My father, after a failed semester in college, graduated from a police academy and served, at various times, on a couple of police forces. His experience (which he characterized as “making minimum wage plus a nickel to wear a shiny target right over my heart”) fueled this advice to me, which he gave when I was still a bit too young to understand the full ramifications.

“Son, I want you to remember two things: first, never trust a cop; second, do every damn thing they say. The badge attracts the kind of (sexually explicit epithet) who gets his jollies by making other people’s lives a living hell.”

That was in the mid-1980s, and it referred to police officers with half a year’s training, at one of the few times in American history when we got halfway serious about trying to rein in police abuses.

In 2002, in response to the September 11 attacks, ICE was created as a special police force to round up foreigners in the US. It had been a right-wing wish list item for over a decade beforehand, but civil liberties activists had, until then, managed to prevent Congress from making it happen. Thanks to anti-Islamic paranoia and a Bush administration which would go on to make torture official government policy, the civil liberties people lost the fight, and ICE was created.

And let us be perfectly blunt: from the very beginning, ICE was intended to be a white supremacist organization with no accountability and nearly infinite powers. By its very nature it was intended to attract exactly the kind of person my father tried to warn me about- the sadists, the bullies, the undercover Klansmen. They were restrained by one thing and one thing only- the need of their bosses and their political superiors to pretend that racism had nothing to do whatever with immigration policy.

Then came Trump, who made it both politically and socially acceptable to be openly white supremacist again.

Today, in attempts to hit the purge goals set by the Trump administration, new ICE recruits are going straight from signing the paperwork to the front lines. Many of them have been repeatedly rejected b police departments and military services for incompetence or bad attitudes. There is no background check. There is no training. There is, at most, a questionnaire in which the most important feature is not training in law enforcement or public safety, but rather loyalty to Donald John Trump.

This is a group of men with nigh absolute power, made up of people who have waited all their lives to have power so they can abuse it, backed by superiors who want to see violence, chaos, and fear. And their orders from the top are loud and clear: haul in as many brown people as possible, legal or not, foreigners or citizens, elderly or children, and make Examples of them. Create a situation so horrible that people fleeing brutal regimes or organized crime will fear the United States more than they fear drug lords or dictators.

These people were hired to be evil, and the people who apply are applying specifically for the opportunity to be evil.