Check out the video of me drawing this cartoon!
Two-thirds through drawing this cartoon I had the thought “surely some other cartoonist has already done ICE arresting Jesus.” And of course, they had. For instance, Andy Marlette in 2017; Claytoonz in 2018 (featuring Jeff Sessions – remember him?); and Ellen at Pizzacake just two months ago. (I’m a big fan of Pizzacake, by the way – it has a lovely sense of whimsy). I’m sure there are many others, as well.
I considered abandoning the cartoon. But then I thought of this exchange between George (an artist) and Dot (a muse) in one of my favorite musicals, Sunday In The Park With George.
[GEORGE]
I’ve nothing to say[DOT, spoken]
You have many things.[GEORGE]
Well, nothing that’s not been said[DOT]
Said by you, though, George
That passage is one of the best pieces of advice for artists I’ve ever heard, and I think of it often. My cartoon shares a premise with those other cartoons, but I don’t think anyone could mistake our cartoons for each other.
This is the second anti-ICE cartoon I’ve done this month, the previous one being this collab with Kevin Moore. So rather than go over the reasons to hate ICE in this post, I’ll just link to that previous post.
For panel four, I thought it would be a good idea to show famous immigrants, real and fictional, among the prisoners. My hope is that it makes the group look more like a collection of individuals, rather than being simply a mass of generic people.
I’m not the best at caricature, but – as a result of my recent turn to drawing lots of chicken fat in my cartoons – I’ve gotten a bit more confident, so I decided to try it.
When it came time to actually draw the panel, it turned out to be much more challenging than I’d anticipated. The panel is inspired by homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s repulsive photo op in front of a cell full of prisoners in El Salvador. The prisoners were all male, had their heads shaved, and were shirtless.
Being all male wasn’t a problem – since beauty standards are much more stringent for female celebrities, male celebrities tend to have easier-to-caricature faces.
But all the other elements made it harder. They had to all be shirtless – so there went using costume to identify characters. (Although I cheated a bit on this by including a hat). They all had to have shaved heads, so there went using hair. And I didn’t think it would work to show anyone smiling, so there went a whole lot of characteristic expressions.
So a lot of folks that could have been in that panel – Mork from Ork, Angel from Buffy, Alfred from Batman, Raj from Big Bang Theory, Keanu Reeves, etc – ended up not being there because I just didn’t think I could successfully draw them under these restrictions.
The characters that ended up going in were Chico Marx (American, but the character he played was an Italian immigrant), Mr. Spock (not an immigrant, but he spent a lot of his life being an outsider among smugly superior Earthlings), Superman (the ultimate immigrant), Albert Einstein, Bob Hope (born in the UK), Beldar Conehead, and Mr. Miyagi.
I don’t think all of them are great likenesses, but one of the pleasures of chicken fat is that it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect.
For me, the most iconic Superman cartoonist will always be the late Curt Swan. Kings Highway Elementary School, when I was a kid, had an original Swan Superman sketch framed on a wall, and I studied it often. Very helpfully, it turns out that Swan made a “How To Draw Superman” tutorial.
Although I didn’t look at them while I was drawing, as preparation I did check out Al Hirschfeld drawings of both Chico Marx and Bob Hope. As far as I’m concerned, Hirschfeld is the best caricaturist to ever wield a pen, and if Hirschfeld chose to emphasize a particular feature, then it’s an important feature. Mainly, though, I relied on photos.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. The first three take place on a city sidwalk.
PANEL 1
Jesus Christ, a smile on his face and a glowing halo over his head, is talking to a man wearing an ICE jacket. The ICE agent is talking into his phone.
JESUS: Yes, it’s me, Jesus Christ! I’ve come back to–
ICE AGENT (thought balloon): ✓ Foreign accent. ✓ Brown skin. ✓ Doesn’t look rich.
ICE AGENT (aloud): Guys, I think I got one!
PANEL 2
Two more ICE agents, big men wearing black masks that cover their whole faces other than their eyes, have rushed in and are shoving Jesus (now wearing handcuffs) to the sidewalk.
MASK DUDE: He looks mid-eastern to me.
