ICE Barbie and the Border Czar of Cruelty

Kristi Noem turns raids into theater while Tom Homan turns cages into contracts. Together they script Trump’s deportation state.

It begins with a pink glitter sign. A little girl named Dyra had made it for her mother, taped to a wall in their Queens apartment. A toy kitchen sat nearby, its tiny pots and pans waiting for play that will not come. Because when her mother brought Dyra and her teenage brother to what was supposed to be a routine check-in at New York’s immigration court, they never came home. ICE agents grabbed all three, the mother and her children, and scattered them to the winds. Dyra, just six years old, and her mother, Martha, were shipped nearly 2,000 miles away to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. Her teenage brother, Manuel, was separated from them and locked up in Delaney Hall Detention Facility in New Jersey. Martha remains caged in Texas, terrified of deportation back to Ecuador where gang violence nearly killed her before.

This is not the unfortunate side effect of a complex system. It is cruelty as policy, cruelty as deterrence, cruelty as spectacle. And a particular type of person carries it out, persons like Kristi Noem and Tom Homan, who have made careers out of staging and monetizing human suffering.

Trump’s ICE raids have a distinctive aesthetic. Masked men in unmarked cars. Windshields smashed with gun butts. Families dragged screaming into the street. Pregnant women slammed to the ground. Toddlers locked in cages with lights blazing 24 hours a day. The violence is wide open; it is filmed, livestreamed, dressed up like a dystopian action sequence.

This is performance, not law enforcement. A spectacle designed to terrify immigrant communities while thrilling the MAGA faithful with images of the “enemy” subdued. Where past authoritarian regimes built their power in secrecy, Trump’s America flaunts it for the camera, packaging despair into recruitment sizzle reels and glossy social media posts.

Enter Kristi Noem, the former South Dakota governor turned Secretary of Homeland Security. On paper she’s responsible for a vast department, but in practice she has turned ICE into her own stage. Her slick recruitment ads, complete with horseback charges and cinematic slow-motion raids, earned her the mocking nickname “ICE Barbie.” She embraced it.

Her message is clear: enforcement isn’t just necessary, it’s glamorous. The shattered windshields and bloody detainees are her props. The agents with GoPros are her extras. Every raid is an episode in her authoritarian reality show.

Noem herself has bragged about killing her 14-month-old puppy because it was “untrainable”, as if cruelty is proof of toughness. That admission, casually delivered, tells us everything about the character required to run a system like this. She doesn’t flinch at suffering, she performs it, turns it into a brand. She markets herself as the heroine of her own fascist film, one where the villains are six-year-old girls and pregnant women.

If the recruitment reels and ICE Barbie sizzle videos make cruelty look glamorous, the raw footage and eyewitness reporting tell a different story, one that shreds any illusion of “law enforcement.”

We see it in Norwalk, Connecticut, where ICE agents smashed the windshield of Ricardo Chavez’s truck, tased him, and dragged him bleeding into an unmarked car while his daughter begged to show his work permit. They left his wrecked truck in the street for her to deal with, again the violence itself the message.

We see it in Houston, where a pregnant woman screamed “I’m pregnant!” over and over as ICE agents slammed her to the ground, grinding their knees into her abdomen. Her pleas became background noise for the performance.

We see it at an Anaheim car wash, targeted three times in as many weeks, where ICE agents tear-gassed, tackled, and pinned down a U.S. citizen, Isaac Dominguez, who cried “I can’t breathe” as they beat him. Hours later, they let him go without charges, without paperwork, without even a story because he was never the point. The spectacle was.

And we see it on a far more sinister stage at Alligator Alcatraz, the Everglades camp Governor Ron DeSantis and DHS built in just eight days. Promised as a holding site for “the worst of the worst,” the Miami Herald revealed it was instead filled with asylum seekers still fighting their cases, most with no final deportation orders. Detainees were forced into chain-link cages and tents, lights blazing 24/7, bugs crawling across damp ground, toilets overflowing. Lawyers had no way to speak confidentially with their clients. People were tricked into signing deportation papers “in exchange for a blanket.” One man with an intellectual disability was deceived into signing his own removal order. Guards told new arrivals bluntly: “As soon as you come in here, you don’t have any rights.”

