The banality of ICE

Nine months ago, within spitting distance from the deaths of Alex Peretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, Reddit user @Lokja asked the internet, “If you know an ICE agent personally, what is that relationship like now?” Thousands answered. Because yes, of course, we do know ICE agents. The Department of Homeland Security goons who have taken to the streets of US cities to act as an armed gang enforcing the white supremacist whims of the current regime—they are not some distant people group. They are us. 

ICE agents are our neighbors, brothers, cousins, uncles, brothers-in-law, and ex-husbands. They are the meanest girl you knew in high school and they were the kid who picked fights. We served alongside them in the military, way back when, before they became what they are. Or maybe they are the jerks who tried to pick up our ex-girlfriends, the ones we’ve blocked on the college group text, or the people three drinks in who receive ad-hoc counseling from their local bartenders. Many ICE agents are themselves immigrants to the US, they have married immigrants, or their families may originally have entered the country illegally. They’re the dropouts from the National Guard, Marines, or local police force. They’ve failed psychological examinations. They’re wanna-be Proud Boys. Or they started working in the organization before the recent Trump term and have retired or quit to avoid the purge they saw coming. Some stay to act as a “leash” for their colleagues, despite the personal toll it takes on their mental health. And still, many remain “the definition of toxic masculinity,” as one commenter put it.

As another commenter put it, “People who enter that line of work can be like anybody you know including family. People with good hearts and intentions. . . . What defines them is what they do when asked to cross a line they themselves hold. Clearly . . . there is no such line for some.”

In July, the ACLU released a report about ICE’s activity in 2025, titled “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty.” Their detailed 86-page analysis revealed a troubling picture about this federal law enforcement agency, showing that agents and ICE administrators are barely accountable for their cruelty; that they have abused those in its care, including refusing to provide basic medical treatment, hygiene, and adequate food and water; that the agency has employed racial profiling without restraint; that they have carried out raids in schools, shelters, hospitals, and churches, sensitive areas that other administrations have studiously avoided (likely not for the sake of morality as much as a desire to avoid bad PR); and that agents have killed and harassed the noncompliant—both citizens and non-citizens, adults and children—at unprecedented numbers, all while administrators have lied about the agency’s actions to the American public. “No one was off-limits,” writes the authors of the report. “The abuses detailed in this report are about more than immigration. They reveal a blueprint for expanding authoritarian rule in the United States . . . [with the aim of] ‘slicing away at democracy a sliver at a time.’”

In fact, what is most concerning about ICE’s activity is what we don’t know, the headlines never written, the stories never told. The ACLU authors continue: “Erosion of our basic freedoms that would have made headlines only a few years ago are now so commonplace that it is hard to fully take stock of each event or action. Federal law enforcement presence in our communities has not disappeared… [rather,] they have become a new normal. It is a fact of life, obscured or ignored, rather than protested.”

Evil does not announce itself. It does not have to be as obvious as the abuses that occurred in Minneapolis. Yes, it can look like a deportation raid at a hospital or a gun pointed at a defenseless woman, but it can also happen from an office chair. Evil can be mechanized to the push of a button, removing its architects from the inconvenience of witness.

This is what the political writer, Hannah Arendt, meant by her phrase, “the banality of evil.” In 1961, Arendt witnessed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Gestapo operative who had facilitated Hitler’s “Final Solution” with his extraordinary administrative skills. In his role as the head of the Jewish Affairs department of the Nazi intelligence, Eichmann had become the “managing director of the greatest single genocide in history,” writes historian and Eichmann biographer David Cesarani in Becoming Eichmann. Eichmann had killed millions from a desk in Berlin.

Arendt was a Jewish political commentator who had escaped Nazi Germany for the United States, had traveled to Jerusalem on assignment for The New Yorker magazine. Israeli intelligence had kidnapped Eichmann from his home in Argentina, where he had escaped after the regime’s defeat, and Arendt sat in the audience to witness the unrepentant Nazi’s months-long trial by the state of Israel.