JESUS: But I– OW!
ICE AGENT: No talking back, terrorist!
PANEL 3
A cartoon dust cloud, from which raised fists and clubs emerge, indicates a beat down going on.
JESUS: I’m only here to–
MASK DUDE: He’s resisting!
ICE AGENT: Get him!
PANEL 4
The Ice Agent, hands on hips, is grinning as he chats with Kristi Noem (Trump’s Homeland Security secretary). In the background is a cell full of prisoners, shirtless and with their heads shaved. One of the prisoners is Jesus, covered with bruises, looking very irritated.
NOEM: We really are doing God’s work here.
ICE AGENT: Heck yeah!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is a long-obsolete cartoonists’ term for unimportant details drawn in a cartoon.
PANEL 1 – The building directory in the background:
Accountant
Accountspider
Spider-Man
Copyright Suit
Tailored Suit
Taylor Hebert
Hebert ‘n Ernie
Ernied Interest
Interest Ing Inc
Dentist
A newspaper lying on the sidewalk says “Background Detail News. Headline Leaves No Room for Story Text. Lazy Cartoonist To Blame, Says Bob. Bob? Who’s Bob?” (Some of that last line is literally impossible to read, because panel borders. Honestly, the entire newspaper might be impossible to read, partly because I distorted the lettering to put it in perspective.)
A poster on the wall says “WORDS. They’re all over! Where do they come from? What do they want? Do they have plans? No one knows.”
Oscar the Grouch is peeking out of a trash can in the foreground.
PANEL 2 – The Tin Man, The Scarecrow, and the Lion are watching from a window in the background. In another window, the three-eyed alien from “Toy Story” watches. A bumper sticker on the ICE van says “My other car is unmarked.” One of the ICE agents has actually stuck his hand through the middle of Jesus’ halo.
PANEL 3 – One of the Ice Agent’s arms has a “Care Bears” tattoo. Micky Mouse’s fist is sticking out of the dust cloud.
PANEL 4 – The people in the jail cell include Chico Marx, Mr. Spock, Superman, Albert Einstein, Bob Hope, Beldar Conehead, and Mr. Miyagi.
I’m surprised the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion aren’t getting arrested seeing as they are not U.S. citizens. I guess this isn’t their The Wiz incarnations.
I bet I.C.E. comes back for them later.
While Bob Hope was indeed an immigrant, white anglo saxon protestant male immigrants are explicitly welcomed by the current shitocracy that is terrorising the w0rld through its illegitimate control of the American government.
I want to put that WORDS poster on a t-shirt!
LOL, thanks!
@Avvaa: I’m not sure even WASP male immigrants are welcome. There have been several tourists who have been detained because they overstayed their visas by 1/2 an hour or ICE thought that they might violate the terms of their visas.
Seriously? Your only response to the fact that 99.5%* of ICE detainees are male is that it’s going to make drawing them easier?
At least you managed to draw attention to the real victims in all of this.
*22 out of 4422 new detainees in a two-week period were female https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/new-ice-data-shows-administration-isnt-just-arresting-criminals-rcna192656
I entirely agree that Trump’s alleged “government” is a shitocracy, and I’m quite prepared to believe that current immigration practice favour white, and Anglo-Saxon, and Christian, and perhaps even Protestant applicants, even more so that it has done under other presidents.
But male? Where’s your evidence for that? According the the DHS, Naturalisations have been 55-56% female since 2014, which is as far back as I have looked. This did not change during the entirety of Trump’s first term. Source: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/naturalizations/naturalizations-annual-flow-report
If you don’t have evidence – and I suspect you don’t – why did you say “male”?
Please chill, Daran. Obviously, that’s a terrible thing – and it’s something I didn’t know until I read your comment just now. Characterizing my post as my “response” to something I didn’t know about when I wrote the post is inaccurate.
My comics post frequently have paragraphs discussing the drawing side of the cartoons, rather than the issue the cartoon is a response to. This paragraph was obviously one such case. Female celebs do tend to have less distinctive facial features than male celebs, because the standards are different. My mentioning this extremely relevant fact about drawing a bunch of caricatures of male celebrities was in no way meant as a dismissal of how ICE has focused on men (again, something I didn’t even know).
