Armed ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis in January of 2026.
Armed ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis in January of 2026. Credit: Chad Davis / Wikimedia Commons Credit: Chad Davis / Wikimedia Commons

For centuries, the subjugation of women’s bodies has been foundational to building empires like Canada and the United States. The texts I’ve been studying for my masters thesis on the sprawling concepts of evil and fascism show this clearly. And yet, I’m left baffled at how the same ideologies that brought us the witch trials, the inquisitions and the slavetrade are perpetuating bloodshed and suffering today, despite everything we know and all the battles fought.

Today’s violence by the hands of immigration enforcement isn’t new or just a Trump problem, like some political centrists maintain. It’s the security machine functioning exactly as designed on white supremacy and violent misogyny.

Over the last few years, there are countless examples of such violence. In 2025, immigration officer David Courvelle sexually abused a Nicaraguan woman known as C.H. by coercing her into sex in exchange for food and letters from her daughter. In 2014, a 19-year-old woman was detained after fleeing domestic violence in Honduras. She was groomed and raped by a guard who bribed her for sex. In 2018, The Intercept reviewed 1,224 cases of abuse, a small portion of the overall complaints, in immigration detention in the United States, showing the systemic nature of this abuse.

When Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the United States, murdered poet and writer Renee Good in January, it was more violent misogyny. Only this time it wasn’t hidden behind a concrete wall. After Ross shot Good in the face, he called her a “fucking bitch”, his unabashed contempt and hatred toward a woman who refused to cower in his presence broadcast for us all to see.

These are acts of patriarchal violence, misogyny and state-sanctioned murder. Many people are rightfully horrified at the news, yet they turn inward to hide away from the violence. If we truly want to stop it, we have to first face the truth about patriarchal and white nationalist ideology—even those who feel they aren’t impacted by it.

The security machine of the state

The security machine of Canada and the United States includes the police, the military, immigration enforcement, and any institution whose purpose is to criminalize people and enforce laws. In these systems, women’s bodies, particularly those of racialized women, exist as territory to be policed, controlled, and violated. This is part of a tradition that goes back hundreds of years.

In the 16th century, the false and non-scientific creation of “race” as a human category was created. Race was key for the newly emerging system of capitalism because it allowed for entire groups of humans to be subjugated based on their region, the colour of their skin or the texture of their hair. By having categories of people to exploit based on “racial science” (long since debunked), wealth could be hoarded by the “privileged” class.

The racialized “other” and the domesticated woman became the core of capitalism and colonialism. Some Canadians argue that we’ve evolved from the violence of the past and that democracy has prevailed. Some champions of nationalist pride claim the horrors of colonialism were necessary. But there will never be a justification for the violence that has continued from history into the security machine of today. From the transatlantic slave trade through the colonization of the so-called Americas, the constructed categories of race and gender remained essential.

Even after many lifetimes of “modernization”, women, particularly racialized women and trans women, are dehumanized by these armed forces whose job is to protect the colonial projects. In the United States, Queer and trans migrants report sexual abuse and forced labour in immigration detention. Anti-immigrant zealots believe that racialized women who cross the colonial border are a barrier to the false idea of “ethnic purity”. Detained migrants in Canada face similar violence and discrimination, only it goes relatively unnoticed, often kept quiet through Canada’s culture of “politeness”.

But Canada has not been able to keep quiet its systemic abuse in the Canadian Armed Forces and structural violence in the RCMP. A recent example from 2024 exposed how RCMP officers had discussed their colleague’s vagina, joked about rape, and made racist comments in a Signal group chat. Despite rampant sexual misconduct in the RCMP, many officers who are sexual abusers have been allowed to keep their jobs, putting society at further risk.

To be clear, patriarchal violence under capitalism doesn’t just rely on white men. These systems also recruit women to become their instruments, complicating our understanding of violent misogyny. For example, women guards in immigration detention facilities, women ICE agents, and women in policing take part in the same system, even as they themselves remain subject to various forms of patriarchal control, as we see in the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP examples above.

Racialized people and immigrants who become ICE agents and police also serve a similar purpose. Though I won’t take away their agency as humans who chose these jobs for whatever reason, their decisions are not above critique. Their role in the state security machine is to provide a level of legitimacy to explicitly oppressive institutions while fracturing solidarity across racial and class lines at the same time.

