Acting ICE director Matt Albence declared
that sanctuary cities “leave us no choice,” but to send in the combined forces
of the ICE, Border Patrol and heavily armed “tactical units” to scour these
cities for what they claim are mostly illegal immigrants who are “dangerous
criminals,” but in reality to mostly round up anyone who “qualifies”—such as
those 680 “criminals” working at Mississippi food processing plants. The fact
is that there just isn’t that many illegal immigrants who have been convicted
of actual crimes in “sanctuary cities” to justify this invasion force; this is
just Trump and Steven Miller acting out on their racist fantasies. As we saw in
the arrests by those ICE Gestapo agents in Mississippi, the vast majority of their
arrests are not of violent criminals, gang members and drug traffickers, but
otherwise law-abiding, hard-working people who try to avoid trouble at all
costs for their own safety.
Trump and Miller’s activities
have transformed the ICE into something that has strayed far from what was
supposed to be its original purpose: locating and detaining foreign terrorists
and transnational criminal groups. Today, Trump’s ICE is nothing more than a
terrorist group that whose principle mission is to be a force of terror against
people who are just trying to live. In July of 2018, three members of Congress—Rep.
Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Adriano Espaillat—introduced a bill entitled Establishing a Humane Immigration
Enforcement System Act, which like all immigration reform initiatives
coming out of Congress went nowhere almost as fast as it came off the printer.
But the problems that it set out to correct still exist, and if nothing else
have only gotten far worse as Trump and Miller feel entirely free to conduct
their “cleansing” of America of those nasty “little brown ones.” In a press
release by Rep. Pocan, he stated that Act sought to abolish the ICE because “Congress
created ICE in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks with the primary
mission of preventing ‘acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and
materials that support terrorist and criminal activities.’ However, since then,
ICE has become synonymous with immigration raids, home invasions, family
separation, abusive detention practices, and chronic noncompliance with the
law.” Rep. Pocan went on to say that
President Trump’s blanket directive to round up and target all
undocumented immigrants underscores the unchecked power which ICE has used to
terrorize our communities. From conducting raids at garden centers and
meatpacking plants, to targeting families outside churches and schools, the
President is using ICE as a mass-deportation force to rip apart the moral fabric
of our nation. Sadly, President Trump has so misused ICE that the agency can no
longer accomplish its goals effectively. As a result, the best path forward is
this legislation, which would end ICE and transfer its critical functions to
other executive agencies.
According to Rep. Jayapal,
There was enforcement of our immigration laws before ICE was created
and there will be after ICE, as an agency, is gone. As it stands, ICE is out of
control – contracting much of its work out to private, for-profit contractors
that cost the taxpayers far more than is necessary, failing to even identify
and address deficiencies in their system and allowing deaths due to substandard
in their custody, as numerous Inspector General reports have found. The agency
is simply unable to do the work that is most necessary for national security,
instead taking away necessary resources from functions that are critical to
protect our national security, including investigating terrorism, drug
smuggling, and trade fraud. We should eliminate the agency as it stands and
start from scratch to restructure its functions. This legislation would
establish a commission to look at transitioning essential ICE functions to a
new agency that would have accountability, transparency and oversight built in
from its inception. It’s time to change the system to one that is accountable,
efficient, humane and transparent. There will still be enforcement of
immigration laws, but it must be without cruelty and abuse.
Rep. Espaillant added
We are pushing to bring an end to ICE as the agency has strayed too far
from its original mission, intent and purpose. In the era of President Trump,
ICE has been granted an unlimited range to terrorize Latino communities around
the country, regardless of citizenship or status. The agency has a very broad
jurisdiction and was created to combat terrorism, human trafficking, and drugs.
Yet, ICE now spends the majority of its time detaining and separating mothers
and fathers seeking safety for themselves and their children - instead of
focusing on hardened criminals, gangs and terrorists set out to hurt our
country and negatively impact our quality of life. We are witnessing a human
rights crisis, and our bill would bring forward a new model and dismantle ICE
once and for all.