Getting angry that I even mentioned a form of sexism that affects women, even when it’s obviously relevant to what I’m writing about in that paragraph, isn’t really a productive approach.
Thank you for sharing the information. Please attempt to have a little bit of interpretive charity next time.
Why don’t you know, Ampersand? If 99.5% or even just 85% of the detentions were reported to be female, you’d certainly know about it. The left-wing and progressive chatosphere would be ablaze. Questions would be asked in Congress. Human Rights Organisations would be investigating.
I now doubt the 99.5% figure. According to ICE’s 2025 YTD figures* about 87% of detainees are male, which is in line with widely cited figures for previous years. I don’t know how to square the two numbers. Either something was very unusual about that two-week period, or (more likely) NBC Journalists or their source within ICE have misinterpreted some data.
87% is still horrendously one-sided.
* https://www.ice.gov/detain/detention-management in the sheet labeled “Facilities FY25”. You will have to add them up yourself.
Why isn’t Andrew Tate (and the many mini-Tates) making a fuss about this?
Anti-feminists like Tate and Rogen are extremely influential, and are probably a major reason Trump is president right now. (The demographic that moved most towards Trump was young men). If they were dedicated to making this an issue, it would be an issue.
I agree, 87% is extreme. Why do you suppose that ICE is so focused on men? It’s certainly not that ICE is run by man-hating radical feminists.
I can think of some possible reasons, but they’re pure speculation on my part. It might be sexism (men are stereotypically more dangerous, and ICE wants to give the impression they’re going after dangerous people). It might be convenience (due to job segregation, men might be more likely to have jobs where large groups congregate in a way that makes going after them and fulfilling quotas more convenient for ICE). But as I said, that’s pure speculation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wQvco9ViMc
Sad but true.
You want me to dive into the dark psyche of Tate and his ilk? I can think of sewers I’d rather swim in.
But you’re correct of course. The right/conservative/traditionalist chatosphere has paid no more attention to this aspect of the detentions/deportations than has the left/progressive.
Do you think the right specifically should be doing this? The left is only for women, the right is for men. Is that really what you think? I doubt it.
So the question stands. Why didn’t you know? Why doesn’t the left/progressive chatosphere pay attention to this issue? You don’t dispute my contention that it would be ablaze if the gender-disparity were in the opposite direction.
I think there are many intersecting/interacting dynamics, including those you mentioned. One thing worth looking at is whether there are differences in the proportion of men and women in the migrant population who have tattoos, if the tattoos are different, and if ICE agents are more likely to use them as a proxy for criminality when sported by men.
But I think the biggest factor is the demonisation of migrant men, particularly Mexicans. It’s “bad Hombres” they’re going for, not “bad Mujeres”.
OK I am going to probably upset some fragile male egos, but here goes…
Although ICE’s roundup is criminal and bullshit and fascist and wrong, their focus on men makes sense, internally. Their pretext is that the migrants are violent criminals.
Of course they are wrong. But if we reason from the assumption, and they are going after violent criminals, it makes sense that they would go for men, since the huge majority of violent criminals are men.
Like if there generally was a violent crime, like a rapist or murderer at large, it wouldn’t be sexist for the authorities to round up men, since statistically speaking it is overwhelmingly likely that any violent criminal is a man.
So if they were rounding up men and women in equal numbers it would damage their pretext – which I emphasise again, is bullshit – that they are locking up violent criminals. So it is a matter of trying to make their bullshit look at least slightly less bullshit by following legitimate practices (e.g. focusing on men)
The reason I stuck my head in here is that we need to acknowledge that law enforcement efforts that focus on men are not innately sexist since men objectively are more likely to commit crimes. This would not be true if there were law enforcement efforts that focused on women, that would be sexist, since there’s no objective basis to pursue women for crimes.
There it is. Are you OK, men? Did your egoes survive this truth? Any male tears? I am sure Andrew Tate has a tissue for you.
The only men in this conversation have been Ampersand and myself. Since I doubt you’re referring to him, I must assume you mean me in particular. Well, let’s see how my ego stands up.
