The beatdown in broad daylight in Washington, D.C., on Saturday was caught on video. Two masked men in tactical vests grappled with a delivery worker. One tased him, and he fell to the ground. A third man piled on, and then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth, all in similar vests with faces covered. Pinning the worker face down on the pavement, agents tased him again and punched him repeatedly in the head. “Get the fuck out of this city!” a bystander’s voice yelled out at the masked men. “Why are you guys here?”
The masked men’s vests only identified them as “police,” as is often the case with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and later, their arrest—in the upscale Logan Circle neighborhood—was confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security. It was part of the escalation in the federal law enforcement occupation ordered by Trump, with multiple agencies patrolling neighborhoods, stopping residents at checkpoints, and making arrests. Throughout, these federal agents have met opposition from countless bystanders and witnesses, who record them, jeer at them, and demand they leave their city.
In that sense, nothing about the assault on Saturday stood out so much as it captured all these dynamics in the span of three minutes. It laid bare too how this takeover of an American city—the nation’s capital, no less—has been brewing in the far-right imagination for a long time. “You guys are ruining the country,” said one of the bystanders to the masked agents, and one of them responded, “Liberals already ruined it.” Once, it was far-right groups who flooded cities in the summertime, in masks and tactical vests, looking for a fight; now, those groups have no need to be in the streets, with ICE and other federal agents carrying out their mission for them. As one Proud Boy organizer said at a Portland, Oregon, rally in 2018, “For all the illegals trying to jump over our border, we should be smashing their heads into the concrete.”
What we are seeing now flows from those dramatic street confrontations, brought on by groups such as Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys nearly a decade ago, when they made Portland their target and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson pledged, “The stench-covered and liberal-occupied streets of Portland will be CLEANSED.” Gibson was running as a Republican for the Washington state Senate at the time, and the Portland Police Bureau was in close contact with Patriot Prayer organizers, as reporting by Willamette Week exposed. The police regarded them as “much more mainstream” than leftist counterprotesters, arresting more of the latter than Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer members—even as the far-right groups were advocating the murder of immigrants and leftists.
It is perhaps less perplexing to see law enforcement in Washington this week engaged in anti-immigrant, anti-“liberal” taunts knowing this. On Sunday, the ICE account on X posted a video of seven masked agents removing a large banner hanging in Mount Pleasant’s main plaza, reading “Chinga la migra, Mount Pleasant Melts ICE.” Clutching the torn-down banner, one agent said to the camera, “We’re taking America back, baby.” (A new banner quickly appeared in the same place: “They are fascists. We are artists. We melt ICE.”) It’s petty, it’s cruel, and it didn’t come from nowhere. Ahead of January 6, 2021, members of the Proud Boys stole and destroyed Black Lives Matter signs from two historically Black churches in D.C., as they posed for cameras in their tactical vests and mockingly chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets.”
Seeing how ICE in particular have conducted themselves over the last few months, some people have feared that the masked agents Trump has unleashed might be the same people he pardoned for their involvement in the January 6 insurrection. Had they now infiltrated or been secretly hired into ICE and other agencies? A former assistant ICE director told Slate in July that he was “very worried” that “Proud Boys and other insurrectionists and hoodlums” would be hired at ICE, because, “What self-respecting person who wants a meaningful career in law enforcement would go to work [for Enforcement and Removal Operations] right now?”
There is no evidence that J6ers have been secretly deputized as federal agents; if anything, the Department of Homeland Security is openly making appeals to far-right and white nationalist groups in its recent ICE recruitment drive, and some have, in fact, volunteered. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 insurrection, praised Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington last week. Rhodes also said he planned to relaunch the Oath Keepers, and asked Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and “call up” the far-right militia group and others for immigration enforcement. “That’s what I urged him to do in 2020, when the left was rioting in open insurrection across the country,” Rhodes said, referring to the massive, nationwide protests after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd.
For the far right, it’s as if the street fights they started in Trump’s first term never ended. What ICE and other federal law enforcement agents are now doing in the streets should be understood in that much longer context, in which Trump has gone from tacitly endorsing such violence, from the “very fine people” at the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 and his televised order to the Proud Boys in 2020 to “stand back and stand by,” to pardoning their members in his first days in office in 2025. One January 6 rioter has advised Trump’s “immigration czar” Tom Homan. Another now works advising the Department of Justice on the “weaponization” of the department (for anti-Trump ends). From the beginning, violence against Trump’s perceived enemies has been invited and rewarded. Now it is just being institutionalized.
