I am an Enforcement and Removal Operations officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. I have worked this job for ten years.
I still have the button from the first Trump rally I went to, in 2016, before I had the badge. It's in my truck, in the console, under the registration. I don't wear it. I just haven't thrown it away. Sometimes I open the console for something else, my sunglasses, a parking pass, and there it is, and I close it again without deciding to.
That year felt like something was actually being built. Not a policy. A room. Everyone in it believed the same six things and every one of the six things was going to fix something specific. Trade. Borders. Epstein. Forever wars. The people who'd stopped listening to us. It felt big because it was aimed at big things with big energy.
Epstein meant the people who never get touched finally get touched, all the way up, no matter whose name was in the book. Forever wars meant my sister's kid doesn't get a fourth deployment to somewhere he can't find on a map. Those weren't abstractions to me. I could tell you the address of the room the six things were said in, and I could tell you who I was standing next to.
I want to describe what it's aimed at now, because I read the news like anyone else, and I still say "we" about all of it, and I've started to notice that the "we" covers a lot more ground than it used to, and I keep looking for the version of it I signed up for and not quite finding it, the way you keep checking a pocket for something you already know isn't there.
This week alone. The Secretary of War removed or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, something like 1 in 10 of the top brass, and put his own former aide in as acting Army chief. He called it a cleansing. The Army Secretary resigned in the middle of it. The math on who got cleansed and who got promoted is not subtle, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't see the numbers on that.
The President renamed a lake. Signed the paper himself, in the Oval Office, said it was official and effective immediately, over a trade argument with Canada. The order doesn't bind New York, doesn't bind Canada, doesn't bind anyone but the federal government, which means the only entity required to call it Lake America is the government that renamed it. I keep turning that over. We used to talk about winning countries. Now we're relabeling a lake we already owned half of, for an audience of federal letterhead.
The FBI put a former congressman on a nine-hour flight and had air marshals watch his phone the whole way to see if they could read his passcode. He was a manager in an impeachment trial once. That's the offense on file, as far as I can tell. Nine hours over the Atlantic, two federal officers, one phone.
And Epstein. I have to talk about Epstein, because it was one of the six things, and it's the one I think about longest. There was a release, millions of pages, back in January. Then in July there was a memo. No client list. No blackmail. Nothing but what the first report already said about how he died. That was the finding. I read it the day it came out, standing in a parking lot on a break, and I remember not being able to make my legs walk back inside for a minute. He said he'd release it. He said it enough times that I stopped hearing it as a promise and started hearing it as a fact that hadn't happened yet. Then the memo said it had already happened, and it was nothing, and I was supposed to just carry on with the shift like the ground under that particular thing hadn't moved.
Meanwhile there's a real war a few time zones over, and a new oil deal in Venezuela, and a Treasury Secretary using the word asphyxiate about another country's economy on the record, and I clock in Monday like all of that is a normal week, because at this point it is.
That same weekend he posted a video of an island "being blown to smithereens," two exclamation points, over footage nobody at the Department of Defense could confirm happened. No strike record. Just the video. I watched it twice before I clocked that it was generated, which says something about the video, or something about how used to this I've gotten, I honestly can't tell you which anymore. The other video from that weekend was geese. A flock of them, wearing his hairline, holding rifles, standing guard over the lake he'd just renamed. I don't know which post he expected people to read as intelligence and which one he expected people to read as a joke. I don't think that's a field on the form either.
None of that is free, and I don't mean what we spend on it. Gas is close to $4 a gallon nationally, up more than 30% since this war started. The 30-year mortgage rate is 6.72%, and the reporting on why cites this exact conflict by name. Home prices are up about 17% over the same stretch, the median payment is $2,191 a month now, and grocery bills are climbing faster than most people's raises.
In that same stretch, the family running the war has made about $4 billion off businesses that didn't exist before the second term, most of it crypto. One venture alone moved $1.4 billion in token sales, and the family's own entity kept 75% of it. I'm not an economist. I process removal files. But I can read two numbers in the same news cycle. One of them is going up because of the war. The other one is going up because of the war too. They are not the same family's number.
I signed up because I was scared of something. I still am, if I'm honest, the same something, government deciding what you're allowed to keep, deciding it's not really yours. That fear was the whole engine. I built ten years on top of it. What I can't work out anymore is whether the thing I signed up to stop needs us at all to make its case, or whether we've spent a decade doing its opening argument for it for free, one grocery bill and one mortgage rate and one gas receipt at a time, while the people telling us to be afraid of it get richer than anyone in that argument has ever been.
And then there's the file I actually touched.
We arrested a man at the airport in New Orleans for overstaying a visa and missing his hearing. Routine removal order, routine flight home the next day. He'd spent years telling anyone who'd listen that officers like me deserved total immunity for doing exactly this job. He meant it. I believe he meant it.
The form does not have a box for that. I checked, the way I've checked before out of something like curiosity. There's a box for entry date. A box for hearing date. A box for status. His said removable, the same word it says for everyone else's file in the drawer.
I used to think the point was the six things. Borders, trade, Epstein, no more forever wars, the people who stopped listening. I still think that's what it was, in the room, in 2016, when it was a room and not yet a filing system.
I don't think anyone renamed a lake for those six things. I don't think 80 generals got cleared out for those six things. I don't think the plane full of air marshals was about those six things. I don't think the memo that closed the book on Epstein was about those six things, and I don't think the file on the man who wanted us protected was about those six things either.
I think the six things built the machine, and the machine outgrew the six things, and what's left doing the work now is just the machine, running on its own weight, filing whoever's in front of it under whatever box fits, while the six things sit in a truck console like a button nobody's thrown away.
I kept the button.
I never got a box that said which side you were on. Nobody did. That was never a field on the form. I just thought, in 2016, that we were building the kind of thing that would have needed one.
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