In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films, viewers are shown the savage, primitive Romans reveling in the grotesqueries of the arena, and are meant to be disgusted by their bloodlust, even as they themselves watch along. For the Romans, one can see how the spectacle itself would have reinforced their perception of a line between themselves and their captives—a process of mass socialization in which the subordinate status of those they saw as barbarians was reinforced by their deaths being made fodder for entertainment. If the gods wanted your suffering to matter, you wouldn’t be here for my amusement. Given that the film’s audience is watching and thrilling to the same scenes, the movie seem to be asking, how different are people today from the jeering mob in the arena?
We don’t have arenas with death matches anymore. But turning human suffering into spectacle did not die out in antiquity. Instead, we have social media and reality television, which allow even more of a remove from what the audience sees. The Trump administration is now trying to showcase its program of “mass deportation” as reality-show style entertainment, through which voters will rationalize their cruelty. And just like in the past, many people become numb to brutality when they perceive it as entertainment rather than oppression.
This approach became apparent when, in January, the Trump administration had the reality-show personality and Donald Trump sycophant Dr. Phil go along on an ICE raid in Chicago, enabling him to post a video of an arrest to Instagram. Later that month, on the social network X, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted photographs and video of herself on ICE raids in New York City while in “full glam,” wearing a bulletproof vest and announcing, “Here in New York City this morning we are getting the dirtbags off these streets.” Last week, the White House—the White House—posted a video to X captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” showing ICE officials cuffing people who are being loaded on a plane, presumably to be deported, while a soundtrack of roaring jet engines and unfurling chains plays. (ASMR refers to a genre of videos that feature sounds people find soothing.)
This reality-show mechanism has worked before—it convinced much of the country that Trump was a very good businessman, after all. The reality-television shows Live PD and Cops, which were canceled amid the George Floyd protests in 2020, skewed audience perceptions about violent crime and police work while, many critics observed, portraying potential abuses as effective policing. The people arrested on the shows were a punch line, there to amuse the viewer—guilt or innocence was irrelevant.
The reality of these deportations has been ugly. Arrests and detentions of Native and Hispanic Americans have led to accusations of racial profiling. People with genuine fears of persecution are being deported to countries they’ve never been to and whose language they don’t speak.
Although the Trump administration has claimed that it is focusing on undocumented criminals, its actions suggest that it is defining criminality extremely loosely. Trump’s focus on individual horror stories of immigrants committing crimes notwithstanding, immigrants, including those who are undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than citizens—not because they are inherently more law-abiding, but because they have greater reasons to want to avoid trouble. There aren’t enough undocumented criminals to justify a “mass” deportation on the scale Trump has promised. Noncriminals will have to go as well, which is what is happening. Frustrated with the low numbers of deportations—fewer undocumented immigrants have been deported under Trump than were under Joe Biden in a similar period—Trump has now ordered ICE to focus on expelling undocumented children.
The Trump administration has withdrawn humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans who were cleared by background checks and allowed to stay for “urgent humanitarian reasons.” These are neither immigrants who are here illegally nor criminals; they are simply people from places Trump sees as “shithole countries” who have incurred Trump’s wrath for not being the type of immigrants he wants, such as Scandinavians and white people from South Africa. Many Americans might want them to be treated fairly, with due process. But the Trump administration needs people to think they are all “dirtbags” so that treating them like human beings is unnecessary. The Deportation Show can convince people that those being shipped off are so insignificant, so beneath real Americans, that people may consume their suffering as entertainment. Maybe those mobs that once filled the Flavian Amphitheater weren’t so different from us after all.
The post The Deportation Show appeared first on The Atlantic.
