One of the most revealing images of American politics this week wasn’t taken in the corridors of Congress or on a campaign stage. It came from a Home Depot car park, where a team of ICE agents (decked out like a private militia) caught for the camera in full tactical gear. Helmets. Goggles. Assault rifles. Armoured vests emblazoned with POLICE and BORDER PATROL, as if there were a genuine risk they might confuse themselves for something else. They look ready to raid a narco-compound. Instead, they’re preparing to arrest undocumented men looking for a day’s work shifting bricks, fixing roofs, or digging out fence posts. The theatre is the point.
This is how the spectacle works, as Guy Debord wrote in 1967: not just through images, but through social relationships mediated by them. The image is not incidental; it is the message. You’re not meant to ask why ICE is running counter-insurgency drills at a retail park. You’re meant to absorb it. Internalise it. Accept it. The state is watching. It can and will appear anywhere. Even next to a pallet of fertiliser or a discounted lawnmower.
This isn’t law enforcement. It’s a performance of sovereignty.
You can almost hear the language of the press release before it drops: “routine enforcement operation,” “public safety,” “criminal aliens.” But nothing about this is routine, and nothing about it is safe. These are acts of political symbolism. They don’t just enforce the border, they extend it. Into cities. Into suburbs. Into commercial space. The spectacle here is that of domestic militarism in service of market discipline. It is the ICE version of “the boss class knows where you live.”
Where better to stage it than Home Depot? The megastore is a fitting backdrop for this kind of state theatre. It sells the tools of labour without ever acknowledging the people who use them. For years, migrant workers have gathered outside these stores in the hope of picking up casual work, work that’s informal, unprotected, and sometimes unpaid. They build the fences. They haul the timber. They keep the housing economy going while being locked out of its rewards. The American dream requires undocumented labour like the plantation required the enslaved. But when the state shows up, it’s not with contracts or fair wages. It’s with guns.
The message couldn’t be clearer. To be poor, racialised, and undocumented is to be permanently vulnerable to state violence. And to be armed, badged, and white-passing is to be invited to perform that violence with impunity.
The Masked State
The masks matter. They’re not just about tactics or anonymity. They’re part of the mise en scène a visual code that marks these agents as outside the bounds of ordinary society. In Debordian terms, they become representatives of representation, figures whose humanity is obscured to make way for pure function: enforcement, punishment, control. The mask is depersonalising by design. It allows the wearer to disappear into the uniform, into the role, into the image. No names, no eyes, no accountability, just a faceless extension of state power.
But more than that, the mask makes the violence abstract. It shifts the encounter from one between people to one between types: the enforcer and the trespasser, order and threat. This depersonalisation is essential to the spectacle. It allows the state to behave as a machine, and for that machine to be consumed as image. What’s being staged here isn’t protection, or even deterrence. It’s fear, wrapped in camo and performed in public. A choreography of repression in which the individual disappears and only the function remains.
Our Own Border Spectacle
What ICE is doing here is not radically different from the Border Patrol operations we’ve seen in the desert, or from stop-and-search tactics in Britain’s urban peripheries. It’s about disruption, humiliation, fear. But what makes this image so grotesque is the overproduction of violence. You don’t need military hardware to detain a migrant painter with a toolbox. But you do need it if the point is to terrorise, to assert control over a racialised underclass, to turn immigration enforcement into reality television.
In Britain, it’s easy to dismiss this as American madness. But our own government has already embraced the same logic. From dawn raids on Windrush elders to the plan to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda (anywhere, but here), the UK Border Force is increasingly styled as a paramilitary actor. We don’t have a Home Depot, but we do have the Home Office. The spectacle is subtler here (more bureaucratic, more polite) but no less violent.
This is what Debord meant when he said that the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. The ICE agents aren’t individuals. They’re avatars of a system that combines market failure, xenophobia, and spectacle into a single aesthetic: the authoritarian cosplay of empire in decline. Their gear, their stance, their expressions, remember they are not preparing for combat. They’re posing for a future Instagram account called Faces of the Collapse.
It’s easy to mock the image. The tacti-cool fashion. The performative toughness. But the truth is that this is statecraft in the twenty-first century: violent, incoherent, aestheticised1. Not the quiet banality of evil, but its TikTok-ready reboot. The performative nature of ICE’s violence is no less real for being absurd. As with Trump’s wall, it’s not about stopping migration. It’s about staging opposition to it. It’s about showing the base that someone is being punished while the system continues to depend on the very people it persecutes.
The theatre of ICE in a Home Depot parking lot is a performance of sovereignty for a country that has all but lost the capacity to govern. It is the spectacle of a state at war with labour (armed to the teeth and posing for the algorithm). Like all spectacles, its goal is not to protect, but to pacify. The enemy, as ever, is not crime. It’s the working poor.
Footnotes
- The globalised police state ↩︎
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