TV
immigration and customs enforcement

MAGA supporters fume at The Pitt for 'demonizing ICE agents'

A still from The Pitt showing a male ICE agent, in a blue cap with a grey scarf covering his mouth and a bulletproof vest, standing next to a brown woman with a white vest and short black hair.play icon
HBO Max and Warner Bros TV/YouTube

Supporters of US president Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda have been left angry this week, after the second season of the HBO Max series The Pitt – an award-winning medical drama set in a Pittsburgh hospital – featured a storyline involving agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entering the facility and arresting one of the doctors.

In a clip shared to social media, an ICE agent is seen approaching and grabbing a female patient, but when a male doctor tells the agent he’s “hurting her”, it later cuts back to said doctor on the ground before being carried away.

Except conservatives and MAGA fans weren’t too happy with the show “demonizing ICE agents”:

“Wtf is this woke fan fiction,” fumed Curtis Houck of the conservative media analysis website NewsBusters:

Another tweeted: “Boycott HBO Max and The Pitt”:

And just as much as conservatives and Trump fans expressed outrage, those critical of the convicted felon’s administration delighted in just how upset they were becoming, and the show’s depiction of ICE:

“The Pitt said f*** ICE,” tweeted one fan:

Another wrote: “I think The Pitt handled the ICE plot decently? they didn’t show them positively at all, they showed how needlessly violent they are and how much fear & trauma they cause”:

In an interview with entertainment journalist Matthew Belloni ahead of the episode airing, executive producer John Wells said HBO wanted to make sure the storyline – which he said is “a real issue in emergency rooms” - was “balanced”.

“There are real issues about immigration and there are real issues about immigration enforcement within public health system [sic] in which you really need people to come in, so that’s what we were dealing with and they just wanted to make sure it was balanced.

“But they weren’t saying ‘don’t do this’ or ‘don’t do that’ – in fact, quite the opposite. We showed them a lot of the research and they were like, ‘yeah, that looks like a good story’,” he said.

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