Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t just a federal immigration agency, it’s become a political arm of the federal government. Candidate Donald Trump made plenty of promises and has broken plenty of them, but one he’s kept as president is to make life for America’s immigrant families as miserable as possible—and he’s done it with the weight of an unleashed mass deportation force:
ICE’s 40 percent increase in arrests within the United States after Trump took office is now closely associated with the president’s political priorities. His sweeping executive orders on immigration broadened the focus of enforcement beyond serious threats to public order. Arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions have spiked. Routine “check-ins” with ICE officials can end with handcuffs and deportation. “Sanctuary cities” — a recurring presidential political obsession — are being targeted with additional personnel. Hundreds of children have been removed from parents seeking asylum and detained separately — compounding their terrible ordeal of persecution and flight. ICE recently announced a new policy that makes it easier to detain pregnant women. Asylum seekers have often been denied “humanitarian parole” while their cases are decided, effectively jailing them without due process.
“The attitude of President Trump toward federal law enforcement is, to put it mildly, mixed,” columnist Michael Gerson continued. “The FBI refused to bend to his will. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has passed the loyalty test”.
ICE’s duty should be to protect the public good. But in its quest to round up as many immigrants as possible, ICE has flouted its own policy, ICE has lied, ICE has doctored evidence, ICE has broken the law, ICE has committed egregious acts that have broken the public trust:
Accusations of abuse in ICE custody are numerous and serious,” Gerson writes, “and they preexisted the Trump era. An investigation by ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported cases of racial profiling, fabricated evidence and warrantless searches — all given little scrutiny by overwhelmed immigration courts. During the past few years, there have been hundreds of accusations of sexual abuse, racial slurs, abusive strip searches and verbal harassment in ICE jails, prisons and detention centers. For an institution that claims “zero tolerance” for such practices, it seems to get a lot of serious complaints. One asylum seeker, Gretta Soto Moreno, has called the facilities worse than normal prisons because ICE “feels like it can treat immigrants any kind of way.”
“ICE tactics leave terror, not safety, in their wake,” Citizen Times editorial board declared earlier this month, following reports of dozens of immigrants swept up in raids targeting North and South Carolina. In Tennessee earlier this month, 100 immigrants were arrested in a meatpacking plant raid, leaving over 160 U.S. citizen kids at risk of seeing their families torn apart:
The tactics have stoked fear in the Hispanic community. “People are intimidated and don’t want to come out of their houses, not even to meet their daily needs,” said Bruno Hinojosa, leader of the immigrant advocacy organization known as CIMA.
Everyone ICE arrested in the Carolinas last week was charged with illegal entry, but most had been targeted because of past criminal activity, ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said.
“While all of those arrested are unlawfully present in the United States, the majority of those arrested also have criminal convictions or are illegal re-entrants,” he said. “I can’t tell you if that’s 51 percent majority or 91 percent majority. That’s as specific as I can be right now.”
That sounds more like a broad sweep than a targeted exercise. No wonder immigrants are scared and their champions are outraged. Agents stop Latinos to ask them for the whereabouts of the people on their target list and then ask where they’re from. If they give the wrong answer they end up in cuffs, said Hinojosa.
And when an ICE spokesperson recently resigned rather than continue spreading lies about another raid targeting Northern California, why should ICE officials be believed when they claim they’re targeting people who pose a public danger?
For human and immigrant rights advocates, ushering in new leadership is essential to dismantling “the most brutal kind of national police force” that ICE has become. “This is an issue ripe for more rigorous congressional oversight—even an independent commission to investigate charges of physical and sexual abuse in the ICE system,” Gerson continues. With at least 13 congressional contenders so far calling for ICE to be eliminated and replaced with a smarter approach, there is a sea change coming.
Trump “aims to intimidate immigrants, reject refugees, and tell lies to justify the police-state tactics he is deploying,” said Lynn Tramonte, deportation defense coordinator of immigrant rights group America’s Voice. “We aim to welcome newcomers so that they can become new Americans in a way that builds a stronger nation. For us, immigrants and refugees are integral members of our national family, and we are going to keep fighting until our vision is fully realized.”