So far I agree completely.
And I agree that this makes sense, internally to the ICE world-view, but in so far as you appear to be stating it as though it were an unchangeable objective truth, I would point that both “violent” and “criminal” are social constructs.
Whether it would be sexist or not is a question of semantics, not fact. Is this the kind of differential treatment to which we think the word “sexist” (or any other “—ist”) should apply?
But before you nail your colours too firmly to this particular mast, perhaps you would like to consider some other examples of differential treatment that would not be “—ist” by this standard.
It’s not sexist by this standard for employers to refuse to employ women because statistically they are far more likely to take parental leave.
It’s not ablist to refuse to employ disabled people, because the accommodations they need are expensive and inconvenient.
It makes perfect sense, internally, for white supremacists to deny black people human rights, because according to their world-view, black people aren’t human.
And it’s certainly not racist for ICE to round up people who look Mexican.
If you are genuinely prepared to stand up in a room full of women, disabled, black and Mexican people and say all of these things without regard to their fragile egos, then I should commend your intellectual consistency just as I would deplore your lack of sensitivity. I would disagree with you, but our disagreement would be purely on the semantic question: I would apply the relevant “—ist” word to all of these.
But if you find your own ego quivering at any of them, then perhaps you might have a little more sympathy for the fragility of men’s.
As I understand it, men, or masculinity, is a particular interest of Tate’s. One of his issue areas.
So? Making America great again is a particular interest of Trump’s. Saving your soul was a particular interest of Falwell’s, and filling my bank account with money is a particular interest of the Nigerian Prince in my inbox. They’re all fraudsters and charlatans, irrespective of the specifics of their particular grift.
I don’t know why you’re so focused on Tate in this thread, but it’s starting to look like you really don’t want to address the points I’ve raised.
I’ve mentioned Tate twice; once as an example of how current big-name antifeminists haven’t spoken up about the disproportionate number of men being deported, and once to clarify that I’d chosen him because he has a focus on male issues, not (as you seemed to imply) as an example of “the right” generally.
The only reason you think mentioning a famous anti-feminist twice is being “focused” on Tate is that your standards are unreasonable.
My guess? Because we’re unaware of it. (How long have you been aware of it, Daran?) It’s not something that’s basically never mentioned on the news, and there’s no dedicated left orgs focusing on how sexism hurts men.
Why are there no dedicated left orgs like that? Because MRAs have aligned themselves (for the most part) with the right. I suspect you’ll claim MRAs were “chased” off by feminists, but I’m not persuaded. The left has always had internal strife and cross-criticism between various factions; the difference with MRAs is that most of them genuinely prefer right-wing politics, so they don’t have a strong desire to build a home on the left.
When I ask a question about you or more generally, “the left” (which for the purposes of discussion subsumes “progressive” even though I don’t consider the two words to be synonymous), and you reply “Tate”, I don’t think it is unreasonable for me to think you’re evading. My “sewer” comment was, of course, a counter-evasion, but since you pressed me, I hope my “he’s a fraud” answer is sufficient. If you want a fuller one, it would be that Tate hasn’t talked about this issue because he a doesn’t know, b doesn’t care, c doesn’t see an opportunity to make money from it, d is too wrapped up in his legal problems, e any of the above, f all of the above, g I don’t really know what goes on in his head, h I don’t care, the man utterly disgusts me. Now may I please be allowed to climb out of this sewer?
How long have I been aware of what? That violence by the state or by state actors is overwhelmingly perpetrated against men is something I’ve been aware of for over thirty years, but I’ve only found the figures specifically pertaining to migrant detention/deportation in/from the US in 2025 since I decided to comment on this blog post.
I honestly can’t remember if I’ve seen figures pertaining to previous years. Figures in the 80-90% range are typical of state violence against men, so they would not have struck me as particularly memorable.
I assume you intended a single negative: It’s basically never mentioned in the news.