For many, the torment was so unbearable that they dropped their legal appeals just to escape the camp. Daniel Ortiz Piñeda, a Colombian national with no criminal record, abandoned his asylum case because he could not stand another day in Alligator Alcatraz’s limbo. This is engineered despair. Attorneys call it what it is: psychological warfare.

All of this, the smashed windows, the caged toddlers, the despair-by-design, is the machinery behind Noem’s glitzy recruitment ads. It is the human wreckage her sizzle reels will never show, but which they depend on to function.

Then there’s Tom Homan, Trump’s handpicked “border czar.” If Noem is the showrunner, Homan is the production manager, the one who makes sure the cages are built on time and filled to quota. A career immigration officer, Homan has long been known as the intellectual father of family separation. His philosophy is simple: make the process so painful that people give up on due process.

After leaving ICE, he pocketed consulting fees from GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison companies profiting from immigrant detention. Then, like a ghoul summoned back from the grave, he returned to Trump’s side to build what he promised would be “the biggest deportation machine in history.”

Homan is the perfect embodiment of the bureaucrat-executioner. He doesn’t need the spotlight. His satisfaction comes from watching the machinery of despair run smoothly, each child separated, each asylum case abandoned, each new contract signed. In him we see the type that historian Hannah Arendt warned of: the man who builds atrocity into paperwork, who calls cages “infrastructure,” who wears cruelty like a badge of competence.

Alligator Alcatraz is where Noem’s theatrics and Homan’s machinery meet: cruelty staged for deterrence, despair engineered as policy, profit guaranteed by the private prison contracts humming beneath it all.

We have seen this before. The Gestapo raiding homes in 1930s Germany, not for crimes but for intimidation. Think of Hermann Göring, who cultivated the theatricality of Nazi repression, uniforms, staged raids, fear as performance. Göring didn’t just enforce policy; he branded terror as strength, much as Kristi Noem packages ICE raids into recruitment ads. She is not inventing a new playbook. She is reprising an old role: the authoritarian who understands that cruelty sells when you put it on film.

We saw it when Japanese Americans were rounded up into camps in the 1940s, told it was for “safety.” Figures like General John L. DeWitt, who signed off on mass incarceration orders, embodied Tom Homan’s type: the bureaucrat who insisted “a Jap is a Jap” and built cages not out of personal animus but out of an obsession with quotas and “national security.” DeWitt rationalized internment into paperwork; Homan rationalizes family separation into policy. Both call it law. Both mean despair.

We saw it again in the 1950s, during Operation Wetback, when over a million people of Mexican descent, including U.S. citizens, were deported in desert sweeps. General Joseph Swing, then head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, openly bragged about mass expulsions as triumphs of management. Like Homan, he measured success in bodies processed, not lives destroyed.

And we saw it in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” where masked men dragged away students in unmarked cars. Admiral Emilio Massera, one of the junta leaders, reveled in the performative aspect of repression, staging disappearances and torture as demonstrations of state power. He played Noem’s role, turning atrocity into theater, convincing himself it was patriotic. At the same time, General Jorge Videla embodied Homan’s persona: the efficient administrator who treated disappearances as administrative necessity, filling quotas with chilling calm.

The throughline is always the same: find the vulnerable. Strip them of due process. Use public spectacle to terrify the rest. Profit from the system along the way. And at every turn, authoritarian regimes rely on these two archetypes, the performer of cruelty who glorifies the spectacle, and the bureaucrat of cruelty who keeps the machinery running. In our moment, those roles are played by Kristi Noem and Tom Homan.

It takes a particular type of person to run such a system. A Kristi Noem, who treats shattered lives like content. A Tom Homan, who treats cages like balance sheets. Both embody the banality of cruelty in different costumes: Noem as the action star, Homan as the bureaucrat. Together they animate Trump’s deportation state, proving once again that authoritarianism doesn’t run on abstract policy alone. It runs on human beings willing to be cruel, and proud of it.

We must not look away or all this to be normalized. We must name these atrocities, describe them, and refuse to let their performance go unrecorded. One day, when history asks what kind of people they were, the answer should not be lost in euphemism. They were the ones who smiled for the camera while a six-year-old’s pink glitter sign sat abandoned on a wall in Queens.