For two days in June, I attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. I learned about the event while browsing the DHS website in order to find the phone number of someone who’d been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A pop-up ad linked to an EventBrite page, with free tickets readily available.

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service were all recruiting at the event, but ICE was the main draw. Far more applicants stood in line to submit their résumés for deportation officer than for any other position on offer in the cavernous room.

Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.

There were tactical trucks, motorcycles, and drones; an ambulance, a Humvee, and a kind of mobile command center, all parked inside the Expo. At rest in curtained-off and carpeted recruitment areas, they loomed over the supportive agency staffers who were there to “triage” résumés and offer encouragement to prospective employees. The ICE recruitment area sported two enormous trucks similar to the ones that menaced protesters in Los Angeles in June. When an agent lifted the curtain, I saw piles of coffee tumblers hidden behind their wheels.

At the CBP booth, a glowing snowmobile was parked next to a teepee made of metal poles and synthetic fabric where applicants could sit and charge their phones. Some of the applicants looked a little frightened, less tough than the people in the photographs around them, the diverse officers framed in siren lights, shot from below to emphasize their solemnity and certainty of purpose. The recruiter for the Federal Air Marshal Service told a crowd of people they shouldn’t bother applying if they were fat. “Nothing looks worse than a fat cop,” she said. She drank Pink Monster Ultra Rosá and had multiple dreamcatcher forearm tattoos.

She told us not to apply if we couldn’t do push-ups and sit-ups, or if we were unprepared to run one and a half miles. Candidates who engaged in domestic abuse (“If you like to punch your lady, if you like to punch your boyfriend”) also need not apply, she said. Candidates should show empathy and emphasize what was unique about themselves in interviews. Maybe you saw a car on fire in Colorado and threw blankets on it, she suggested — that’s great. Say you were on a SWAT team in Albuquerque. That’s also great.

The air marshals were the only group to have a dedicated, detailed presentation; the rest relied on prerecorded talks or videos. CBP’s video looked like it was made by professionals. ICE’s, with its Stencil font titles and royalty-free photographs of stainless steel, had the feeling of a grade-school history project, the kind that little boys use as an excuse to shoot each other with Airsoft guns.

The ICE video began with jittery, sepia-toned photographs of the founding fathers and the Federalist Papers, then jumped ahead to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, and from there to mugshots of the September 11 attackers. Though the narration was inaudible, I believe that September 11 was cited to justify the deployment of the men who appeared onscreen next, the ICE agents arresting meatpackers with their hairnets still on.

A solitary fascist marched through the center of the frame as the setting changed around him — from secondhand store, to airport, to warehouse. He was everywhere, protected by his flak vest and holstered pistol.

The banality of these settings juxtaposed with the grandiosity of mission reminded me of a TikTok I had seen recently, which compared the way men and women move through the world. In the video a couple walks through a mall while a series of subtitles narrate their divergent thoughts. The man, ever on his guard, sizes up the threat posed by each passerby: “I can take him,” “I can take him,” or “I’d need backup,” depending on the size of the individual in question. The woman just examines the shop windows, thinking things like, “That’s so cute!” or, “I wish I could buy that.”

Though perhaps an exaggeration of how men and women experience malls, the video suggested that populating one’s field of vision with imaginary threats may offer a sense of purpose that life in suburban America does not always provide.

One of the ICE applicants I spoke with seemed to have an insatiable desire for conflict in line with this hypothesis. All his life, he said, he had hoped to fight in America’s wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. He’d joined the army hoping to fulfill this desire, but the wars had wound down by the time of his enlistment. He never got a chance to fight abroad.

He said his wife had almost been assaulted in Texas, and when she called the police they arrested a man who turned out to be an “illegal alien” and who was promptly deported. He said he’d seen videos of a member of the Taliban getting into an argument at a fast-food restaurant in California (I couldn’t find any evidence of this — not even as a conspiracy), and that he wanted to join ICE to protect his family.

“I learned all these skills in the army — smash and grabs, site exploitation — and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”

Previously impressed by the connections between war and domestic policy elucidated by the historians Kathleen Belew and Stuart Schrader, I found this man’s account almost embarrassingly transparent. It was the most straightforward articulation I’d ever heard of someone bringing the war home.

Other applicants offered similar explanations for their motives.

There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage in Louisiana, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for $20 an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.”

I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all the “savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.

A blind man I spoke to, who was hoping to find a data-centric position with ICE, said he was sick of his current job collecting child support payments from delinquent parents. At present, he said, his “hands were tied” because the law in his state forbade him from sending in sheriffs to collect money from deadbeat dads. In a lilting, basso voice, he told me that “in college I wrote several papers about the harms of illegals in America.”

