Even When ICE Nabs Your Wife, That’s No Reason to Actually Condemn Donald Trump, Right?
ICE leopards may be eating the face of this guy's wife, but he's still very much on board with the leopard face-eating program in general.
Photo via Unsplash, Tim Hüfner Splinter ICE
“Person supports cruel, punitive policy, only to find themselves the victim of that same policy” is a rich, seemingly inexhaustible genre of exploration during the second Trump administration. To cite the inescapable, classic tweet of pre-Elon Twitter, “the leopards” have been at an all-you-can eat face buffet for a long time now, to the point where we’ve all seen the countless examples of people hoisted by their own petard in the media, lamenting how the cruelty they rooted for has now rebounded on them. There are obvious economic reasons for why these stories get written and get clicked on; they scratch an itch of reader schadenfreude as one revels in the ironic comeuppance of a person who has only learned their folly after it bit them in the ass. You can see why a publication might go out of its way to make a story fit this outline … even when the person in the story doesn’t really fit the way the story has been framed. That’s what we appear to have in a new piece in The New York Times today, about a Trump-loving man watching his unfortunate Russian wife get caught up in the dragnet of ICE’s deportation engine.
Consider the headline, for a moment: “Years of Trump Support Came Undone in 15 Minutes in an Airport.” It intends a story about a husband and wife whose lives are now fractured by the fact that the Trump administration turned its ire against her in particular, a woman who overstayed a visa and has a pending green card application following her marriage at the end of last year. And it’s a headline that implies the two–particularly the U.S. citizen, the MAGA-rific husband–have now been chastened, shocked into recognizing and acknowledging the administration’s cruelty, its disregard for basic human dignity. They now finally see Trump and Co. for who they really are, and they’re obviously ashamed to have supported it!
Except … none of that is really in the story. Not at all, in fact. Husband and Ohio native Brent Jindra doesn’t actually condemn Donald Trump or the broader push for mass deportation once in the Times’ story—or if he does, the reporters elected to not use any of that material. He’s not angry about the leopards eating everyone’s faces! He still supports the face-eating campaign in general. He’s merely peeved that he doesn’t believe his wife’s face deserved to ravenously devoured along with the rest, because she’s one of the good faces. Which is all to say: Even when you inflict ironic comeuppance upon these types of people, the most likely outcome is still that they will flat-out refuse to learn the most basic lesson about empathy. The takeaway isn’t “I can’t believe we’ve been enabling this treatment,” it’s “I can’t believe I personally am being treated this way.”
As you read this account of state terror & maltreatment of a woman snatched arbitrarily from her husband’s side, consider that hers is one of the better briefer such ICE atrocities daily documented & that her husband wished & enabled this hell on countless others.
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/u…
— Philip Gourevitch (@pgourevitch.bsky.social) 7:53 AM · Aug 16, 2026
“The allure of the MAGA campaign was around illegal entries of criminals,” said the 48-year-old Jindra, who described himself as a three-time Trump voter. “There was never a mandate for this president to turn the barrel of the gun and start going after people who legally entered.”
Look at the words that Jindra chooses, particularly “the barrel of the gun.” This is a man who doesn’t object to the barrel of a gun being pointed at immigrants. He’s invoking “barrel of the gun” as a GOOD thing! He welcomes it, as long as those people are in a category he would personally deem “criminal.” What he objects to is Trump merely overreaching a bit, and what he asks is he “turn the barrel of the gun” back in the direction of his new family and the “dream house” they recently purchased in Cleveland. He reasons that because his wife, Galina Bobreneva, originally entered the country legally on a tourist visa in late 2021 (and then extended multiple times before applying for asylum), that she could not possibly fit in the “criminal” category. She’s clearly a special case; an exemplary soul whose dignity the administration would never sully! One wonders what he would have said about someone else exactly like his wife being detained in these same circumstances, before it happened to her.
Of course, to be able to hold these beliefs, Jindra needs to ignore that the Trump administration has been demonstrating since the beginning that absolutely no one is safe from a visit from ICE. They may trumpet that they’re going after the “worst of the worst” in their press releases, but over the last year they’ve also detained countless people with no criminal record, merely because they have expired visas, while ignoring pending court decisions about legal residency, work permits, etc. On one occasion, they even detained and deported a two-month-old baby. Those folks get shoved into the exact same detention facilities as “the worst of the worst” do. As the administration flat-out says to NYT: “To be clear, work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States.”
In recent months, detentions and deportations have accelerated on this front as ICE has rushed to keep up with a growing quota for daily arrests, leading agents to places such as airport jetways to pick up arriving aliens. That’s where Jindra and Bobreneva were in July, flying from their San Francisco home to Los Angeles when federal agents swooped in and separated them. Bobreneva would be in federal custody for the next 16 days, in terms she described as bordering on torture: Constant sleep deprivation, senior citizens pleading for insulin, 120 women sharing four working showers, a shared chocolate with other Russian-speaking detainees on her birthday. As she summed it up: “I felt like a piece of meat, not like a human.” After more than two weeks, she was finally released on a $35,000 bond, now wearing an electronic ankle monitor, checking back in at the ICE office on a monthly basis, never knowing if this is the time she’ll be detained again as her case progresses.
A man who voted for President Donald Trump three times is decrying the administration after his wife’s arrest left her “terrified.
— Raw Story (@rawstory.com) 10:30 AM · Aug 16, 2026
Her husband, Jindra, must be hopping mad, right? He argues, after all, that his wife did nothing wrong: “She did not jump a wall, she did not swim a river. She came in Trump’s beautiful, big front door.”
And yet, not once does the story that NYT framed as “Years of Trump Support Came Undone in 15 Minutes in an Airport” actually get around to including a straight-up condemnation of the President, or of ICE, or of the broader deportation campaign, from the mouth of Jindra. He laments that in the wake of his wife’s detention, she is now unable to enjoy life, and that they are now “living in fear in my own country,” but he’s seemingly totally incapable of considering that hey, is it possible that my support for the MAGA deportation engine has caused millions upon millions of other people to feel the same way as how I’m feeling right now? Is it possible that I’ve made the world a more painful place for countless other people?
Bobreneva, likewise, observes that “I never thought that it was so easy to take freedom from anyone,” without continuing on to the acknowledgement that it’s not supposed to be this easy, because a federal agency like ICE isn’t supposed to operate, in normal times, like some kind of clandestine, extrajudicial secret police. Only when you vote for a man who man who runs on campaigns of promising wanton violence against anyone the federal government deems “criminal” do you end up with an agency like ICE that is empowered to enforce immigration law as broadly and punishingly as possible–and possibly empowered to go after American citizens on criminal charges totally unrelated to immigration as well. No administration prior to Trump ever looked at someone in Bobreneva’s situation–a pending asylum case, a marriage to a U.S. citizen, a green card perhaps around the corner–and would have concluded, “This is a good candidate for deportation.” This husband spent more than a decade supporting the one and only candidate who would have dared to deport his future wife, and even when they’re now facing down that possibility, his first priority isn’t to renounce that decade of support. It’s to say, “There’s been a mistake; you weren’t supposed to be targeting my own interests!”
That is, of course, the trouble with leopards: They’re not picky about faces. And neither is an ICE agent with a quota to meet.
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