The womanosphere urges dubious followers to back ICE: ‘Don’t let compassion cloud you’

Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer turned anti-transgender activist, makes motherhood and femininity a core part of her brand. Her husband, Louis Barker, is a naturalized US citizen who moved to this country from the UK. The couple welcomed their first child, a daughter named Margot, in September; Gaines said there was “nothing” she would not do to protect her baby. But do not think that Gaines is at all sympathetic to families targeted by ICE.

This weekend, Gaines spoke on her podcast about Liam Ramos, the five-year-old boy taken by ICE agents from his driveway in Minneapolis. Images of Liam, clad in snowpants and wearing a blue hat with bunny ears, being held by a federal agent prompted widespread disgust in the US. How could a preschooler be considered one of the “dangerous” criminals Trump’s administration rails against?

Gaines, however, remained unmoved. “I will say thank you to our ICE agents,” she said on the podcast. “Thank you for not abandoning that five-year-old boy like his father did. I’m glad and I’m grateful.” (While the DHS claimed the boy had been abandoned by his father, eyewitnesses and Liam’s school district said the father had been detained by ICE, which then attempted to use the child “as bait” to get other family members out of the home.)

Gaines pleaded to her flock not to feel bad for victims of ICE cruelty like Liam, or Renee Good or Alex Pretti. “Do not let compassion, or what you believe to be compassion, cloud you or suspend you from thinking critically,” she said.

Gaines is one of the leading figures of the “womanosphere” movement: mostly white Christian conservatives who promote an anti-feminist, gender-essentialist agenda to their followers, and who have been parroting the Trump administration’s messaging that ICE has done a good, moral job in its brutal crackdown on immigrant communities. Any evidence proving otherwise is wrong, warped or fabricated, they insist. But there are signs the womanosphere may be rattled by the widespread reaction to news coming out of Minneapolis.

Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is another such figure beating the drum for ICE. “Women, including many, many Christian women, are being completely duped by the anti-ICE propaganda … I am working HARD in my DMs and posts and on my show trying to combat this nonsense and appeal to these women,” she posted last week. On Monday she blamed “emotionally evocative messaging and images” – Liam and his Spiderman backpack, maybe, or Pretti being shot while protecting a female protester.

Stuckey later repeated these claims on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, saying: “The propaganda … starts to chip away at their conscience.”

A memorial for Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Tuesday. Photograph: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty Images

In 2024 Stuckey published Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, writing that she first encountered the phenomenon after the murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin. In the ensuing global protests, Stuckey took issue with the Instagram trend of posting black squares in solidarity with Floyd and other victims of institutionalized racist violence. When she instead shared a video of an elderly Black woman describing property destruction in her neighborhood as the result of protesters, some followers responded saying Floyd’s loss of life was the bigger tragedy. Stuckey’s thesis: “I was facing weaponized, toxic empathy.”

Five years later, Stuckey still preaches that empathy can make Christians weak, because it allows the reflexive horror over systemic violence and cruelty to cloud their objectivity. Show empathy to the wrong person – immigrants, people of color, the disenfranchised, or anyone who defends their rights – and you are a pawn of progressives who wish to weaponize the concept of caring for one another to feed you a lie.

But the continued violence in Minneapolis complicates this mission. Though Stuckey filters out dissenting opinions in her Instagram comments, some skepticism got through.

“I’m interested in what the Bible says about law when law becomes inhumane,” one user wrote. “I am not against border control … I’m curious to know where do people specifically us christians draw the line at when the law of the land is no longer viable.” Another wrote: “Conservative here and I have to side with right and from what I’ve seen, I feel ICE made a huge mistake on this one.”

April Ajoy is a former evangelical Christian, podcaster and author of the memoir Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith. A preacher’s daughter who went to televangelist Pat Robertson’s Regent University and later worked as a producer for the Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club, Ajoy knows how hard it is to go against the right’s notions of what makes a good Christian woman. “If you are not fully in line with every single position [that womanosphere figures promote], then you can get ostracized from your community,” Ajoy said. “That’s what happened to me.”

Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who studies Maga influencers, says that Stuckey especially has “positioned herself as an authority figure to women, to the point where she gives them permission to not look elsewhere for facts or perspective, because she’s able to sift through what’s going on and speak from that Christian evangelical female perspective”. She and other successful talking heads in this space make their followers believe they could be friends or confidants. “It takes a lot to push back on someone you feel like you know and believe in,” Wellman said. “It’s not a small thing if you’ve followed Stuckey for a long time and then start to dissent.”

Still, among some Christians Ajoy knows, recent ICE activity in Minneapolis signaled a turning point. “I’ve seen people on my personal Facebook page or on Threads who say: ‘I voted for Trump, I supported ICE, but I can’t support what they’re doing now, we need justice and investigations,’” she said. “When you’re in this world, you live in a very black-and-white ideology, where there’s a good side and a bad side. Some people now are starting to unravel that really dogmatic theory.”

A new poll from the Economist showed that at the start of this year, 15% of Republicans were strongly or somewhat in favor of abolishing ICE. On the day of Pretti’s death, that number went up to 19% – not exactly a surge, but certainly a sign of growing dissension on the right.

Not every womanosphere response is as concerned for women as Stuckey or Gaines.

Just one day after Pretti was killed, Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster and self-described “cuteservative” whose work meshes pop culture and politics, described on X how she “spent my Sunday while ICE is rounding up illegals”, listing off a series of unbothered activities: pilates, church, lunch at Sweetgreen, a facial and what she described as “Taylor Swift symphony by candlelight”. It was a business-as-usual approach, encouraging her audience to ignore the state violence playing out across their social media.

“For people on the left, that’s a representation of [Clark’s] privilege,” Wellman said. “But to the white, Christian women in her audience, that’s further permission to disengage with politics. It’s confirmation that they don’t have to protest or post something on social media. She’s framing it as taking care of yourself and staying out of the government’s way.”

(In a later Instagram story, Clark thanked Stuckey for being “firm yet patient and wanting confused women to understand the truth and come back around … Me on the other hand … I have zero patience for stupidity and will just roast you.”)

On Sunday, Haley Williams, a Christian mother who has more than 50,000 followers on Instagram and runs the Kindled podcast, posted what she seems to have considered humorous faux-infographics. Titled “Simple ways I lower my risk of being shot by ICE”, the tips centered around 1950s-style domesticity – which could be read as a dig at Good, a queer woman who was falsely accused by the right of ditching her children to protest against ICE.

One such tip was “drinking coffee and cuddling my baby” because “research shows that it’s very hard to cuddle a baby AND be thrown into a senseless rage at the same time”; another was “hanging out with my husband” because “research shows being happily married multiples your contentment with not disrupting law enforcement at least 874%”.

The message: stay in your lane, ladies. But should you veer, the womanosphere will do its best to convince you that your emotions are not to be trusted.

On Monday, Stuckey released a long statement calling the killings of Good and Pretti “tragic” while placing blame for the situation in Minneapolis on local leaders and law enforcement, as well as protesters. “ICE’s job is necessary and good,” she wrote. Later, she spoke on her podcast: “There are a lot of people out there who want you to be dumb. Know that, women,” she said, her soft blond curls bouncing. “I want you to think. Because women, you are not just feelers.”