That’s part of it, I agree. In the NBC piece, the matter is briefly mentioned partway through the articled, but not discussed or developed. If the journalists had been given data that pointed to overwhelming female victimisation, they would likely have 1 lead with it, 2 framed it as “violence against women”, 3 contextualised within the wider picture of violence against women, 4 contacted women’s advocates for comment. Those advocates would then have used their organisational platforms to promulgate the information. So yes, I agree that facts indicating female victimisation get a kickstart from the mainstream news media that facts indicating male victimisation do not get.
But I don’t think that’s all of it. Here’s a missed opportunity for the left in general (and feminists in particular) to have learned about the gender disparity in detentions/deportations.
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2025/05/06/gendered-consequences-of-u-s-mass-deportations-how-shifting-migration-policiesendanger-women-and-girls/
The single most important fact needed to evaluate this claim – let alone reach it from an initially neutral position – is that 80-90% of those detained and deported are male. Any honest competent scholar would have sought out this information before making such a claim, and informed their readers when making it. If 2025 data wasn’t available at the time of writing (some of the links are to articles posted in March), then they should have located the next best thing, which is data for earlier years.
There is no reference to this anywhere in the article. So are they dishonest. incompetent, or both?
There is nothing unusual about this article. I must have seen hundreds of articles written by feminist scholars that are systematically blind to any information that contradicts their ideology. In my view, it is an academically fraudulent field, which is not to suggest that there there aren’t individual works, and individual scholars, of the highest quality.
This is already long enough. I’ll address the final part of your comment separately.
Before I do that, I have some more data to bring to the table.
https://tracreports.org/phptools/immigration/remove/
Click on “gender” and then “male” in the bottom left menu. Select “by Month and Year” and “percent” from the radio buttons. In every month from the beginning of the dataset (October 2002) until September 2019 deportations from the US have been in the 85-95% male range. This was the case throughout most of Trump’s first term. Only at the tail end of it did it dip into the low 80s, returning back to the higher range when Biden took over. Then, during the second half of Biden’s term, there was a steeper decline, down to 70% in November 2023 before climbing back to 79% in February 2024, the latest figures available. Over the entire period 4,932,674 males and 544,160 females were deported together with a further 877 whose gender was not recorded. That’s almost bang on 90% male. I was not surprised to discover this. This is exactly what I expected to find.
In the UK there’s the Men and Boys Coalition. In the US there is the American Institute for Boys and Men. You’ll have a hard job persuading me that Ally Fogg isn’t a left-winger, or that Glenn Poole isn’t progressive. I know less about the AIBM, but this doesn’t strike me as the kind of article a right-wing organisation would publish: https://aibm.org/commentary/the-radical-act-of-seeing-black-men/
What do Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Suzanne Steinmetz and Erin Pizzey have in common? Well several things of course, but one of them is they have suffered threats of violence themselves for having the temerity to suggest that domestic violence can be female-on-male. The three academics also suffered adverse professional consequences.
That was then, and things are different now. There is broad acceptance within feminism that female-perpetration and male-victimisation exists and that perhaps something should be done about this. But let’s not forget that you – that’s a plural you, of course – had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this position, and some of those that did the dragging have paid a heavy price to do so.
And you’re also not going to persuade me that I haven’t been attacked and vilified and lied about by feminists, at various times other the years, because I have, at times on this very blog. I haven’t been “chased off” – I’m still a progressive lefty, but it’s not been a comfortable ideological home.
I’m not an expert in the history of the left; I can really only speak to my experience of it, which goes back nearly 30 years. And that experience is that it perfectly acceptable to criticise and cross-criticise so long as you don’t step outside the hegemonic ideological framework. But it is not ok to criticise the framework itself, even if your criticism is rooted in progressive values.
A lot of them do, I accept that. Some of them have been pushed there by the hostility. Some are right-wingers who don’t genuinely care about men or boys, but see it as a way to attack wokism – the contradictions are so glaringly blatant to anyone who hasn’t drunk the cool-aid that it really is an obvious line of attack. And some of those who might have started from that position find, after a while, that they really do care about men and boys after all. Those people I will accept and make common cause with when our interest coincide, but they’re still going to be generally right-wing in outlook. When you take all these factors into account, it really isn’t a surprise that the men’s movement looks to you the way it does, especially when you take your own outgroup homogeniety and outgroup extremism biases into account.
