benefits, amidst socioeconomic crisis—enable their actual, primary compulsion to sign up: an opportunity for work that is meaningful, patriotic, and a service to their country and community. In other words, ICE is a rare instance where meaningful work is, for once, literally valued. It is the only way for otherwise dispossessed people to make sense of the world because it is one of the few cases where meaningful valuable work is appreciably valued in the way that matters–with dollars.
This is, of course, not any less conjectural than the rest of the left’s psychoanalysis. I’m contending this, first of all, because the possibility is understated, despite it being no more than assuming that people actually believe in the missions of ICE and the DHS (whether it’s propaganda or not makes functionally no difference). It’s certainly a mundane explanation, but also the more horrifying one. Imagining that ICE’s enthusiastic recruits are also horrible psychopaths and that the DHS is going out of their way to assemble the most deplorable people imaginable is scary in the same way that a thriller movie is scary: it’s all experienced in a short period that builds up to a moment of catharsis, and you might make an impassioned social media post about it later. That’s not scary. That’s just interesting. Suggesting that ICE recruits had a good reason for joining, which is to say that it was a choice made in accordance with their values—and that these values are more of the truth, justice, and the American way variety, rather than the “murder is ok” variety—is more unsettling in the long run because it means that positive values are what drive people to do terrible, violent things. This shouldn’t be hard to imagine despite ICE’s particular recklessness. The military and police rely on their capacity for violence and inflicting gratuitous human harm, but even the most hardline radical would find it weird to suggest that people join them because yes, they actually do want to hurt people. As law enforcement, the same principle applies to ICE. Sure, anyone is a whore for enough money, but values are much cheaper bought than sold. If people are willing to volunteer for their local church or nonprofit with their labor, how much more enthusiastically would someone leap at the opportunity to achieve means of subsistence while cultivating their virtues and values?
This is the main reason why I’m offering the straightforward explanation, because it gets at a larger issue: the misalignments between what we claim to value—justice, virtue, patriotism, family, what have you—and what we actually value, determined by the precise number of the dollar. What’s crazy is that ICE recruits might have, unlike their Eichmann-like bureaucratic counterparts, initially thought about their choices. Charity and volunteer work are considered inherently virtuous because of their impact on the world. This suddenly no longer matters, though, if someone’s getting a tax write-off or somehow making a buck out of it. What seems to be really admired, then, is not the work itself but the asceticism of embracing this topsy turvy paradox: that doing good only counts and is only valuable when the labor of so doing is not compensated–which is to say actually, literally valued in dollars and cents. We can take this a step further when we think about the more meaningful or “noble” careers that are as underpaid as they are appreciated. Going to work as a public defender after law school will add a ballpark of a decade to paying off loans compared to working as a beloathed but handsomely compensated corporate lawyer; journalists often make their bones by juggling unpaid or underpaid internships with some service job (which that they might keep anyway upon seeing what an entry-level salary looks like); resident physicians might as well be practicing physicians who are just doing half of their work for free; practicing physicians—while their salary in the United States is a high anomaly compared to the rest of the world–are still on paper compensated an insulting fraction of the sticker value of the labor performed; and everyone seems to be aware of the grand ruse every other Tuesday when someone bemoans how underpaid teachers are. We could go as far as to say that the virtuous and valuable have an inverse relationship with value itself in practice: The more virtuous and/or respectable something is, the more meaningful and valuable it is to us, the less it is compensated. Which means that, in reality, such qualities aren’t valuable at all.
This severe misalignment in value and values is a part of the socioeconomic material conditions which makes joining ICE an unusually attractive decision, and one which appeals to a wider population. By offering financial security to a frustrated population at large, it is an opportunity to make a difference in a way that “noble” professions otherwise couldn’t–in a way that makes sense. It allows recruits to see through the charade. Society, our own government, truly recognizes the value of serving one’s country, and wants to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to cultivate it. With guns. And while patriotism and the law are commonly held as values, killing people generally isn’t. This is, quite literally, the second thought: I don’t actually want to do these things, and I think my position would be more harmful than helpful—In fact, this ends up being against my values.
It’s important to point out that any such civil servants who sign up and stay aren’t being duped in the way that I mentioned earlier; that they joined in hope of serving their country but are somehow tricked into destroying it. The military and police provide and perform tremendous public services, after all—health care, mediation, provision for education, traffic safety, etc. Along with ICE, they faithfully serve their country–it’s just that doing so requires gratuitous acts of violence. What makes ICE stand out is that it makes this uniquely, disturbingly visible. Violence isn’t just following orders. It comes with the territory. So if the virtuous and the valued have an inverse relationship with compensation, it makes sense for an agency notorious for egregious violence to offer handsome pay with a low barrier of entry, especially with a president eager to use it to form a personal squadristi di pagliacci as quickly as possible. From the inside looking out, it makes sense for precisely the opposite reason: serving the law is a virtue that should be compensated and actually valued. Because it is actually valued. The world just reflects the opposite. In a world organized around a value system where goodness, altruism, and virtue are not valued at all and might even be inversely proportional with value itself, summary executions in broad daylight are comparatively rational. The more horrifying reality that they could be ultimately motivated by a desire to do good isn’t any more outrageous than the upside-down world in which those motivations are formed.
Again, conjecture. By value, most of the violence is going to the development of a deportation-industrial complex than vigilantes. But even when violence is so visible it remains a force that does not suppress thought but rather repels it like a magnet. To recoil in horror is to not dwell on it or ask questions of it. Despite a never-ending list of explanations for violence, none of them seem to be helping. But if our world is truly backwards, where altruism is intentionally unrewarded, where we insist upon the myth that all individuals are self-interested actors, where violent agents of the law are also those who end up providing great public services, the better question to be asking is the one bourgeois economists tie themselves in knots and doing olympic backflips over: why on earth would someone do good?