Content Warning: Violence
Since the whistleblower story broke yesterday, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the people that ICE is violently abusing. The list of atrocities that ICE has committed is long. Forced sterilization was maybe one of those blatant human rights abuses that many thought would be beyond the pale. Sadly, it’s right in line with ICE’s outlook for humanity.
Since its inception in the Patriot Act era, ICE has used its power and funding, under the guise of law enforcement, to inflict racialized violence in communities across the US, at our borders and abroad. Their main justification for both their tactics and their existence rests firmly in the reactionary fantasy that they are some form of ‘last defense’ against a faceless horde of villains. They’ve used this logic to develop a surveillance network that would make 1984 blush, to set up a prison system that enriches people at the cost of human lives and dignity and to create a boogeyman for immigrant communities that is designed to instill constant fear and anxiety.
Under Bush ICE got its legs. The Bush-Cheney administration deftly utilized fear and uncertainty to undo decades of precedent on immigrant enforcement and detention. Eisenhower ended immigration detention and envisioned a country that no longer used state resources to lock up people for moving. ICE’s first lesson was how to turn public anxiety stirred up by politicians into an endless funding stream. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have always voted to maintain and increase the agency’s funding.
During the Obama years ICE gained discipline. The calm analytical posture we loved about Obama as a president turned coldly efficient and cruel at his ICE. What we recognize as ICE’s ruthless efficiency today was designed under the Obama administration and Secretary Napolitano. Cruelties like deporting children who arrived seeking asylum at the border was good policy under Obama and we know where that policy ended up. Obama rightly earned the Deporter-In-Chief moniker, as it was his system that separated thousands of families then and now.
Under Trump the cruelty in the system is no longer obscured. It is purposely front and center. It is ICE’s logical culmination. This agency has been given free rein to inflict as much pain as possible. And now we know they are actively engaging in the anti-immigrant movement’s dream: ethnic cleansing.
No surprise from a government that built an election pitch and an eventual presidential authority on deep anti-immigrant hatred and xenophobic demagoguery. And Trump may win again. If that happens we can absolutely expect the DHS, ICE & CBP network to run absolutely wild and to take their genocidal campaign more into the open. Right now they’re still deriving authority on ‘law and order,’ but the truly terrifying reality we face under a 2nd Trump term is unimaginable. The mandate that Trump will assume and that the worst actors in his cadre will draw power from will be full speed white nationalism with all the state sanctioned terror right out in the open.
This is what ICE does- use dog kennels for children; ‘process’ people in rooms so cold they’re called the hielera, the icebox; traffick and sexually abuse children; refuse to treat people for COVID; force feed people in their care; lie and use fake warrants to rip people from their homes; and now, we know, forced sterilization; and countless other crimes against humanity. They’re doing this to further white supremacy. I hope this makes you as sick as it makes me.
We have to remember the heroes in this terror. Nurse Dawn Wooten is a hero. The Immigration Attorneys fighting this agency are heroes. The people in the concentration camps who staged hunger strikes in solidarity with The Movement for Black Lives are heroes. Everyone who survives ICE is heroic, but their strength does not justify the trauma that we as a nation are responsible for.
DHS and those who work with them at CBP and ICE have taken a position of terror. They’re using methods to terrorize the people they have kidnapped and trafficked. And, importantly they’re sending a message to others.
A message to racists and xenophobes that “we agree, migrants are not human.”
A message to the world that “this is no place for justice.”
A message to the millions of people seeking refuge and protection “we will destroy you.”