Speaking as a man I would never join an organisation that focuses on men’s issues. To do so would be incredibly sexist – to devote yourselves to the needs of the group that perpetrates patriarchy, rather than the group that suffers from it? It’s like setting up an organisation to help ethnic Germans in Nazi Germany.
I disagree. I do think there are ways that men are hurt by sexism that have no equivalent in your Nazi Germany analogy.
Due to occupational segregation, for example, over ninety percent of workplace deaths in the U.S. are male. Being against this is not contrary to being against the ways occupational segregation harms women – it’s complimentary.
That’s not a problem analogous to being an ethnic German in 1940.
I don’t think it’s good for feminism that ending sexism is seen as something without direct benefits for men, when it’s simply not true.
You’re only saying that because you have a fragile ego and you want to protect your own privilege.
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So, a little off topic, but not much; as I’m sure you’re all aware the Supreme Court has quite unsurprisingly ruled that injunctions by District Courts must be limited to the case in front of them, including being limited to the parties thereto and no further. I say unsurprisingly because Justice Thomas has been hinting in his opinions for years that the Court should examine the issue. So now there is no nationwide bar to the current Administration trying to deny citizenship to people born in the U.S. of parents who are not in the U.S. legally.
It has been my opinion that the Constitution is pretty clear on this and that if you’re born in the U.S. you are a citizen of the U.S., full stop. However, my attention was directed to the fact that the Supreme Court has issued an opinion touching on this topic previously, and did so not very long after the 14th Amendment was adopted. They’re called the Slaughterhouse Cases (83 US 36, from 1872), and the majority opinion includes this passage on page 73:
The citizenship laws of Mexico are such that anyone born outside of Mexican territory but who has at least one Mexican parent is considered a natural-born citizen of Mexico. On that basis, the above-quoted passage would seem to indicate that such a person should not be considered a citizen of the United States.
I don’t presume to guess what the current Justices will make of that. I DO presume that the current Administration’s Department of Justice will cite this opinion in court. So from my viewpoint this just got a lot more interesting, as before this I figured that the Administration didn’t have a hope in Hell of prevailing. Now I’m not so sure.
Amp:
First, I’ll pick a nit – I think that last word should be complementary, not complimentary.
Second – why does such occupational segregation exist? More men die in hazardous occupations because more men work in such occupations. But why do more men work in such occupations? Is it because women are denied entry into them for no justification? Is it because such occupations require more upper body strength that men are far more likely to have than women? Is it because women don’t WANT to enter those occupations?
And what is the remedy? That more women enter those occupations so that more women die? Will that result in LESS harm being done to women by occupational segregation? Does this NEED a remedy? Or is this just the natural order of things?
Amp:
How disproportionate is it? What proportion do males make up of the population of people who are illegally in the U.S.? I would imagine that’s a fuzzy number because such people aren’t eager to be counted.
“So from my viewpoint this just got a lot more interesting”
Well as long as it’s interesting to you. We are talking about millions of people being stripped of their rights, tortured and ethnically cleansed, but that’s a small price to pay to keep you interested, Ron.
Normally I’d be up for a little debate on gender and its implications, but in this case all I can say is WHO CARES? People are being kidnapped, tortured, killed, and enslaved by or on behalf of the US government. Who cares if more of them are male or female? Can we forget about gender for a moment and concentrate on stopping the ongoing genocide?
I doubt anyone here has the power to do that.
I did send the AIBM a message, citing the statistics on deportation and finishing as follows:
“this one” being the inequality and injustice of selectively targeting males for detention and deportation. Maybe the AIBM will devote some attention to this matter. Maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, then my message has done no harm. If it does, then its organisational lobbying influence is probably more significant than any individual in this thread.
Edited to add: Where the majority of victims of an injustice are female, or believed to be so, it is typical in this space for attention to be focused on that fact and those victims. I don’t recall you ever complaining about this, Dianne.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/257783/estimated-number-of-illegal-immigrants-in-the-us-by-age-and-sex/
There are estimated to be slightly more men than women, but not ten times as many.
