The Marshes are running their weed farm successfully, but Randy realizes their business is losing customers who are growing their own marijuana and goes to war against this, causing friction with Towelie as a result. Meanwhile, Kyle gets sent to an ICE immigration center by Cartman, and is shocked by the appalling conditions there; he tries to dissuade the agents supervising the center by telling them that someday one of the kids there would turn into a "Mexican Joker", but they end up believing one of these kids is already on its way to become such a thing.
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: At the end of the last season, President Garrison was seen in handcuffs. It's never stated who the current president is, whether Garrison escaped custody and returned to Washington to continue his reign of terror, if Caitlyn Jenner is acting president, or if Matt and Trey decided to say "fuck it" and outright have Donald Trump as the president. After all, somebody has to be ordering these child separations. It's revealed later in "Season Finale" that President Garrison has indeed escaped custody and returned to Washington to continue his reign of terror, so he might be the cause of these child separations.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Invoked by one of the guards when he kills all the other guards and lets all the children free believing that Mexican Joker will spare his life.
- Bittersweet Ending: Kyle and Cartman manage to help free all the children who were sent the ICE detention center and are seen in the next episode getting off the bus from there, but Randy gets away with blowing up all the home-grown weed gardens, killing numerous people along the way and it's heavily implied that Randy is going to get worse over the course of the season.
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Broken Aesop: Played for Laughs. Jeff's puppet play to teach the children at the center about "forgiveness". Puppet Mexican Joker didn't learn forgiveness, and he himself wasn't forgiven for his actions either, despite Jeff acknowledged that Mexican Joker was wronged.- It's even more deranged when considering that in the end, Jeff's overall message was to not seek unfair punishment of others, while justifying Mexican Joker's unfair punishment that created him.
- Brutal Honesty: Kyle asks the officers at the Detention Center that if they knew that their actions on the children there are traumatizing them and teaching them to fear the government. The warden says "Correct" with a smile on his face.
- Character Check: Cartman is back to his sociopathic self in this episode, and it's glorious. He rats the Broflovskis out to ICE and gets them sent to a detention camp. In fact, it's implied he did the same thing to all of the Mexicans in South Park, and he even threatened to do the same to Jimmy.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Kyle and Cartman still stuck in the detention camp. It's unknown if their plot will continue throughout the season, or a Cliffhanger Copout will happen and they will be back in South Park by the next episode. It's revealed in the next episode that a Cliffhanger Copout did happen and an ICE bus returns Kyle and Cartman to South Park after their plan to free the immigrant children there succeeded.
- Comically Missing the Point: The ICE people take Kyle's analogy of a hypothetical "Mexican Joker" too literally and believe one of the children is already on the verge of becoming him.
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Kyle blows his chance of getting out of the ICE detention camp just as Jeff was letting him out of the cage by convincing Jeff that the Mexican Joker story isn't genuine.
- Continuity Nod: The Marshes still live at Tegridy Farms, which is a central part of the episode's A-plot.
- Create Your Own Villain: Kyle references this trope when he tells the ICE people that separating kids from their families will traumatize them and eventually turn them into a Mexican Joker, like in superhero movies.
- Department of Child Disservices: The ICE officers are full swing with this in this episode.
- The arresting officer told Shelia if they can prove to be legal citizens, the Broflovskis would be reunited by Monday; but when Cartman shows up at the Center, Kyle states he hasn't seen his parents in 2 weeks!
- Kyle also states that no one at the center knows where Ike is.
- Jeff wears a colorful sweater you expect a teacher to wear, but it covered with a police vest.
- A security officer at the center is constantly seen ready to draw his gun whenever he is around the migrant children.
- The officers at the ICE center pretty much say with a straight face how they are traumatizing and instilling fear into children. They're also willing to induce torture on them too if not for budget restraints.
- It somehow gets WORSE next time we see Jeff and the Center.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- Cartman has taken to framing anyone who he believes wronged him as illegal immigrants from Mexico.
- Randy Marsh outright bombs and kills anyone who grows their own weed so Tegridy Farms can maintain its monopoly on Park County's weed supply.
- Enemy Mine: Kyle once again has to work with Cartman to get out of the camp. Not that they succeed in doing so.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Even Cartman looked shocked at one of the guards shooting the other guards.
- Evil Is Petty: Cartman sends Kyle to the ICE detention camp just because Kyle insulted him in front of a girl whose bra Cartman was going to snap. He threatened to do the same to Jimmy when he told their teacher about Cartman texting in class if Stan hadn't sent Cartman away first.
- Flashback: Parodied and subverted. The ICE agents take to trying electroshock on kids in the hopes that will prevent them from later having traumatic flashbacks of being detained. Jeff warns they could be in that very flashback right now. Later, as the news covers the explosions that Randy caused, Commander Miller says Mexican Joker no doubt suffered a traumatic experience a long, long time ago. He looks up, as harp music plays; a ripple effect then transitions this present-day scene to Jeff's office, also in the present-day.Jeff: Oh shit, it's the flashback!
- Good Is Dumb: Kyle tells the guard that he made up Mexican Joker right as he is about to unlock the cell. The guard immediately leaves, with the cell still locked.
