With the Olympics right around the corner, some athletes competing for the United States have a fancy new private hospitality space in a boutique hotel in Milan. Nice! Three national government bodies went all in, with U.S. Figure Skating, USA Hockey, and US Speedskating joining hands to make sure that America’s finest athletes who compete on ice are swaddled in comfort.
Oh, dear.
There’s that pesky word again. Do we really have to say that they compete on … ice? That word is a bit loaded these days, don’t you think? What if we referred to them all as, perhaps, frozen water competitors? Frozen water aficionados? Highly skilled frozen water athletes?
Well, at least we can change the name of the fancy hospitality center, right? Wouldn’t want people to be referring to it as “Ice House,” because it kinda undercuts the whole fancy hospitality thing if all people are thinking about is America’s masked and violent secret police. So, just a few days out from the Olympics, Ice House is now Winter House.
“Frozen and fascist” by Clay Bennett
Let’s just take a moment to process this. Under the Trump administration, the actions of federal immigration agents are so egregious that merely saying the word “ice” is now too fraught to use. Now that is a toxic brand.
The last-minute renaming of the hospitality space comes on the heels of the administration’s announcement that it would be sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to provide security. The administration has taken pains to explain that the agents in Milan will not be the masked marauders terrorizing American cities and kidnapping children. No, these agents are from the Homeland Security Investigation division, and they are there to “vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations.”
And really, you can 100% trust the administration when it says that it totally will not be conducting any immigration enforcement activities on Italian soil! It’s not as if the Department of Homeland Security actively ignores court orders or insists that ICE agents can do whatever they want, wherever they want, and face no consequences.
Oh, wait. Hmm. It looks like the administration’s stance appears to be that federal agents are absolutely, completely immune, even when they murder someone in cold blood.
Related | This ICE has no business at the Winter Olympics
Italians have already taken to the streets to protest ICE’s presence there, seemingly not persuaded that the HSI agents will behave differently than their typical ICE brethren. And why wouldn’t they? This is a problem of the administration’s own making. As John Sandweg, who was an acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, explained to The Athletic: “One of the things I think that’s really tragic about this kind of approach is the way in which the administration has handled this has just devastated the ICE brand to a point worse than it’s ever been before. To the point where, even at the Olympics, even where it’s really Homeland Security functions, the brand is so tainted that it’s bleeding into it, and it’s impacting their ability to do that mission.”
Sure, but what if, rather than reforming anything or, say, not sending ICE agents to Milan, we just avoided saying “ice” instead? That’ll fix everything!
This isn’t the first time the administration has tried to get around mentioning “ice”—the frozen water version. Last month, Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster response staff were told to avoid using the word “ice” when referring to the winter storm that was on its way to crush huge chunks of the country. That was kind of a problem, since there was actually going to be an ice storm. However, “Watch out for ICE” could remind people of ICE, and the administration didn’t want anybody to be able to make anti-ICE memes.
No, really. FEMA staff were instructed to twist themselves in knots by referring to, say, “freezing rain” in place of “ice” so that no one would be mean to ICE on the internet.
Trump’s secret police are murderous and violent and lawless, and the mere mention of “ice” makes people think of that. Somehow, just changing the names of things doesn’t seem like the right way to fix this, but what do we know?
