In today’s political climate, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to dominate national conversations about belonging, labor, and exclusion. Through policies that encourage “voluntary departure”—a euphemism for forced removal—and high-profile workplace raids1, the agency has made visible the precarious status of millions of undocumented people. These actions are not isolated; they are part of a broader strategy that blurs the line between deportation and coerced self-expulsion, reshaping the daily realities of migrant workers across the country. The rhetoric of “illegal presence” reduces individuals to violations, while the language of “removal” sanitizes the violence of displacement.
It is in this climate that Deliver the Keys to Fred’s Residence takes shape. The composition reimagines Pietro Perugino’s Renaissance fresco The Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter (1481–82, Sistine Chapel), where Christ grants Peter divine authority in front of a gleaming temple. In my version, the keys are replaced by an electric drill, exchanged between two workers—one with painter’s tape across his mouth, silenced in both speech and status. What once symbolized heavenly inheritance is transposed into the material reality of labor, construction, and migration.
At the center of the painting stands a Dutch Colonial home, but unlike Perugino’s idealized temple or Fred Trump’s real-estate projects, the model is my own house. This decision was deliberate. The image carries with it the history of Fred Trump’s arrest at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927, reported in The New York Times (June 1, 1927), and the legacy of exclusion that his housing empire would leave behind. But by inserting my own home into the composition, the painting resists keeping that history at arm’s length. The hooded figure in the attic is not just a ghost of America’s supremacist past—it is also a reminder of what lingers unexamined within our own walls. The house becomes both a stage for collective history and a mirror for private introspection, where inherited myths and personal shortcomings cohabitate.
In the foreground, immigration agents occupy the space where Perugino’s apostles once stood. Yet all four principal figures—workers and agents alike—are painted as brown bodies. This choice collapses the binary of labor and enforcement, acknowledging how the same communities that bear the weight of policing are often enlisted to carry it out. Authority here is not cleanly divided; it is refracted through the shared body of the immigrant, the worker, the enforcer. The ICE badge and the electric drill—symbols of surveillance and survival—become mirror images in this exchange.
The shotgun between figures underscores how authority is negotiated not through “sacred blessing” but through coercion. The tools of construction—drill, gloves, ladder—stand alongside the tools of enforcement—badge, weapon, tape. The rooftop laborer, bent in work, carries on despite the surveillance below, embodying a resilience that is simultaneously visible and ignored.
By staging this transfer of “keys” in a setting shaped by ICE raids, racialized housing policies, and inherited supremacist legacies, the painting insists that authority in America is contested ground. But by locating that stage within my own home, and by rendering all four figures as brown bodies, I am also acknowledging complicity: that national myths and exclusions are not abstractions but live in the spaces we inhabit daily, and sometimes, in the figures we ourselves perform.
- ICE detains more than 530 people in workplace ‘raids’ in U.S. Northeast. Jan. 23, 2025. Mark Moran, UPI News