- Honor Before Reason: Kyle's honor about telling the truth leaves himself and the other boys trapped in the cell.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Cartman threatening to send people to migrant detention centers backfires on him when Stan sends him to a migrant detention center, ironically the same one that Kyle is at.
- Hypocritical Humor: When the residents of South Park start growing their own weed instead of buying it from him, Randy goes out of his way to make growing pot illegal for everyone but him.
- Insane Troll Logic:
- When Kyle tries to explain that the children at the detention center will become tormented by the experience, the guards don't understand how that affects them until Kyle uses analogies from superhero movies.
- When that gets through to the guards, they take his words literally and believe one of the children has already become Mexican Joker.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- When Randy insists growing pot was his idea, Stephen points out it was most definitely not something he started.
- ICE's rational for their actions is that they don't want the immigration system being abused. Kyle noticeably doesn't debate that but merely points out that the incarcerated children won't care.
- Just Following Orders: The ICE people's usual excuse for what they do.
- Karma Houdini:
- Unsurprisingly, Randy gets away with blowing up the weed gardens.
- Jeff Corrigan also gets away with shooting his co-workers and leaving all the children locked in the detention center.
- Knight Templar: Jeff Corrigan spends the entire episode becoming more and more "corrective", going to such lengths as to stop a couple of the other guards from using electroshock therapy on any child who might be Mexican Joker because only the military can help him with "traumatic" experiences, killing three guards that he's been working with because he wants to stop any more busloads of immigrant children from coming in and being accommodated, and leaving Kyle, Cartman and the other kids locked in the cell in order to find Mexican Joker in a different "flashback" and get him to safety, all while shooting any random guard he can find. Yeah, he's definitely not following orders anymore...
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Cartman gets his comeuppance for sending Kyle to a migrant detention center by being sent to a detention center himself. Played with, as Cartman takes this whole ordeal in stride.
- Although he was arrested for a different reason, Gerald was arrested by ICE.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: On the ride back from city hall Randy says they're done with South Park and are only focusing on Tegridy Farms from now on. Tegridy Farms is the main focus of the A plots this season.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Cartman has a moment of this when he realizes why being sent to a detention center might be an especially sore spot to a Jewish person. It might have sounded sarcastic at first, but looking back at Season 16, Cartman did get over his anti-Semitic views ever since "Jewpacabra" and even brought himself to accept and become one of the Jewish, so he might have been genuinely remorseful.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Stan getting Cartman sent to the ICE detention center.
- Oh, Crap!:
- The ICE people have this reaction when they find out that Cartman ratted all the kids out and that they weren't intended to be there.
- The ICE people also have this reaction when they find out Kyle is Jewish, and immediately try to get him released so they don't look like Nazis.
- Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is depicted as a bunch of over-zealous idiots blissfully ignorant of the harm they cause. They detain Kyle and his parents without trial when Cartman tells them that they're illegal immigrants, misinterpret Kyle's attempts at reasoning with them to outlandish extremes (thinking that there is a "Mexican Joker" when Kyle tried using Joker as an analogy) and doing everything but the right thing trying to fix it (trying to dissuade their child-prisoners from being vengeful instead of just returning them to their homes and applying pointless electroshock onto them).
- Pay Evil unto Evil: According to Cartman, at least. He mentions to Kyle that when he unwittingly revealed what he did to the latter in class after threatening to do the same with Jimmy, Stan was (understandably) righteously pissed off and arranged for Cartman to end up at the same detention center.
- Punch-Clock Villain: When Kyle first brings up the possibilities of what Mexican Joker can do, the ICE employees claim that they're this, only for the former to say that Mexican Joker won't care.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Referenced by Jeff, as he teaches a group of potential Mexican Jokers the slippery slope on being unforgiving, illustrating Joker with Mexican Sombrero and 'stache crossing the line by raping a princess.
- Sanity Slippage: The ICE People slowly lose their minds over the course of the episode due to their belief of Mexican Joker.
- Serious Business:
- Weed is this to Randy, to the point he outright murders innocent people to keep control of the weed market.
- To the ICE officers, it's the fear of creating a Mexican Joker.
- Shout-Out:
- Cartman sings a snippet of "It's A Hard Knock Life," just in case you forgot Matt and Trey are musical geeks.
- The title refers to Joker, and the controversy surrounding that film is subtly referenced.
- The electroshock therapy is a reference to Stranger Things.
- The Tegridy Farms theme song borrows the flyover shot from the intro to Green Acres.
- Skewed Priorities: The head ICE agent objects to electroshock therapy being used on a child, not because it's unethical, but because it might turn them into Mexican Joker in the future and because they don't have the budget to do it to every kid they have imprisoned.
- Special Edition Title: The theme song is changed to be all about Tegridy Farms.
- Take That!: Towards ICE for their over-zealousness in arresting undocumented immigrants and poor treatment of children. Most of them are portrayed with a noticeable gut.
- Tranquil Fury: Downplayed. Kyle does show fury at Cartman, but he is clearly showing every possible restraint to keep him from murdering Cartman right on the spot when he’s sent to the same detention center he’s at.
- Variations on a Theme Song: The Tegridy Farms theme plays at the beginning instead of the regular theme song, but is sung to the tune of said theme.
