Inside the Ad Campaign to Convince Trump’s ICE Thugs to ‘Walk Away’
An anti-Trump group is running ads with a message for ICE agents: Quit.
“A mask can’t hide you from your neighbors, your children, and God. They’ll know. You can walk away before the shame follows you home.”
That’s the message an anti-Donald Trump group hopes to convey directly to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents carrying out the president’s violent mass deportation campaign.
The ad campaign from Women’s March WIN features an ICE agent returning home, from a day of breaking car windows and terrorizing immigrant families, to his young daughter. “Daddy, how was your day?” she asks. The camera zooms in on the agent’s distraught face. As he hugs his daughter, text appears on the screen: “What will you say when she asks about your day?”
Women’s March WIN is running the ad on TV in West Palm Beach, Florida – home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where he’s spending Thanksgiving weekend. The ads are also set to run around Chicago, Illinois, and Charlotte, North Carolina, two cities that the Trump administration has targeted with aggressive immigration raids and street round-ups.
“Our goal behind this is not to agitate the public to dislike ICE – I think that ICE is doing that on its own,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March WIN, tells Zeteo. “Our goal here is to talk directly to ICE as representatives of the mothers, the sisters, the abuelas, the daughters that they have to come home to after tearing kids’ parents from them and deporting them, and really have them think about the consequences of their actions from the frame of their own family.”
Simply put, Carmona says, her message to ICE agents is: “Leave. Do not cooperate. Walk away.”
As Trump conducts a sprawling mass deportation campaign, his administration has deployed masked, unidentified, and unaccountable ICE agents around the country to arrest immigrants on the streets and at routine courthouse appearances. His administration has received huge sums of cash from Congress to hire new ICE agents, offering them sizable bonuses and student loan forgiveness, before sending them into communities with little training or vetting. More than a million immigrants have disappeared from the US workforce since Trump took office.
Carmona compares Trump to a Latin American dictator in the mold of Augusto Pinochet in Chile – and the ad campaign is designed to disempower Trump in a similar fashion.
“The people who defeated [Pinochet] changed the battlefield,” she tells Zeteo. “They said: ‘Don’t participate. Lay down your guns. Your life will be better. You won’t have to live with shame.’”
Carmona says the goal is to inspire similar non-cooperation in the US.
“We can find ways to combat this that are in line with our values and don’t have you misaligned with yourself, with your family, with God, with what you believe to be true,” she says. “And there’s actually nothing but honor in that.”
Have a tip for Andrew? Send via Signal aperez.03
Check out more from Zeteo:
Are they buying ad space on Fox? That’s where these ads need to appear.
As long as there is money to be made, and racism in USA, they will never run out of ICE agents unfortunately.