Nearly impossible to distinguish between real and fake immigration agents, men have allegedly lied about their identities to intimidate, kidnap and rape women.
Multiple men are facing arrest in at least three states since President Donald Trump’s inauguration for allegedly posing as immigration enforcement officers to perpetrate sexual violence against immigrant women.
Across the country, so-called “ICE impersonators” are on the rise as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) itself has been violently arresting people without warrants, sometimes in plain clothes using unmarked vehicles. Nearly impossible to distinguish between real and fake agents, men have allegedly lied about their identities to intimidate, kidnap and rape women with precarious immigration statuses, according to survivors’ accounts:
- In Prince George’s County, Md., police arrested 26-year-old Victor Antonio Reed, who they say raped a Latina woman while posing as an ICE agent.
- In Raleigh, N.C., an immigrant woman says 37-year-old Carl Thomas Bennett kidnapped and raped her while posing as a law enforcement officer and threatening to deport her. He is facing charges for kidnapping, second-degree rape and impersonating a law enforcement officer.
- In Brooklyn, N.Y., a man told a 51-year-old immigrant woman that he was an ICE agent. She says he attempted to rape her, and he took her phone, purse and jewelry. At the time of publication, he has not yet been arrested.
Right-wing extremists have also been wearing ICE costumes in predominantly Latino workplaces and neighborhoods, including in San Francisco, to instill fear across immigrant communities.
In another South Carolina case, a video emerged of a man appearing to impersonate an ICE agent to harass and mock a group of Latino men. He has been charged with kidnapping for taking the driver’s keys and trapping the men in their car.
ICE Spells Danger for Immigrant Women (And All Immigrants)
ICE impersonators are not the only threat facing immigrant women. Especially under President Trump, who is ushering in a harsh wave of militarized mass detention and deportation, ICE itself poses grave risks to women’s safety, bodily autonomy and human rights.
In mid-March, ICE detained a pregnant mother of five named Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus. In ICE custody, Monterroso-Lemus says she endured hunger, abuse and medical neglect; her food had cockroaches in it, and her only prenatal care was 12 unidentified pills a day.
When she was five months pregnant, Monterroso-Lemus gave birth alone, shackled and under armed guard. She experienced a stillbirth in custody after officials allegedly refused to provide medical care while she begged for help. After she gave birth to a stillborn child, ICE deported Monterroso-Lemus to Guatemala, separating her from family in the United States.
In May, ICE detained Paola Clouatre—the wife of an American Marine Corps veteran—after her appointment for a green card. Immigration officials sent Clouatre to a facility hours away from her children, including her 3-month-old breastfeeding daughter.
These are just two of many stories. Tragically, too many women have suffered in ICE custody to include every story here.
Additionally, women who are deported often face abuse in other countries. Many came to the United States to escape gender-based violence, which is prevalent in many parts of Latin America and around the world.
ICE may stand for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” but it spells danger for immigrant women and their families.
We have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants, and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing. … People see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.
Maribel Hernández Rivera, American Civil Liberties Union
MAGA (and Patriarchy) Emboldened These Attacks
The threats facing immigrant women—from individual predators to mass detention and deportation—also point to a long legacy of systemic harm.
Black and Latina women in the United States have always been subjected to systemic violence, which has historically acted to reinforce both racism and sexual oppression by instilling hierarchical control.
In Trump’s first term, immigrant women underwent unnecessary gynecological procedures in ICE custody, with allegations some were forcibly sterilized. Immigrants have also reported sexual abuse at ICE facilities.
This is not the first time women of color have been mutilated and abused while held captive. Enslaved Black women were systemically raped, and many faced brutal experimentation at the hands of the so-called “father of gynecology,” Marion J. Simms.
Reproductive abuse and eugenics against Black women did not stop after slavery, affecting women such as Fannie Lou Hamer, who suffered what was nicknamed a “Mississippi appendectomy” or a nonconsensual hysterectomy performed on Black women in the 1900s. This extended further to the Norplant birth control, which was strategically marketed to (and sometimes forced on) Black women in the 1990s to control and limit Black women’s reproduction.
Latina women were also frequently and forcibly sterilized and tested on throughout the 20th century as eugenic pseudoscience and xenophobia circulated widely. The first oral contraceptive pill in the United States was tested on Puerto Rican women, often without their knowledge or informed consent.
For centuries, the criminalization of brown and Black women’s bodies has been normalized and used to further sexual and reproductive abuse, slave economies, racism and eugenics.
The Trump administration is emboldening and reinvigorating such violence by providing more tools to harm women of color, including both systemic tools (mass detention and deportation) and a cover for any man looking to kidnap immigrant women in broad daylight.
Black activists say ICE raids are reviving Jim-Crow era tactics of brutalization and criminalization towards people of color.
The MAGA-sphere is also unabashedly endorsing bad behavior by building a culture that celebrates the pain and fear of immigrants. Nowhere is this anti-immigrant culture more visible than the president’s outright celebration of a facility built to trap immigrants in an alligator-ridden swap during hurricane season.
Since Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) partnered to open an immigration detention facility in the Everglades, which they have dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” some are buying merchandise and clothing to celebrate.
Presidential advisor Laura Loomer, meanwhile, is posting about feeding all 65 million Latinos in the United States to Florida’s alligators.
“What we’re seeing here is we have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants, and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing,” Maribel Hernández Rivera, national director of immigrant community strategies at the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN. “You end up having a violation of people’s rights, people see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.”
It is no surprise, then, that some could take this rhetoric as a license to target immigrant women of color with sexual violence.
Through misogyny, racism and xenophobia, and by elevating a sexual assaulter to the presidency, MAGA has continued this normalization of violence against women and people of color structurally and culturally. It is no surprise, then, that some could take this rhetoric as a license to target immigrant women of color with sexual violence.
In the midst of immigrant women’s vulnerability under Trump, predatory men are assuming power due to patriarchal entitlement and acting to reinforce sexism and racism.
This rampant violence against immigrant women is a direct consequence of historical white supremacist patriarchy and its relation to the MAGA movement. This points to a larger issue of the racialized exploitation of women’s bodies, enforced and perpetuated by the current government.