In an earlier interview published in 1960 in Life magazine, Eichmann had revealed his own double-mindedness about the “Solution”: on the one hand, he told his interviewer, “I regret nothing.” He praised Hitler as a leader, and alternately referred to Jewish and allied troops as parasites, enemies, and thieves who were “stealing the breath of life from us.” He refused to repent, though he sat 15 years removed from his crimes.

Yet the Nazi also insisted he was no antisemite. He wanted a political, not a violent solution to the “Jewish question,” as did the rest of his colleagues. He had learned Hebrew in order to collaborate more effectively with Jewish leaders, and he respected the zealotry of the Zionists, who shared a goal with the German regime to separate themselves from non-Jewish society. In fact, he wanted what Zionists had always wanted—the separation of Jews from the European nations into a state of their own (albeit a state under the “protectorate” of Nazi Germany). These same religious leaders often assisted Eichmann in cajoling Jews to accept the yellow star, the move to ghettos, the government requisition of Jewish property, and the deportation of Jews out of Europe or to munitions factories to arm the Nazi advances.

But in 1942, when Adolf Hitler ordered the Final Solution that turned terms in labor camps into death sentences, it was Eichmann’s relationships within the Jewish community that allowed the S.S. to transport intended victims to the camps at speed. In court, Eichmann insisted that he had merely followed orders. He was an administrator, not a murderer. He hadn’t turned on the gas, and so his hands were clean (even if he had witnessed the deaths). His job had been to get the Jewish peoples wherever the regime ordered them to go, not to make decisions about the fate of those he was tasked with transporting. “Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on these trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business,” Eichmann told a Life interviewer.

Reflecting on the interview, Life’s editorial board agreed with him: “What he did with himself could have been done by anyone with an equal talent for [staying in] his place, ‘doing his duty,’ taking his orders, and turning his conscience over to the care of the State.”

“At heart,” Eichmann insisted, he was “a sensitive man,” who “can’t look at any suffering without trembling myself.” This is why he looked away when soldiers ordered a crowd into a pit before peppering them with gunfire. This is why he encouraged the regime to develop a more humane way to exterminate, a method that did not require human violence or bullets. Otherwise, as he told a superior in the 1940s, he feared that fulfilling death orders might cultivate an unrestrained “sadism” within the lower troops, an attitude of which he disapproved because he was no sadist.

In fact, when Hannah Arendt arrived in the courtroom, she saw this dissonance in play: the unrepentant Nazi she’d read about sat on a witness stand that the court had enclosed in bullet-proof glass. From his fishbowl, Eichmann looked vulnerable, maybe even sensitive.

But that didn’t really matter because Eichmann was responsible. No matter his reasons for serving the state, he held responsibility for actions done and undone, for actions he had ordered others to do but did not complete himself, for actions his country and party and companies had committed that he had never played a direct role in carrying out. Because, Arendt argued, a person’s intention does not annul the effect of their actions on another person. Though Eichmann may never have meant to murder Jewish people—an intention that Arendt very much doubted, based on the clear antisemitism that Eichmann had demonstrated over years—that did not matter. The fact remained: the Holocaust. And in Eichmann’s work, he had contributed to the aim of that genocide so successfully that, as he had boasted a year earlier to his Life interviewer, his superior General Müller had commended him by saying, “If we had had 50 Eichmanns, then we would have won the war.”

Yet as Arendt looked into Eichmann’s face, Arendt called the evil she found there “banal,” a word that offended many of her peers who had lived through the purge. How could she so minimize his deeds, they wondered. But Arendt was referring to the appearance of evil: It could look unremarkable, like the man seated in the fish bowl. One who commits atrocious evil can appear vulnerable, and the way he commits that evil can take on the rhythms of routine. In Eichmann’s case, evil looked like surrendering his will to the powers-above-his-paygrade to gas a busload of Jews at lunchtime before he returned home to eat with his family at dinnertime.