I'm writing this from Saigon, where traffic confidently ignores rules, and no one pretends that chaos is order. The atmosphere is refreshing. Handguns are not allowed in Vietnam, and I haven't seen a police officer in over a year—not even any traffic accidents. It's amazing. There's no road rage here. I've been away long enough to witness Trump veering toward obscurity or damnation. Not sure which, but it will be exciting. I admit I’m biased. Can you tell? Distance sharpens perspective. There's no violent crime here, and the people are friendly. You can see American politics more clearly when you’re far enough away to stop smelling the perfume it sprays on itself.
So, I felt a mild, exhausted amusement when I read that the U.S. government is finally equipping federal immigration agents with body cameras. Body cameras! Accountability! Transparency! Cue the press release, the serious nods, and the solemn promise that this time, things will be different.
Sure. And this time Lucy won’t pull the football away.
Let’s get something straight up front: I’m not against cameras. I’m against pretending they’re courage. Cameras don’t reform institutions. They accessorize them. They’re what you put on when you want to look busy without touching the engine.
We’ve been here before. Police departments rolled out body cams years ago, and for a while everyone acted like the problem had been solved. Then the footage didn’t get released. Or it malfunctioned. Or it turned out the camera was off. Or the angle was bad. Or the moment “wasn’t captured.” Funny how that keeps happening.
Now immigration enforcement gets the same treatment. A little glass eye pinned to the chest, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe the system has found its conscience.
Here’s the thing cameras don’t do: they don’t decide policy. They don’t choose targets. They don’t wake people up at dawn. They don’t separate families. They don’t design detention centers that look like warehouses because that’s cheaper. All of that happens before the lens cap ever comes off.
A camera can show you how something happened. It won’t tell you why. And in immigration enforcement, the “why” is where the rot lives.
Who decides when the camera’s on? Who controls the footage? Who gets to see it? Who decides whether it’s evidence, training material, or something that mysteriously disappears into an internal review that takes eighteen months and ends with “no wrongdoing found”?
If the same agency that does the detaining controls the recording, the storage, and the release, that’s not oversight. That’s home video.
The timing is interesting too. This didn’t happen because the system suddenly grew a soul. It happened because people complained. Because courts asked questions. Because journalists kept digging. Because communities got tired of being told, “Trust us,” by people who have never earned it.
So now we get cameras. Not fewer raids. Not narrower authority. Not real consequences when power gets abused. Cameras.
It’s the political equivalent of putting up a “We Care” poster in a break room where nobody gets lunch breaks.
And look, I’m a liberal. I believe in government. I believe in laws. I believe borders exist and enforcement happens. But liberals have a bad habit of falling in love with process and mistaking it for justice. We see a new rule, a new device, a new oversight committee, and we sigh with relief like the adults are back in the room.
They’re not. They just bought new equipment.
The right, meanwhile, cheers enforcement like it’s a contact sport and treats cruelty as a feature. Trump made that honest, if nothing else. He didn’t dress it up. He just said the quiet part loud and dared everyone to flinch. A lot of people didn’t. That damage doesn’t disappear because someone clipped a camera to a vest.
And here’s the dark joke: body cams may end up protecting the system more than the people inside it. Footage can be selective. Context can be stripped. A moment of resistance can be looped without the hours of provocation that led there. Anyone who’s ever seen how video gets weaponized knows this.
For migrants, asylum seekers, and undocumented families, a camera doesn’t feel like safety. It feels like evidence being collected for later use. It feels like one more thing that remembers you when you’d rather be forgotten.
None of this means cameras are useless. They’re not. But they’re tools, not morals. And tools only work as well as the hands that hold them.
If this were serious, cameras would come with rules that hurt when broken. Mandatory activation. Independent control of footage. Automatic release timelines. Real penalties, not retraining sessions and paid leave. Civilian oversight with teeth, not advisory boards that meet quarterly and issue PDFs nobody reads.
Instead, we get a press conference and a promise. Again.
From where I’m sitting, watching scooters swarm intersections like schools of fish, the whole thing feels familiar. In Saigon, nobody pretends traffic laws are sacred. Everyone knows how things actually work. In Washington, there’s still this belief that if you say the right words and buy the right gear, reality will politely adjust.
It won’t.
Cameras don’t change power. They just record it—when allowed. If the government wants trust, it’s going to have to do something much harder than install hardware. It’s going to have to give some up.
Until then, smile for the camera. Or don’t. Either way, the lens isn’t the thing deciding your fate.