Federal Agents Left Behind “Death Cards” After Capturing Immigrants

The cars sat abandoned at the side of the road. Their engines idling, with hazard lights flashing, according to a witness who captured video of the incident on his phone. The occupants of the vehicles had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers late last month in what a local immigrant rights group calls “fake traffic stops.” During these encounters, ICE vehicles reportedly employ red and blue flashing lights to mimic those of local law enforcement agencies, duping people into pulling over.

When family members arrived on the scene in Eagle County, Colorado, their loved ones had already been disappeared by federal agents. But what they found inside the vehicles was disturbing: a customized ace of spades playing card — popularly known as a “death card” — that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

“We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County,” Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of that immigrant rights group, Voces Unidas, told The Intercept. “Leaving a racist death card behind after targeting Latino workers is an act of intimidation. This is not about public safety. It is about fear and control. It’s rooted in a very long history of racial violence.”

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with “death cards” — either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills. A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, “the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them.”

Official U.S. military film footage, for example, shows ace of spades “death cards” being placed in the mouths of dead Vietnamese people in South Vietnam’s Qu?ng Ngãi province by members of the 25th Infantry Division. Similarly, Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s nickname “Gunfighters,” a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.” Helicopter pilots also occasionally dropped custom calling cards from their gunships. One particular card read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther.” The other side proclaimed, “The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

The cards found in Eagle County harken back to this brutal heritage. The black and white 4×6-inch cards look like an ace of spades with an “A” over a spade in the top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black and white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it reads “ICE Denver Field Office.” Below it is the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora. 

Sánchez said his organization took possession of identical cards found in two separate vehicles by two different families. “These were not from a doctored deck of cards. These were designed with this legacy in mind. They were printed on some sort of stock paper and cut in the dimensions of a card,” he explained. Basic templates for ace of spaces playing cards are readily available as clip art for purchase online.

A DHS spokesperson told local NBC affiliate 9News that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility will “conduct a thorough investigation and will take appropriate and swift action.” ICE’s Denver Field Office did not respond to questions posed by The Intercept about the office’s use of the cards, the meaning behind them, and its agents’ tactics.

“You realize — of course — that in Spades, the ace of spades is the trump card,” said a federal official of the Bridge-like card game, alluding to the possibility that the death card is also an homage to President Donald Trump. That official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak to the press continued: “These guys are not too subtle, to be honest.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., recently took to the Senate floor to denounce the use of the malicious ICE calling cards. “They found ‘death cards’ [left in] the cars of their family members who were taken away by ICE agents,” he said. “These cards … have a history of being used by white supremacist groups to intimidate people of color. ‘Death cards’ is what they call them.”

Sánchez expressed worry that similar acts of intimidation are happening elsewhere but may not be reported, noting that while Voces Unidas became aware of the death cards in the course of their work, investigating such incidents is not a core focus of his organization, which provides legal assistance to immigrants.

“When people call us, they call us to get an attorney out to them at a detention center,” Sánchez explained. “In the process, we sometimes hear about these details. But it isn’t a priority. Our job is not to investigate cards. Our job is to provide legal aid.” He noted that the community served by Voces Unidas in the western slope of rural Colorado does not trust local law enforcement officers, elected officials, or mainstream human rights groups. “They’re calling organizations that they trust. And unless those trusted organizations are doing civil rights reporting or are going in-depth in providing emergency assistance, it’s very difficult to find out the details of such incidents,” he explained. “So I would be surprised if we’re the only community where this has happened. We just might not know it.”

Neither ICE nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, returned a request for comment about the use of the death cards in Colorado or elsewhere in the U.S.

This isn’t the first time that immigration agents have used similar imagery during the Trump administration’s ongoing deportation campaign. This summer, for example, a Border Patrol agent taking part in immigration raids in Chicago wore the image of a skull with a spade on its forehead affixed to his helmet below another unidentified but apparently unofficial patch. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.

Recently, The Intercept published a guide to official and unofficial patches worn by immigration agents. These included a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul, Minnesota Field Office, where Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot Renee Good — works. The St. Paul office’s Special Response Team patch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave — a Nordic image called a “Vegvisir.” The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists.

Another ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted wearing a patch reading “DEPLORABLE,” a term some devotees of then-candidate Donald Trump adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” since they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic.”

ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about these patches.

The ace card has a long and macabre history. A British tax on playing cards, which specifically required purchasing aces of spades from the stamp office, resulted in the hanging of a serial forger of the “death card” in 1805. Legend has it that “Wild Bill” Hickok held the Dead Man’s Hand — aces and eights, including the ace of spades — when he was gunned down in Deadwood in Dakota Territory in 1876. In 1931, murdered Mafia boss Giuseppe Masseria was photographed with the ace of spades clutched in his hand. By that time, it was firmly entrenched in culture as the “death card.”

The U.S. use of death cards in Vietnam was immortalized in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” in a scene in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, places unit-branded playing cards, reading “DEATH FROM ABOVE,” on the bodies of dead Vietnamese people. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of the Iraqi government. President Saddam Hussein, who was eventually captured and executed, was the ace of spades.

Last year, the official Instagram account of Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector used the 1980 Motörhead song “The Ace of Spades” as the soundtrack of a video of its canines practicing attacks on people. “Our Patrol-K9s are trained to take down violent threats,” reads the accompanying caption.