‘ Who cares if more of them are male or female? ‘
I will always call out when the patriarchy is cracking down on women and elevating men, ESPECIALLY in a genocidal situation
Daran, ICE has quotas to meet. They are kidnapping those who are easiest to get. They have deported, detained, or disappeared legal residents, tourists, children actively undergoing treatment for cancer, and US citizens. They have resisted returning those who they admit they deported by mistake. Laura Loomer recently posted a tweet in which she overtly called for genocide. Do you really think that they’re going to not kidnap women or girls under those circumstances? That ICE is going onto job sites and saying, “Excuse me ma’am” to the women and arresting the men? Targeting specific sites because they employ more men (as opposed to because they’re easy targets and less likely to contain people who will shoot back than actually going after gang members?) Sorry, just not plausible.
And if they are, then…what? Would you be happier if they built a second prison in El Salvador for female victims? Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find space for everyone at Alligator Auschwitz*.
*Including you if you get into their clutches. Please, please, do NOT visit the US right now. That includes everyone reading this who is outside the US. Just stay away until this is all over. If it ever is.
Exactly Dianne. The ICE genocide is another patriarchal measure to strip women of their rights, their freedom and very often, their lives. The fact that MRAs are claiming men are disproportionately effected is yet another attempt to promote the bullshit pseudo-ideology of “men’s rights”. Women’s rights yes, but in the words of the great Amy Poehler, ‘men’s rights are nothing’.
I see two separate issues here. The first is the historic 87% figure, which is actually less of a disparity than you’d expect if ICE was focusing on violent felons (as I believe they pretty much were until Trump’s second term). According to Google:
So, that aspect isn’t very complicated. Men commit way more violent crimes than women do.
The second issue is that more recent 99.5% figure, beginning when they started losing focus on violent felons in February. One would expect the reverse…to get a higher percentage of women. This indicates to me that they have recently started to target men because they are men. I think this is because, in the patriarchy, the general public will accept a higher level of brutality against men than against women. This is a very troubling pattern.
I have doubts about any data coming out of the federal government these days, especially on issues that Trump wants to look good on.
I mean, look at this page and tell me I’m wrong to take that position.
Hmm…link failed. Not sure why. Trying again: https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/
Good point, Dianne. We really have no idea how many people ICE has picked up, and they very well may not know either. We also don’t know how many people have been kidnapped by criminals posing as ICE (not that the way ICE is going abort things ISN’T criminal).
Also, to alleviate any concerns that ICE won’t arrest women and/or (probably) white people…https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/06/trump-voting-family-canadian-mother-detained-immigration-status
Amp:
I’ll take a swing at this.
This conversation has been interesting to me, because I’ve found some people I normally disagree with very strenuously saying the obvious and correct thing. Daran asked why the left doesn’t seem interested in the inherent sexism of the vast majority of ICE detainees being male. Amp asked why right-coded figures that focus on men’s issues like Andrew Tate aren’t either, and Avvaaa said the true and obvious thing: Trump’s directive has been to pick up people that are violently breaking laws, men disproportionately break laws, and so you could reasonably expect a crackdown on violent criminals to disproportionately effect men. I’ll go further: I don’t think people who are concerned with masculinity will be very empathetic to the plights of people they view as violent criminals, and don’t see a reason to die on that hill.
But I want to point out the divorce from normal left of center practice when it comes to men as a distinct class. If I added just one vector to the conversation, take race as an example, and said that while there are obviously problems with the system (and trust me: I agree with a lot of people who have criticisms of America’s incarceration system) black men do disproportionately commit crime, and therefore reasonably should be overrepresented in jails. Despite that being also obvious and true, there is a cottage industry on the left of diving deep into this and treating it as a facial example of racism. I’ve been told, I’m pretty sure even here, that the disproportionate outcome is evidence of the discrimination. I’m not convinced of that, while I’m more than willing to listen to complaints about drug charges and plea deals, when we get to things where the police have less discretion, like murder, I think the argument wears thin.
