The only way to fix ICE is to get rid of it

Trauma, a former therapist told me, is like a cancer growing somewhere in your consciousness. It grows as long as it can, and it takes as much as it wants, and it will kill you if you don't find a way to either live with or treat it. At the time, I was in denial about the ways in which I detached from myself and crumpled into helplessness at the slightest of triggers. Surely, I thought, I was just being a big baby who needed to suck it up. Yet that, too, was a sign of the trauma's hold on my every thought. The more I pretended it wasn't there, the more it could grow.

Now that I'm four years deep into really intense therapy for C-PTSD, I see the limits of my old therapist's metaphor. There are so many people who never deal with their trauma and live long, healthy lives, even if they aren't precisely happy ones, and there are many traumatic reactions that have heavy boundaries around them and remain isolated from the rest of one's life. But the larger point stands in so many cases: If you do not deal with this pain, it will burrow so deep that extricating it will end up the work of many years, if not a lifetime. In the process of dealing with mine, I severely endangered any number of relationships and ended up losing my job. But at some point, the tumor began to shrink, and though I bear the scars of its excision, it no longer rules my life. My relationships are stronger; my work is better; I am on stabler ground.

And yet here is the paradox: I feel, on some level, lacking. The pain I felt was a reaction to hidden sins perpetuated on me by people who were meant to have known better. The outward manifestations of that pain — from self-destructive professional behavior to self-harm — felt like a way to get people to finally see what had happened to me. To have spent long years fighting back against this thing inside of me and finally beat it back created a perverse sense that it must not have been that bad to begin with. If it really had been that bad, then why had I survived? Had my abuser been right? Had I deserved it on some level?

It was in those moments that I understood the ways that trauma and abuse perpetuate themselves. My harm was largely directed at myself, and it was mostly a series of endless psychological trials I subjected myself to, particularly before I transitioned. But I could see the outer edges of the darkness that might consume someone and lead them to project that dark self-loathing outward onto family or friends or casual passersby. Hurt people hurt people, goes the cliché, and I hate how blithely that phrase skirts around very real issues. Yet it's also true, as many clichés are.

The United States Department of Homeland Security was formed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a moment of profound national trauma. Like most trauma responses, its formation was understandable as a raw, emotional attempt to create a protective framework that would mean nothing so bad could ever happen again. Indeed, most trauma responses are built out of a sudden, sharp terror that the traumatized person never wishes to experience again, but that all-too-human reaction far too easily starts treating totally unrelated and even completely safe things as potential threats. Think of the classic example of the combat veteran who hides fearfully at the sound of fireworks or a car backfiring. This response is so hardwired into their nervous system that they are almost powerless against it, at least until they realize the presence of the trauma and work to treat it.

I'm sure plenty of people think DHS has achieved its goal, as the country has never again faced a terrorist attack so deadly, whether on domestic soil or internationally. Yet almost from the moment it was established, DHS has been in a constant state of metastasis, invading more and more parts of our everyday lives and rooting itself there. This statement has been true since the George W. Bush administration, but in the second Trump term, the truth of it has become steadily more obvious to plenty of Americans whose main intersection with it was previously in the form of having to remove their shoes at the airport. The encroachment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — into the day-to-day lives of Americans in major metropolitan areas has become much harder to ignore, especially as it has begun spilling outward into violence and even murder.

This week, that encroachment reached a new prominence in national headlines thanks to the death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Good and her wife, per news reports, had stopped to film ICE's actions, and in the process of trying to leave the scene, an ICE agent (identified by the Minnesota Star-Tribune as Jonathan Ross) shot Good in the face several times. She died from her injuries, and other ICE agents prevented medical personnel from going to help.

That the incident has become such a flashpoint stems from two things. First, Good was a middle-class white mom who had just dropped her kid off at school and was doing nothing that could even begin to be perceived as overtly threatening, and our society continues to privilege the pain of white people. (I say this not to cast judgment but simply as fact.) Second and just as importantly, there are several high-quality videos of the incident that forcefully disprove the government's claim that she was attempting to run over any ICE agents. These two elements have created something of a perfect storm for a media that is always reticent to go after Trump too hard but does still love catching those in power in such clear-cut lies.

Good's death is not the only one at the hands of ICE or other federal government bodies supporting ICE in its ongoing raids of American cities in recent months, but it has produced the most galvanic response. Whether that response continues to grow in weeks to come or fizzles out remains to be seen, but right now, as I write this, it feels like we are on the cusp of something enormous and uncertain, especially if the Trump administration goes forward with its promise to provide the shooter with immunity for his actions. It has also led to newfound curiosity from the typically apolitical in the idea of abolishing ICE once and for all — or perhaps even deleting the DHS from existence entirely.

I have lived in this country long enough to know that wherever this movement leads will turn into some version of "Don't abolish ICE! Reform it!" Yet if we accept that DHS generally and ICE specifically are the responses of a traumatized nation to a stark, memorable horror, then there is no way to reform either. You might think you have put better walls around them by, say, forcing ICE agents to remove their masks, but containment will only work for so long. A trauma response will always mutate and find targets to lash out at, whether that violence spills outward or turns inward. An understandable desire to protect and defend becomes its worst mirror image, which is to say a desire to make sure nothing bad ever, ever, ever happens, which will inevitably sweep all sorts of innocent people into its maw. (Imagine a "you are here" sticker on this paragraph.) No, you cannot stop this in its tracks. You can only treat it, which means first learning to recognize it for what it is, then slowly learning to reduce your dependence on it, until it finally withers away or you excise it.

"The consequences of my understandable desire to avoid being hurt so badly again have led to more hurt" is an idea so old it goes back to some of our earliest historical sources. Yet we are in a place where this very specific national synapse keeps sending out messages of terror and pain that so far outstrip the reasons for its genesis. We do not need this trauma response anymore, if we ever did.

My current trauma therapist — the one who got me to this place — likes to say that the most dangerous part of trauma therapy comes somewhere in the first few months after a real breakthrough. Once you understand something bad has happened and can name it, well, then it can feel like you have won the battle with yourself. Yet in doing so, you would lose the war. It becomes possible to get stuck at this point of the healing process, to only see the ways in which you have been wronged and keep excusing your own worst behavior as a sort of justified awfulness. It's a feedback loop that is incredibly difficult to escape, and many trauma patients get stuck right there, endlessly pitying themselves and never extending that feeling to others. But this is a child's response to the world, and part of maturity is to accept that one can be hurt and still hurt others. The United States has in so many cases gotten stuck in this very spiral, and it's well past time we escape it. There's ample evidence that we aren't better than this. But we should be.

Become a paid subscriber

If you appreciated this newsletter or any of the other work we've done, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Read more about all the great stuff we're planning here, and take advantage of our 20 percent off sale, which is running only through January.

Or if you'd rather not go to all that trouble, we've also got this:

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday. Premium subscribers get newsletters every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).