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The Trump administration is trying to turn mass deportation into reality-show style entertainment through which the voters can rationalize their cruelty, Adam Serwer writes. https://theatln.tc/sAnuloVf

Last month, the Trump administration invited Dr. Phil along on an ICE raid in Chicago, enabling him to post a video of an arrest to Instagram. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted photographs and video of herself on ICE raids in New York City while in “full glam,” wearing a bulletproof vest and announcing, “Here in New York City this morning, we are getting the dirtbags off these streets.” Last week, the White House posted a video to X captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” showing ICE officials cuffing people who are being loaded on a plane, while a soundtrack of roaring jet engines and unfurling chains plays.

“Turning human suffering into spectacle did not die out in antiquity,” Serwer continues. “Just like in the past, many people become numb to brutality when they perceive it as entertainment rather than oppression.” But now social media and reality television allow for even more of a remove from what the audience sees. Reality-TV police shows, for example—which were canceled amid the George Floyd protests in 2020—skewed audience perceptions about violent crime and police work. The people arrested on the shows were a punch line, there to amuse the viewer—guilt or innocence was irrelevant.

“Although the Trump administration has claimed that it is focusing on undocumented criminals, its actions suggest that it is defining criminality extremely loosely,” Serwer writes. “There aren’t enough undocumented criminals to justify a ‘mass’ deportation on the scale Trump has promised. Noncriminals will have to go as well, which is what is happening.”

The Trump administration needs people to think immigrants “are all ‘dirtbags’ so that treating them like human beings is unnecessary,” Serwer continues. “The Deportation Show can convince people that those being shipped off are so insignificant, so beneath real Americans, that people may consume their suffering as entertainment.”

Read more here: https://theatln.tc/sAnuloVf

📸: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty