Crossing the empathy wall
Part 1: How can I know the grief and fear of “the enemy”?
“When we reach the limit of how much suffering we can take, we sometimes use cruelty as a defense against our fear of pain.” – Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You [see Note]
A friend at BIJAN, a Massachusetts non-profit that trains lawyers and laypeople to accompany immigrants at their court hearings, recently shared the following comment:
A big push to reintegrate ex-ICE officers into society is important.
As teams verify ICE actions, it's often very useful to urge their agents to get a different job…and make amends for the harm they've done in this job.
It's so important to turn that shame into something constructive. Otherwise many of them get further radicalized.
This is a hard truth. It resonates for me as truth, yet I haven’t gotten past my own hatred for what these people are doing. I haven’t been able to understand how anyone could justify such actions and bury their own awareness of the evil they are doing.
How do I stop dehumanizing a whole category of such people whose actions I despise? How do I stop demonizing them as a class and recognize, instead, that they are in the same boat with me?
Nick Miroff’s 7/10/20257/10/2025 Atlantic article, “Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable.” [republished by MSN], gives me an opening. Miroff writes that while the 20,000 employee agency “ICE occupies an exalted place in President Donald Trump’s hierarchy of law enforcement,…the reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous.”
Officers and agents are required to work long weekend and pre-dawn hours and to play roles that seem villainous in the eyes of most Americans. They are under intense pressure from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to meet impossible arrests quotas, numbers like 5,000 a day or 1 million a year—the latter four times ICE’s regular capacity to meet.
But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back.
More seriously for moral, many career ICE employees originally joined with the intention of helping to protect the nation from genuinely serious crime threats, not from non-violent undocumented immigrant families.
Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.
“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible”….
At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me.
“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
I’m not highlighting Miroff’s article to offer any excuses for the horrors we are seeing. ICE and other federal enforcement officers are carrying out extremes of deception, entrapment, and militarized assault, doing so in the eyes of the media with increasing deliberateness. Homeland Security is in effect practicing state terrorism, and some of these agents apparently enjoy being part of such vigilante posses.
Yet as my BIJAN friend points out, there are others who feel trapped into complicity with actions they are quietly opposed to and ashamed of.
I see no clear way forward in this. My commitment to justice and to opposing abuse of authority spotlights every disturbing story I read. My gut reaction is to want punishment. Vengeance. I am discovering a would-be “counter vigilante” in myself.
Still, this sort of stereotyping of people into “good guys” and “bad guys” is what has brought us from the racial civil rights conflicts of the 1950s and 60s into the vastly more powerful and dangerous racist nationalism of the present.
When we don’t know anything about the people we hate, we really don’t know anything expect our own feelings. We rage at the image within the frame. Anyone who appears within the frame receives the full force of our contempt.
The problem here is that to be genuinely compassionate towards others, we must first be compassionate towards ourselves. What I’ve been practicing as I write these recent posts is [see Note] a sort of nonjudgmental self-examination. This involves letting myself see what I don’t like or don’t want to know about myself. But it also involves what Buddhists call maitri, unconditional friendship with ourselves.
It is much more common for us to disapprove of or denigrate ourselves. To want to fix ourselves, or else to fix the world to cater to what we imagine we want and need. I’ve struggled through much of my life with various efforts at self-improvement. I’ve struggled—as we all do—to improve the circumstances and people around me. But this struggle is in fact a damaging aggression against myself. Maitri invites me to welcome—not to like, but to welcome—all aspects of my actual self.
The demons that I imagine possess me, the resentments, the cravings, and so on, are uncomfortable, energetic parts of myself that I haven’t yet learned to integrate. I feel hostility, for example, when I learn of another ICE abduction, another stealth deportation of someone trying to make a living while we Americans exploit their labor yet keep them illegal. I despise the villains and—as I wrote above—I want vengeance against them.
These are powerful, even dangerous feelings, powerful value judgments. They are my socialized brain’s labeling of energy-filled physical emotions, the direct visceral reactions of my body. But what if I were to do as I described in “Living at a crossroads”? What if I were to sit with those physical sensations, that unpleasant, roiling energy, but without directing it toward specific people in the situation I witness?
What if feelings of anger, despisal, vengefulness—yes, and emotions of fear, pain, grief—are parts of the whole situation? What if this confused, violent energy is as much in the hearts of the ICE agents as it is in the hearts of those being arrested and of we who are witnessing the spiritual violence of the situation? And what if I acknowledged that I, too, am one of the “villains,” exploiting “illegal alien” labor every time I buy groceries?
As I’ve said, I’m trying to go broader and deeper. Trying to cross the empathy wall and to allow into my heart all of the conflicting experiences of all of the participants. Not to fix anything. Not to understand “how anyone could justify such actions and bury their own awareness of the evil they are doing.”
Simply wanting to grant that the “villains” and the “victims” and the “witnesses” are all three-dimensional human beings, bringing all the complexity and confusion of their experience together in the moment.
Not by any means a solution or even, perhaps, a way forward. But I don’t know how else to begin than to include the people I currently despise within the human race. And therefore to wonder what is happening within them as they take part in this cultural warfare.
I’m not sure I have what it takes to actually deal with the people whose actions I hate. I am certain, though, that I have to include each of them as a distinct person, not merely as a member of a demonized class.
Notes:
Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (2018)
The far enemy or opposite of compassion is cruelty. When we reach the limit of how much suffering we can take, we sometimes use cruelty as a defense against our fear of pain. This is common for anyone who was abused as a child. Instead of feeling kindness for those who are defenseless and weak, we can feel an irrational desire to hurt them. We protect our vulnerability and fear by hardening. If we do not recognize that by doing this we hurt ourselves as much as we hurt others, we’ll never get free. Booker T. Washington was right when he said, "Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.” Cruelty when rationalized or unacknowledged destroys us. (79)
Recent posts: See America’s culture of disgust (March 11), There is no nation without genuine conversation (March 27), Open, self-aware conversation (4 parts, April 18 – May 16), and Groundlessness (6 parts, June 6 – July 10).
Image source:
“Federal agents at Lake St & Bloomington Ave, Phillips, Minneapolis,” by Taylor Dahlin (6/3/2025) [©®CC BY 2.0 - Attribution 2.0 Generic].