Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual violence.
“If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.” This is the caption that President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social account, attaching it to a video of people of color walking down a dirt road. It is a chilling message, but the policies behind it are based on racist lies that put women in danger, rather than protect them.
The post represents the culmination of nearly a decade spent framing immigrants as threats to women, since the beginning of Trump’s first campaign in 2015, when he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…”
Trump continued this rhetoric in his 2024 campaign, promising to protect women from “criminal migrants” who he said came to “assault, rape and murder our women and girls.”
“I’m going to protect them,” he said, “whether the women like it or not.”
Despite data disproving these claims, and reality reflecting that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens, President Trump and his administration have continued to spread lies about migrants and violence, and continue to falsely position themselves as protectors of women.
Now, in his second term, Trump is attempting to fulfill his promise by using the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, infamously known as ICE.
ICE was founded on March 1, 2003, in response to 9/11, replacing the previous Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Customs Service. ICE was charged with enforcing immigration law and conducting criminal investigations to protect national security and public safety.
However, under the Trump administration, ICE has changed drastically. It has shifted from an organization focused on targeting the “worst first,” a policy described by former acting ICE Director John Sandweg, to an organization focused on making arrests in raw numbers.
Across the country, ICE has been given arrest quotas: numbers of arrests per day that they are expected to meet that range from hundreds to thousands. New protocols for how agents conduct their duties have loosened to meet these quotas. Agents have become increasingly militarized and aggressive in their tactics, donned masks and are now allowed access to formerly “protected areas” like hospitals, churches and schools.Â
But despite surpassing more than 100,000 arrests in June, and the detainee population reaching 66,000 in November, only 10% of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime. The rest? Most had only traffic or immigration-related offenses. Trump’s promise to “protect the women” from violent immigrants does not match the data about these immigrants.
In contrast, ICE’s activities have directly led to the abuse of women.
Multiple women have been sexually assaulted and raped by men impersonating ICE agents, including a Latina woman in Oxon Hill, Maryland. The offender in this case displayed a badge, identified himself as an ICE officer and proceeded to rape the Maryland woman in his car.
This strategy has been repeated several times and is only possible due to the Trump administration’s policies that allow ICE agents to wear masks, plain clothes and not identify themselves. These policies make it impossible to know if someone is truly an agent or just an impersonator.
The problem does not end with impersonators, though. Several reports from women inside ICE detention facilities describe the conditions as rife with abuse. Reports detail women being confined in facilities with men, being subjected to unnecessary gynecological procedures, being leered at while using the toilet and being sexually assaulted and raped.
Women not only suffer in detainment, but also fear for what may come next. ICE’s indiscriminate detainment has led to the arrest and deportation of women who fled their homes seeking asylum from abuse — abuse they may be forced to face again.
Neither ICE nor Trump is protecting women. Instead, they are hurting women. Every dollar spent on raids and detention facilities is a dollar taken from real solutions to violence against women. Now, with ICE’s new budget being equivalent to that of most of the world’s militaries, that is a lot of solutions lost. Solutions like the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, which had its funding frozen back in February. It is time to stop funding racist fears and start funding real change.