The Man Behind the Vest
The Man Behind the Vest: where personal wounds, national pathology, and institutional brutality converge.
Introduction:
I've been sitting with watching ICE agents terrorize the country, the fabric of our communities, and what keeps surfacing are my experiences working as a therapist in domestic violence, working with perpetrators, as well as working with complex PTSD clients where healing wounds instead of recreating patterns that keep wounds alive, is the main purpose of conscious living. I kept seeing a crossover, a commingling, and as I followed the path of what is under the underbelly of behavior, a clarity of the wounding-in-common surfaced and I was able to write this essay. Critics will say this is projection and biased; I say this is my phenomenology as a prior therapist and my methodology is a short, meta analysis of the literature from a depth psychological perspective. Regardless, this is just one voice, one that struggles to understand how due process, the fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, is now gone, it no longer exists, and peoples' lives are permanently mangled, destroyed by a six-month old government.
Narrative Essay:
Somewhere in America, a man straps on a bulletproof vest before the sun comes up. He’s not going into a warzone, at least not officially, but his body prepares for one. Heart rate spikes. Jaw clenches. Breath shortens. His job title reads Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer, but the word enforcement is the only part that really matters. The rest is paperwork.
He checks his gear, runs over the plan. A family will be pulled from their home this morning. Maybe a bakery owner. Maybe a mother. Maybe a teenager on his way to school. That part doesn’t matter, not to the system. To the man in the vest, it might or it might not. He tells himself it’s the law. He tells himself it’s duty. He tells himself someone has to do it.
But who is the man who does it?
He's not always a thug, not always a bigot. Sometimes, he’s ex-military, sometimes not. Sometimes he came from a working-class home where borders meant very little until 9/11 rewrote the script. Sometimes he has an education, sometimes he barely scraped through high school and found purpose in a uniform. That’s not the heart of it: what drives him isn’t found on a résumé. It’s found in a private place, the one between fear and identity.
Somewhere in his history, there may have been pain. Not always visible, but the kind of pain that starts early, like when a child is bullied at school, mocked for crying, shamed in church, punished at home. Behavioral psychology tells us that wounded children typically choose one of two survival paths: they either become protectors and vow to never let anyone suffer what they endured, or they become perpetrators, lashing outward with the same weapons that once damaged their own skin, heart and soul.
And there’s something else, something more haunting. These wounded boys who once felt invisible, whose pain was ignored, whose suffering was dismissed, they grow up to become legal bullies. Given badges, weapons, and commands, they find institutional ways to reenact the very powerlessness they once endured. And still, they hide. They hide behind dark sunglasses, behind uniforms without name tags, behind the authority of the system. In this way, they repeat the deepest wound of all: not being seen. As children, they were overlooked, unacknowledged, the assaults on them kept secret. As ICE agents, they continue the pattern ensuring that they are not known for their acts or their consequences. Their anonymity is not just procedural, it is psychological. A refusal to be identified becomes its own act of violence. The perpetrator who conceals his identity is not protecting himself from danger: he is preserving his childhood wound.
That’s the buried truth behind many in uniform: not evil, not ideology, but a haunting, private wound walking the streets in government gear, looking for vindication. A boy humiliated by a screaming father grows into a man who screams with authority. A teen who once felt powerless in a locker room finds meaning behind a badge and a clipboard, muscles clenched around the memory of once being small.
Carl Jung wrote that “every individual is a criminal in kind. He is potentially everything.” And, “the larger the crowd, the more negligible the individual becomes.” When these unresolved wounds go ignored not only in one life, but across a whole society, and what emerges is a collective neurosis, a national shadow, a system that performs its trauma instead of healing it.
In his exploration of the shadow, Jung warned: “The change must begin with one individual. It might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.”
And still, we looked away. From the father’s belt. From the coach’s slap. From the Sunday sermons shaming girls for their bodies and boys for their tears. We dismissed the cruelty. We renamed it tradition. And now it walks in broad daylight with government insignia.
Worse still, among ICE’s ranks are men once convicted for their roles in the January 6th insurrection, now pardoned, rearmed, and paid by the same government they once tried to overthrow. The man who waved a Confederate flag through the Capitol hallway now waves someone else’s child into a holding cage. The pathology has been absorbed, normalized, and legalized.
As James Baldwin said, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” But what happens when the nation itself becomes the one who shuts its eyes?
The first raid might give the officer a rush. Cortisol pumping like oil in a drill line. The storming of doors, the shouting, the flash of panic in a child’s eyes: it might feel like power. It might feel like control. It might feel like finally belonging to something bigger, safer, and worthier than his own self-worth.
Rep. John Lewis, who was beaten and bloodied for marching across a bridge so others might live in dignity, once said, “You are a light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light.” But ICE officers are trained to dim the light of others. To shut it in cages. To press it under boots and clipboards. Somewhere, in the back of their minds, they may still believe they are protecting something. But when protection becomes persecution, the light goes out for everyone, especially themselves.
Some, let’s be honest, believe they are better. Whiter. Righter. They’re seduced by the myth of purity. Not just racial purity, but the fantasy of a clear, clean order to things, and they are the ones who get to participate in who belongs.
That fantasy is old. It echoes through Mein Kampf, where Hitler wrote of the need for “a stronger race to exterminate the weak.” No ICE agent would say it like that, not out loud, but history doesn’t need to repeat itself in full to rhyme.
What happens after the raid?
Some go home and cradle an infant. Some grill burgers with neighbors. Some sedate themselves with pills or porn or silence. Some weep in secret. Some feel nothing at all. But the cost is there.
Jung wrote: “The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order but are psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. The psyche is the great danger.”
And now, that danger is no longer hidden. It’s wearing uniforms, carrying zip ties, showing up at schoolyards and apartment buildings and parking lots. And it’s happening fast like a wildfire across dry land. Like a tsunami rising from centuries of pressure under the sea. Like all the volcanos now erupting, and the eruption is not sudden. It is accumulated.
So we ask: Who is the man behind the vest?
While many people see him as a monster or a cartoon, or even a patriot, he is a man carrying history’s unfinished grief. He’s a citizen who mistook punishment for protection, who chose performance over reflection, who let shame wear a badge and bravado become gospel.
And if we want to understand how this nation turns on its own people, how war comes to the neighborhood, look not just at the law, but at the wound behind the law. The wound that cries out for respect, for identity, for dominance: even if it means someone else must vanish.
This is not policy anymore. This is pathology.
And we are all in it now.
Narrative Essay by Brenda Littleton
Tin Flea Press, copyright 2025.