The last applicant I spoke with said he didn’t care much about the politics of ICE — he just thought his taxes shouldn’t be used to buy school supplies for “illegal alien children.” What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs. “My classmates came up in the same environment as me,” he said, “but now they’re off posting photographs of Lamborghinis on Instagram, standing on balconies of waterfront apartments.”

His dad had also been in ICE and had broken down the doors of a Queens family that had just sat down to dinner when he stormed in. They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware. In the early part of his career, the man traveled to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, What the fuck, dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”

The prospect of travel excited this applicant and many others. In fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job.

A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she’d had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team.

A CBP agent in Arizona said his favorite part of the job was riding horses through the mountains. A staff member of the EMT Hazardous Agent Mitigation & Medical Emergency Response team (HAMMER), a part of the Secret Service that serves the President’s, Vice President’s, and other VIPs’ emergency medical needs, said that he traveled with his ambulance all over the world, loading it into massive C17 airplanes and then sleeping beside it midair. He said it was “almost like camping.”

The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.

In 2025 ICE agents and their contractors have: shackled immigrant women for hours on the bus to the Krome detention center in Miami, locked them up twenty-seven to a cell, and compelled them to urinate and defecate on the floor; beaten Venezuelan prisoners in El Paso, where women report being told by guards that the guards watch them shower via surveillance cameras; deported at least three children who are US citizens, including a 4-year-old receiving treatment for metastatic cancer; and denied countless immigrants access to their attorneys during detention.

The atmosphere of the convention was so repulsive that I had to go outside for about an hour, where I found a small bench next to a man-made lake. The lake was filled with geese diving for food in the water, then bobbing up, heads covered in mud and weeds.

Looking behind me, I realized that this body of water abuts the local offices of Northrop Grumman, which supplies Israel with the Longbow missile delivery system for its Apache attack helicopters and laser weapon delivery systems for its fighter jets. Across the highway was an enormous company headquarters called BigBear.ai, which, as it turned out, is yet another defense contractor, lately being sued for defrauding investors.

This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. It isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.

I could not bring myself to return to the convention. I walked and walked. I bought some food at a Walmart and then spoke to a man in the parking lot who had sawed a square hole into the back of his truck and inserted a window-unit air conditioner inside of it and attached the A/C to a generator. His clothes were drying on the ground.

“Is your car’s A/C broken?” I asked.

“Yep!” he replied, in a cheerful voice. “It’s broken!”

In the Uber on the way home I had a rambling, incomprehensible conversation with a man who told me that working at a car dealership was harder than fighting in a war and that he had the facts to prove it. He said that his ex-manager had been trained to jump out of airplanes but had had a heart attack because of how hard it was to sell cars in Virginia. After this he added, for no reason, “I’m a normal person. When I go to Walmart, I look for the beer in the exact middle of the price range.”

Back at the convention the next morning, a Border Patrol agent was walking the agency’s emotional support dog around the conference perimeter. Her name was Willow, her handler said, and she was 5 years old.

She was giant and soft, with impeccable fur, and had already flown to sixteen different countries. She belonged to a special, docile German breed called the Leonberger and her job was to confer warmth to Border Patrol agents on the verge of committing suicide. She would work as long as she wanted to work and was hungry for lunch, the handler said.

Willow’s presence elicited coos of sympathy from agents whose job it is to impose unshakable traumas on the wretched of the earth. This same sympathy was later extended to a disturbing Department of Defense “BigDog” robot named Confidence, whose handler directed it to waggle its hips and peer up inquisitively at onlookers. Its thin frame resembled a miniature fuselage with imitation deer legs attached to the bottom. Its hooves looked like the wheels of an office chair, and it had a spinning camera on top of its ass.

Apart from its dog-like face, there was nothing creaturely about it, and even this mild resemblance soon disappeared. A DHS agent placed a BODYARMOR SuperDrink on the ground and the dog retrieved it by opening up its entire face to become a mechanical claw.

Back at the ICE booth, a lone protester was at last present, asking a simple question. At the deportation officer recruiting table, he asked the agent, “Have you read Eichmann in Jerusalem?”

“Do you know what the Nazis said?” he asked. “They said they were just following orders. How do you think of your own work in this context?” He pressed ahead: “I’m just trying to figure out if this position is right for me. Do you think it’s right to separate people from their families, their mothers and fathers from their children, hardworking people who pose no threat? Do you think that’s right?”

The agent demurred, turned away. She looked shy and frazzled. He asked her again, “Have you read Eichmann in Jerusalem?” But at this point another agent — a thick-necked, red-faced pig — walked up to the protester and leaned into his face in an effort at intimidation. I am not certain I heard the next part correctly, but I think the man hissed: “Eichmann in WHAT?”