I say this explicitly as bait… I’m not really interested in rehashing the old arguments about systemic racism, but I think there’s going to be people who aren’t able to let that go. People are significantly much more interested in things when they happen to certain people, and willing to change their standards accordingly.
My argument is that the left treats men as a class differently than they treat almost any other class, with few exceptions. Those exceptions share a trait: they are groups that they view as enfranchised. Attention drawn to the struggle of any enfranchised group tends to be met with derision or outright hostility, I’d point to the response from Ajax or deBatz above as examples. And while that’s not universal, Amp, you’ve been pretty good at pushing back against things like that, I don’t believe that the left generally is a welcoming environment for discussing issues that disproportionately effect men.
And that’s been happening for decades. Erin Pizzey founded the UK’s first domestic violence shelter in 1971, Chiswick Women’s Aid. She’s spent her life on activism related to giving people safe spaces from domestic violence, often against harsh opposition from authorities. Her organization was eventually rebranded as Refuge , which is currently the UK’s largest shelter system.
Erin Pizzey is now what you would call an MRA, you can read up on her life, it’s fascinating, but to egregiously simplify: The schism was basically that she expressed that there was a difference between women who were innocent victims of violence, and women who were involved in what she called reciprocal violence… That is, something like 60% of women in the shelter system were themselves prone to violence, and while both classes of women deserved shelter, the logic followed that there might be a need to shelter men in some situations. This is less controversial now, but in the 70’s and 80’s this was met with much more opposition than you might expect: I don’t think it’s surprising that all the people, all the feminists, who were previously really interested in supporting her shelter mission couldn’t find it in themselves to fund a men’s shelter, but for expressing the idea that women might be violent too, that men might need help, and trying to organize such a shelter, Erin was the recipient of death threats, her orgs were receiving bomb threats, and the last straw for her was when someone decapitated her dog and left it on her porch. She’d experienced some of that before, but from her own retelling, it became orders of magnitude worse after she started talking about men’s issues. I understand that in these conversations, assertions like what I just said seem hyperbolic, but I can’t for the life of me find anything she did that I think would offend someone enough to make those responses reasonable. She moved to the US, Chiswick Women’s Aid rebranded to Refuge, and Refuge removed her name from their website (this was reinstated as of 2020), she is currently a patron of the ManKind initiative, a UK based resource charity that helps 100,000 men a year through help lines.
I can’t speak for every MRA, but yes, some were literally chased off by feminists.
But really… That’s a heck of an anecdote, but still an anecdote. I don’t know how I’d go about proving that’s a trend, without vaguely gesturing at reality and saying that it seems facially obvious to me. I guess I’d be interested in why you think it is that the left doesn’t have some version of an MRA. What are the left leaning organizations on the left that are concerned with gender equality from a male perspective? And if they don’t exist, why not? What do you think would happen if a lefty in good standing tried to seriously address the topic?
Gah… Corrections:
On Pizzey: The tipping point for her move was when the authorities required a bomb squad to processed her mail before she could receive it, and her dog was shot, not decapitated, and that happened in the US. This might be a Mandela thing, I’m sure that I distinctly remembering her talking about the dog being decapitated, and that being what caused her to move, but regardless: I’ll defer to Wikipedia.
That’s not a good idea in this case. I went down your rabbit hole.
Erin Pizzey’s life story is extraordinary. She has a lot of admirable qualities. Her antifeminism is rooted in her experience of her mother’s abuse. But, her criticism of feminism writ large is radical.
I think feminists were right to protest against her continuing to run her, often horribly over-crowded refuges (avoiding prosecution for that is one of many reasons she had for leaving the U.K.). I found it quite jarring in this interview, the way she goes back and forth between stories of compassion for the women she helped and rants about women making false accusations against their husbands to get quick divorces and the feminized judicial system. She seems to be able to love individual women, but to hate women as a class.
Also, even she acknowledges that her men’s shelter didn’t fail because of her feminist critics, it failed because “Men won’t look after each other…That’s why there’s no men’s movement.” 33:18 start at 32:38 for more context.
So, you’re asking why the left doesn’t focus more on uplifting wealthy, straight white males? Really? Maybe because that’s what the Republican party and centrist Democrats are for.