Immigration enforcement used to
be conducted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS. After the
shock of 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security was created, the INS "retired" with the CBP created to take over its enforcement functions, and the ICE created
with the task to “prevent acts of
terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist
and criminal activities.” Given this “mission,” there was actually a very
limited amount for ICE agents to do. In fact, in 2005, the DHS own Inspector
General report called into question the size and purpose of the ICE:
We could not find any documentation that fully explains the rationale
and purpose behind ICE’s composition. One senior official offered the following
explanation…ICE was established with not a focus on supporting a particular
mission, but on building an institutional foundation large enough to justify a
new organization.
The IG report noted that the ICE’s
budget expanded to well beyond what was needed, and in order to spend that
money, the ICE’s self-described “mission” and infrastructure expanded well
beyond its original scope. Today, the Homeland Security Investigations is now
tasked with what the ICE was originally supposed to do, and the ICE is now (mostly) focused on immigration in the "interior," in what used to be the INS’ function. One of the original DHS officials,
Moira Whelan, also expressed deep concern about how the ICE strayed from its original program in dealing with terrorism and transnational crime, but had morphed into something
more disturbing, now about “moms with three year olds crossing the border,” and
“farm workers or people seeking political asylum.”
Under the Obama administration,
the ICE was instructed to concentrate on migrants who constituted real “threats”
to the security of the country, but many ICE agents chaffed at the “restrictions”
on their power to be abusive. ICE and Border Patrol unions were among the few
labor groups to back Trump, and when he unleashed the ICE from any restraints,
its agents predictably went wild like ravenous wolves hunting prey wherever it
could find it. As Heather Timmon’s wrote in Quartz, Trump allowed the ICE to
conduct a “nationwide manhunt” for otherwise law-abiding, hard-working people
and families, not the “violent criminals” that he constantly bellow out about. One
attorney representing an immigrant detained by ICE observed that the ICE doesn’t
have to act like Gestapo thugs: “They
have the discretion to implement the laws in a humanitarian way, and they’re
just acting like robots” and while they may pretend they are just doing their jobs,
“but so did the Nazis, and they were held accountable.”
Franklin Foer wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that ICE has expanded
into “a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention
facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology,” relying “heavily
on private contractors” which outnumber actual federal employees. Half of all
federal prosecutions are immigration-related, and with it the “infrastructure”
required to imprison even families and children. David Cohen in the Huffington Post wrote that “In the era
of alternative facts, words have become more ambiguous than usual. So when
President Donald Trump says he’ll spend $1 trillion rebuilding America’s
infrastructure, we should look at the details to see what he really
means. Damon Hininger, CEO of the country’s largest private prison
company, sure thinks he knows what Trump means. To Hininger, when Trump says ‘infrastructure,’
he doesn’t just mean roads and bridges, he also means prisons and jails.”
And keeping them full; at least
one immigration judge has been convicted of a “cash for kids jail scheme,”
dealing out unfairly long jail sentences to keep immigration prisons full; to
help these private “enterprises,” the Trump administration has mandated mandatory
minimum sentences for immigration
violators for the same reason. And these private prisons are not “safer” than
government-run prisons; their lack of oversight has led to unconscionable
degrees of abusive behavior toward immigrant detainees. While an unacceptable
number of immigration detainees die in ICE’s own detention centers, in those
that it contracts out to, the numbers are even higher. One of the causes of
death that is becoming more and more frequent: “self-inflicted strangulation,”
such as this past December in the case of Roylan Hernandez Diaz, who was
seeking asylum from Cuba, and a British man, Ben Owen in January.
The ICE, as the DHS’ own IG
report noted, had no real point to exist when it was first created, and there
was no justification for its size with regard to its alleged mission. The
original INS was viewed as an annoyance but not a government agency meant to
terrorize immigrant families; it was just “doing its job.” The ICE has gained a
justified reputation for being out-of-control, as a recent shooting in the face
of a New York man who is a legal resident. Trump and Miller have let loose this
contagion on the country, and it is the ICE that must be “eradicated.”
No comments:
Post a Comment