The real reason Kristi Noem wants ICE body cams

Kristi Noem does not care about transparency. The Department of Homeland Security secretary has proven herself to be an enthusiastic liar, infamously misrepresenting the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two citizens killed by federal officers working for Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Donald Trump’s recent invasion of Minnesota.

Noem has been at it again with a feeble effort to head off what now appears to be a near-certain shutdown of DHS. Senate Democrats have demanded a series of reforms for federal immigration agents, including mandatory name badges, stricter warrant requirements and a ban on masks. (On Thursday they blocked a spending bill that did not include the measures; funding for the department will expire on Friday night.) On Feb. 2, under fire for her chaotic and deadly management of DHS, Noem announced that ICE agents would start wearing body cameras, a change she characterized as being in line with the “most transparent administration in American history.”

By ending her tweet with such an obvious lie — one only has to look at the administration’s ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files to know how outrageous it was — Noem made it clear that no one should trust her intentions. Instead, her shift marked a transparent attempt to manipulate Democrats by offering them a politically popular compromise that would prove useless at reining in ICE abuses. If anything, under the department’s current management, there’s every reason to believe that body cameras could make the situation worse. Too many of the people being recruited by ICE could be inspired to double down on the brutality for an online MAGA audience that seems to relish videos of immigrants and their allies being assaulted by law enforcement.

The mainstream media and far too many Democrats have treated body cameras as an unalloyed good that helps keep police accountable to the public. But, as criminal justice journalist Radley Balko told Salon, “Body cameras are only as effective as the policies that govern their use.”

“If a police agency can withhold footage that’s incriminating but release footage that’s exculpatory, that isn’t transparency,” he added. “It’s propaganda.”

Research on the use of police body cameras is mixed. A meta review of 30 studies shows that body cameras “do not have clear or consistent effects on officers’ use of force, arrests, or other activities.” As Balko noted, strict policies that force police to be swift and thorough in releasing footage have been shown to improve police behavior. But, as he told Salon, DHS under Noem has “a history of brazenly lying to the public, lying to and defying the courts, and refusing to turn over evidence when ordered by a judge,” which makes it unlikely they would behave responsibly with body camera footage.

As video essayist Lindsay Ellis explained in a December investigation, body camera footage is being repurposed by seedy social media grifters who use embarrassing tapes of DWIs and other arrests as a cheap way to get high-engagement content. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the television show “Cops” — which ran for an eye-popping 24 years, from 1989 to 2013 — but it turns out there’s a big audience of people who get a voyeuristic thrill in watching others being apprehended. the is especially true if viewers have a racist or sexist animus toward the arrestees.

Feeding this public appetite for sadism has been an animating feature of Noem’s DHS. According to an October report from CNN, the department has been using violent videos of immigrants getting snatched as propaganda to titillate the MAGA base, recruit cruel people for jobs and terrify urban communities into wondering if they will be next. Footage shot by ICE and CBP agents is edited into perverse sizzle reels, which are often accompanied by dehumanizing rhetoric that positions immigrants as animals being hunted. “Bag it. Tag it. Take it down,” read the caption on one video, with “it” referring to the human beings targeted by ICE.

Greg Bovino, the CBP agent who, until recently, led Trump’s assault on Minneapolis, understood that his job wasn’t just deporting immigrants; it also involved gathering footage for the administration’s violent propaganda. Sporting an SS-style trench coat and a fascist haircut, Bovino made sure to get himself photographed and filmed throwing tear gas at protesters, taunting residents and overseeing agents as they kidnapped and beat up American citizens who just happened to be Latino.

Bovino was pushed into retirement after the killings of Good and Pretti, but as Salon’s Jason Kyle Howard argued, this was a cosmetic shift meant to disguise that there is no “substantive change in policy.” Reports indicate that Bovino is tightly aligned with Noem and her top adviser Corey Lewandowski, who seem to share a general loathing for all non-white immigrants, regardless of legal status. On Wednesday, for instance, DHS posted on X, “Remember what they did to our country,” accompanied by photos of dark-skinned people legally entering the country, as if it were self-evident that this is bad. 

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On Wednesday, CNN shared body camera footage from the shooting of Marimar Martinez, a Montessori school teacher in Chicago with no criminal record. Despite CBP claims that Martinez attacked border patrol with her car, the footage appears to show the agents were the aggressors. After riddling the unarmed her with bullets, the shooter texted other agents, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.

So far, Homeland Security’s communications team seems to be treating Martinez’s shooting as a political advantage. They reposted the video on X, falsely claiming that it shows her as a “violent rioter,” implying she deserved to die. (Martinez survived, but she was badly injured.) Certainly, racist fanboys of the administration are ready to believe the worst about a woman with a Latino last name, and many responded with posts and comments taking pleasure in her suffering and insisting that victims of DHS violence are to blame for their failure to “comply.”

But even on a right-wing wasteland like X, most of the replies are people pointing out that the video obviously shows that agents hit Martinez with their car and are feigning being “boxed in” to excuse their attack on this young woman. Polling data backs up this anecdotal display of repulsion towards racist violence. Both the approval ratings for ICE and for Trump’s immigration agenda have been dropping at a rate that is nearly unheard-of in opinion data-collecting.

Noem and her staff are mistaken if they think they’ll win American hearts and minds by celebrating brutality and violating basic human rights. But the belief that other people are secretly as bigoted as they are has long been the driving myth of the authoritarian right.

That’s why Democrats should be wary of Noem offering up body cameras as a panacea. It won’t work to curb ICE abuses and, under her leadership, it will probably just be used to generate more racist propaganda. Nor should Democrats be mollified by White House border czar Tom Homan promising an end to the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota — especially as DHS immediately undercut that message by posting that the crackdown on “fraud,” which is the lie they’ve used to justify the assault on the state, is continuing.

Noem clearly hoped she could trick Democrats into voting for DHS funding without giving an inch on her goal to terrorize and deport non-white people. So far, it hasn’t worked. As tempting as it might be to take her fig leaf as a win and move on, Democrats must hold firm in their demands for real reform and accountability. Or they risk looking like dupes when there’s no slowdown of social media videos showing ICE and CBP agents acting like an American gestapo.