The false immigrant replacement

In the United States, ICE’s extreme violent misogyny is carried out by people with no background checks, many of whom take on mercenary personas, likely drawn by signing bonuses upwards of $50,000. At the helm of the agency, white nationalist enthusiasts and men with nazi fetishes like Greg Bovino (who was recently demoted after cosplaying as a Nazi officer) get to release their pent up patriarchal violence onto society.

And sometimes, immigrant enforcement is carried out by immigrants themselves; a 2020 study shows the reasons typically have more to do with lack of job opportunities than ideological anti-immigrant sentiment that surely influences the good ol’ fashioned Bovino-types.

How can it be that this cruelty goes on, despite everything we know? Because the capitalist project uses scapegoats to keep business as usual. In this case, migrants are blamed for the worsening conditions we all face, while also being used for their “cheap” labour. Politicians claim there’s a crisis, an immigrant takeover in “western” nations, evoking the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

It’s important to understand that there is no migrant crisis, according to Harsha Walia in her must-read text Border and Rule. It’s actually a crisis of displacement—the logical outcome of Canada’s and the United States’ foreign policy, the climate crisis, and the long history of imperialism. Displacement is the result of war and occupation; of foreign meddling and resource extraction.

As Walia puts it, borders are “open to capital, closed to people.” Ruling politicians travel the world to make trade deals, welcoming in products but criminalizing people.

ICE agents on the street where Renee Good was shot after the shooting.
ICE agents on the street where Renee Good was shot after the shooting.

Terror tactics

On January 24, we witnessed in horror the murder of Alex Pretti who was shot by ICE over ten times in cold blood. Immediately following, politicians and the police chief held a press conference, urging people to remain peaceful and not give the Trump regime what it’s looking for. But the fascistic MAGA government is already doing what it wants. Using terror to make people submit while simultaneously distracting from their imperialist foreign policy and from the dreaded Epstein Files.

Every shooting, every brutal kidnapping captured on video, every family separation serves a purpose to instill enough fear that resistance becomes unthinkable. They want communities to police themselves and neighbours to stop blowing whistles when ICE arrives. They want people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti to stay home rather than witness state violence.

In Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Maria Mies reminds us that “the rise of some means the fall of others. Wealth for some means poverty for others.” Knowing this, we can see clearly how the dehumanization of immigrants and Indigenous people is used to humanize the settler, who has to face the reality that they are living on stolen land, an earth desecrated through bloodshed, torture, conquest and inquisition.

How many times in the last few years have we heard the nationalist slogans amplified about “America First” and “Canada First”. (I reported on Canada First’s roots in white supremacist movements during the federal election). These ultranationalist slogans signal that emancipation could be possible for the white working class through the oppression of “the other”.

If only everyone could see that the billionaires and technofascists will never allow emancipation because their entire existence is predicated on the oppression of the working class. Perhaps people hundreds of years from now will look back on this era with the same disbelief that we hold for the horrors of the inquisition.

As Cynthia Miller-Idriss put it in Mother Jones, ICE’s crusade on America’s immigrants (and women) is staged as a kind of medieval theatre, as though agents are on a “noble, patriotic and manly quest, flying on horseback across the open land to rescue white women and restore the nation to its righteous place.”

This is why we must be clear about how patriarchy functions today. It teaches people in uniform that domination is their right and that women, particularly racialized women, exist as objects for their use. This same violence then extends to protesters and anyone who challenges their authority.

So what can we do? We can’t rely on playing whack-a-mole with state terror. It cannot be reformed. Anything less than the complete abolishment of ICE will continue to have people murdered, kidnapped and disappeared. Our role, especially Canadians, is to witness, interrogate, educate ourselves and organize against this terror. And it must be done in tandem with resisting our own violent institutions and facing this nation’s legacy of colonial conquest.

Erin Blondeau

Erin Blondeau (she/her) is a Métis mom living on the west coast of so-called British Columbia on unceded Quw’utsun territory. Her paternal family comes from the Red River Settlements and the Qu’Appelle...