Dean Cain, who played Superman on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman from 1993 to 1997, has announced his latest career pivot: becoming an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.
“I will be sworn in as an ICE agent A.S.A.P.,” he said during an appearance on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. Cain was sworn in as a reserve police officer in Idaho in 2018, then again as a reserve deputy sheriff in Virginia in 2022. “We have a broken immigration system. Congress needs to fix it, but in the interim, President Trump ran on this. He is delivering on this. This is what people voted for. It’s what I voted for and he’s going to see it through, and I’ll do my part and help make sure it happens.”
Cain’s decision comes after he shared an ICE recruitment video on Instagram earlier this week. At the time, he hadn’t taken steps to become an agent. “I wasn’t part of ICE, but once I put that out there and you put a little blurb on your show, it went crazy,” Cain told Watters. “So now I’ve spoken with some officials over at ICE.”
In the Instagram video, Cain echoed the selling points ICE has deployed as it launches a nationwide recruitment effort in hopes of intensifying already brutal crackdowns on undocumented immigration. “Since President Trump took office, ICE has arrested hundreds of thousands of criminals, including terrorists, rapists, murderers, pedophiles,” he said as the Superman theme song blared in the background. Cain boasted about a $50,000 signing bonus and “legal” student loan repayments. He also made sure to specify that “you also don’t need an undergraduate degree, you can get to work right away,” a recent change to the application requirements.
Throughout the year, videos of ICE arrests in which agents have been captured smashing the window of a car with a pregnant woman inside, vigorously beating a man who is curled up on the asphalt, and tossing tear gas canisters near a toddler and a baby have gone viral. The chaotic arrest tactics have, in some instances, led to the detainment of U.S. citizens.
The Department of Homeland Security has started to forcibly reassign Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees to ICE, threatening them with termination if they do not agree. Last month, DHS reallocated $608 million in FEMA funds to different states to fund the construction and expansion of migrant detention centers.
Trump previously said that his new Florida immigrant detention facility, which he dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” would hold “some of the most vicious people on the planet,” using similar language that Cain echoed in his video. But records obtained by The Miami Herald showed that only one-third of the approximately 900 immigrants detained at the Florida facility have been convicted of a crime. Another 250 detainees only have immigration violations on their records, but no criminal convictions or pending charges.
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“It’s being portrayed as a real negative thing that we want people to follow our immigration laws, which is insane to me,” Cain said in July, while complaining about Hollywood making Superman — a character who doesn’t have the greatest history of getting along with the U.S. government — too “woke.” “I feel we are in a bad situation here now because it’s being stoked by politicians and by NGOs that have a political agenda. And I think bringing Superman into it, I think that was a mistake by James Gunn to say it’s an immigrant thing, and I think it’s going to hurt the numbers on the movie.”
James Gunn, who directed the latest Superman film, said, “Superman is the story of America. An immigrant who came from other places and populated the country, but for me, it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”
From Rolling Stone US
