This past week disturbing video footage from two separate incidents was aired which should alarm everyone. Ostensibly each was to deliver messages about the Trump administration’s apprehension and deportation of people in our country, but through a different lens, they provide images of how this administration regards women.   

The first showed the ambush of a 30 year old Tuft’s University Ph.D student by six ICE officers, all dressed in black, who jumped her, surrounding and then handcuffing the petite woman as she was quietly walking down a sidewalk in late afternoon.

This seemed almost choreographed to resemble many girls’ and women’s worst nightmares. Under authoritarian dictatorships such behavior is common, but aside from violent suspects, in the U.S., this is not how we typically arrest people. 

Later this same week, a video showed Kristi Noam, Secretary of Homeland Security, visiting one of the world’s deadliest El Salvador prisons, using it as a backdrop to underscore her message and intention to deport people.

Surrounded by guards and wearing a form fitting cotton jersey, she did her power walk before hundreds of the men she had sent there who looked on, locked in cages. The word “dominatrix” came to mind; she lacked only the whip. Someone reminded me: Noam is also the woman who had bragged about shooting her dog. Trump was fully aware of what Noam was capable of when he chose her to be our Secretary of Homeland Security.  

These two chilling, visual examples, in the same week, demonstrate that women have more to worry about than their reproductive health.  In forming the U.S. into a police state, Trump and ICE are willing to victimize women as well as use them to further his own agenda. In both cases, his tool-of-choice is fear. 

Mary Orear lives in Rockport