Raid rehearsal: on the process of ICE propaganda

This article puts forward a mode of critically engaging media produced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It examines ICE videos produced in Los Angeles during a set of 2020 raids, which were made available through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought on by Stanford Law Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. These videos, couched in the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impending 2020 presidential election, and growing public support for the defunding of police, index shifting ICE strategies for apprehending noncitizens in this period. This article offers the analytic lens of rehearsal to read the political significance of the film shoot’s outtakes and the process of managing the agency’s public mediation. In so doing, it uses the notion of rehearsal to reveal how agents’ self-aware missteps during the recorded raids contribute to a larger scale of agency impunity.