BOOK REVIEW — On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode the golden escalator down and said of Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Eleven years later, that sentence is no longer a campaign line. It is federal law. It is more than $100 billion for ICE and border enforcement. And in Bushwick, it is masked men in unmarked cars.
Kylie Cheung has a name for what happened in between: DARVO. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the term in 1997 to describe how abusers react when someone holds them accountable. In Playing the Victim (North Atlantic Books, $21.95), her sixth book, Cheung takes the acronym out of the therapist’s office and points it at the state.
“What we see are these monstrous characterizations of migrants as rapists when our president is a rapist,” Cheung told Migrant Insider in an interview last week. (A federal jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. The book itself calls him “a legally recognized sexual abuser.”)
The book covers a lot of ground: Depp v. Heard, Gaza, abortion bans, the manosphere. Migrant Insider readers here should go straight to Chapter 6, “The Right to Victimhood.” That’s where the immigration argument lands, and it lands hard.
Laws named for victims, written against them
Cheung’s best work is a close reading of two 2025 bills. The first is the Laken Riley Act, named for a 22-year-old nursing student killed by an undocumented man who had earlier been charged with shoplifting. Cheung notes that the law allows immigrants, including those living and working here legally, to be detained indefinitely without being charged with a crime, “even if they’re arrested by mistake.”
The second is H.R. 30, Rep. Nancy Mace’s “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act.” It makes immigrants deportable for domestic abuse accusations that never led to a conviction. Cheung quotes Mace’s floor speech at length: “a horde of illegal aliens” who are “molesting American children,” “violently raping American women and girls.” Then she shows who the bill actually catches. Almost a quarter of survivors who call 911 say they, not their abuser, were the ones arrested or threatened with arrest. An abuser who lodges an accusation first now has a deportation order to point at.
The survivor advocates she lines up are blunt. Hannah Shapiro of the DV Immigration Project says the Laken Riley Act “will add real teeth to an abuser’s threat to have a survivor arrested and deported as a tool of power and control.” Zain Lakhani of the Women’s Refugee Commission walks through the trap: a falsely accused mother signs a no-contest plea to get home to her kids, not knowing it means mandatory deportation.
“Bills like these give immigrants even fewer options of where they can turn when they’re experiencing domestic violence or domestic abuse,” Cheung told us. Her shortest summary of the scheme: “Feminist concerns used as a means to justify extreme anti-feminist violence against immigrants.”
Sexual violence researcher Dr. Nicole Bedera gives the chapter its sharpest line: “the phrase ‘protecting women’ really means ‘controlling women.’”
The thread-bare lie
Cheung places all this inside an older American tradition: at least 4,743 lynchings from 1882 to 1968, most justified by the claim that Black men threatened white women. She doesn’t quote Ida B. Wells, but she could have. In 1892, Wells wrote in Free Speech that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.” A mob destroyed her press for it.
The modern version Cheung documents is darker than satire. In December 2024, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stood in front of a “rape tree” and unveiled $100,000 worth of billboards warning migrant families, “Your wife and daughter will pay for the trip with their bodies.” This is the same governor who promised in 2021 to “eliminate rape” while signing an abortion ban with no rape exception. Researchers later estimated 26,300 rape-related pregnancies in Texas after Dobbs. Cheung’s point is that Abbott’s own billboards admit what his rhetoric denies: the people crossing the border are the ones in danger.
A rogue agency
The chapter’s strongest passage covers the summer of 2025, when men in North Carolina, Maryland, and New York posed as ICE agents to kidnap and sexually assault immigrant women. Cheung doesn’t treat this as a strange side story. Her argument: it was possible because ICE had already made masks, plain clothes, and warrantless home entries normal, and because Trump had dropped the protections that kept enforcement out of domestic violence shelters, hospitals, and churches. Add the 2020 whistleblower complaint about non-consensual sterilizations in ICE detention, and she gets to her conclusion without hedging: “ICE must be abolished.”
In our interview, she put it more personally. “I live in Bushwick. There’s a huge immigrant community here. And it’s horrifying to have a completely rogue agency on our streets.” What gives her hope is the neighborhood: storefronts with signs saying ICE is not welcome, and community groups sharing ICE sightings “to send a strong message that they’re not welcome in our community.”
Verdict
Cheung told us her goal across all her work is “a literacy about how power works,” showing that “the bureaucratic systems that people accept are normal are actually the source of so much violence.” On immigration, Playing the Victim delivers that literacy. It’s a field guide for spotting the moment a lawmaker uses a dead woman’s name to put living ones in danger.
James Baldwin wrote in 1962: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Cheung makes you face it. Read Chapter 6 first, and read it twice.
Playing the Victim: How the Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide, by Kylie Cheung. North Atlantic Books, October 2026. 200 pp., $21.95. Quotes are from an uncorrected advance reading copy.
This is nothing less than unbelievable.