ICE’s Terror Campaign Now Takes Place Out of View
New DHS Head Markwayne Mullin tries to keep ICE out of the headlines, but the deportations continue
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Donald Trump’s Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) spent the early part of this year terrorizing Minneapolis with unconstitutional actions and overt violence. Two Americans were killed in cold blood. After tremendous public outcry, Trump replaced Kristi Noem as head of the department and ordered her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, to make some changes and stop the dramatic loss of public approval for the administration’s immigration agenda.
“My goal is that in six months, is that we are not in the lead story every day,” Mullin recently told a Senate committee.
Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency was going to change its mission or its methods. He just wants to do it out of the glare of the media spotlight. In other words, he wants the nasty work to be done where people may not notice. Today I wanted to take a deeper look at what’s changed, and what hasn’t, with ICE’s approach.
ICE is no longer the top of the news every day. That slot is now occupied by the war with Iran. However, ICE agents are still conducting an unpopular war against undocumented immigrants at a ferocious pace. Today the agency takes into custody as many as 1,100 people per day. They claim to be targeting criminals who are, according to President Trump, “the worst of the worst,” but more than 70 percent have no criminal record. The number who have been convicted of violent crimes? Five percent.
The data indicates a small decline in arrests compared with the past year, and the places where people are being scooped up have changed. ICE has shifted away from the big cities -- Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul etc. -- where dramatic sweeps garnered mass media attention and generated public outrage. Instead, they are arresting people one-by-one, and family-by-family in places like Danbury, Connecticut, and Cornelius, Oregon.
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As they carry out smaller-scale raids, ICE agents are still doing the same horrible things. They are incarcerating parents and children, often for periods beyond the legal limit of twenty days. They are separating children who are legal citizens from parents who are not. According to the investigative media outlet ProPublica, parents of more than 11,000 American children have been deported. Once taken into custody men, women and children are still being kept in terrible conditions at places like the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, Texas.
People held at the Dilly Center have reported that the water is undrinkable and food there has been contaminated by worms and insects. Health care and education are inadequate. Lights that blaze for 24 hours deprive inmates of adequate sleep. Guards try to intimidate immigrants into giving up their asylum claims. One breastfeeding mother was separated from her infant child for more than 100 days. Apparently, things are not better at adult facilities, where seventeen people have died just this year. Two of them died by apparent suicide.
That men, women, and children are held in these conditions, which can be worse than what is seen at federal prisons, is tragic and appalling, but this is being done with a purpose. Top Presidential aide Stephen Miller, who has designed and implemented the administration’s anti-immigrant policy, has clearly sought to frighten people into leaving. At one point, the administration promised that 2.2 million people would be incentivized to “self-deport” by a one-time $2,600 payment and a free airline ticket. So far, just 73,000 have taken the deal.
Miller Still on the Rampage
Miller, a ghoulish figure who has railed against immigration for years, has played a key role in fashioning Trump’s anti-immigrant political stand since the 2016 election, when candidate Trump described them as “…drug dealers, criminals, rapists…” As Trump’s henchman, Miller has been so vile and racist that a biography of him was titled Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.
Hard as it is to imagine, Miller has been more aggressive in Trump’s second term than he was in the first. He is demanding that ICE arrest rates reach 3,000 per day and insisting that agents detain people with the flimsiest of reasons. Here the Supreme Court has aided the effort by temporarily permitting warrantless ICE stops based solely on a person’s accent or occupation.
Miller was behind the militarized ICE operations in big cities, and he kept the pressure on immigration officials during daily 10 AM conference calls, which he used to grill and berate those who failed to meet the goals he had set. One high-level official was reportedly hospitalized-- twice -- due to the stress caused by the enraged Miller’s verbal attacks.
Rabid as he is, Miller was forced to take a brief step back when the public outcry over ICE tactics and aggression led to agents killing two protesting U.S. citizens in January of this year. With protests escalating, he reduced his public appearances; he was formerly a regular on Fox News. As public opinion shifted sharply against Trump’s anti-immigration campaign, Miller was forced to watch as ICE’s military-style occupation forces left the big cities.
However, Miller has not stopped scheming. Now the administration is moving to deprive undocumented immigrants of the means to support themselves and their families. The feds have imposed new rules banning refugees, asylum-seekers, and undocumented immigrants from getting commercial truck driver’s licenses. This rule includes people brought to the US as children who have legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) law. Overall, more than 200,000 drivers could be affected by this initiative
The attack on DACA immigrants reflects Miller’s broad interest in locating and punishing immigrants in any way he can imagine. In order to do this, he needs to find places where immigrants must come in contact with the government. In February the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which manages low-income housing programs, proposed a new rule that would deny “mixed status” families access to federally subsidized housing. It has been estimated that upwards of 80,000 people, including 37,000 children, would be forced to move under this new regulation.
Meanwhile, non-citizen entrepreneurs, who start businesses and create jobs, have been targeted by a policy that denies them access to federal small business loans. Under this rule to qualify for financing, businesses must be 100 percent citizen-owned. To be clear, even lawful, permanent residents are being be denied access to financing.
Unpopular Policies Quietly Continue
Stephen Miller’s power is confirmed by his influence, which he has maintained even as the American people have rejected his policies. The polling firm Ipsos has reported that roughly two-thirds thought ICE had gone “too far.” The stress of prosecuting policies the American people abhor seems to have gotten to ICE Director Todd Lyons. He has announced he will soon retire.
Most recently, between 100 and 200 immigration judges have either been fired or left their positions. These judges, who technically work for the administration, handle appeals made by detained immigrants. Trump has focused his firings on judges who approve a higher rate of asylum petitions. Today, the already clogged system has a greater backlog than ever, leaving increasing numbers of immigrants in fearful limbo. And the rate of asylum approvals has dropped from 42 percent during the Biden administration to 10 percent.
Meanwhile, ICE is so flush with cash that it could hire thousands of new agents, build dozens of detention centers, and still not spend it all. In total, more than $70 billion has been approved for the agency’s operations and facilities through 2029. As anyone who has been around the federal bureaucracy knows, the mere existence of funding motivates departments and agencies to spend it. In ICE’s case, this will be more operations, in more locales, including smaller communities that are out of the major media’s view.
Red States Take Their Own Actions
As ICE has shifted its focus from major urban centers to smaller cities and towns, some of the anti-immigrant action is moving from the federal level to the states. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has threatened to withdraw police funding from Houston, Austin, and Dallas if they don’t step-up their cooperation with ICE. Meanwhile, lawmakers in several “red” states, among them Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, have considered or already ordered the tracking of public school students’ immigration status.
Many state officials support a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning a landmark Supreme Court decision that found that all children, including undocumented immigrants or the children of undocumented immigrants, have a Constitutional right to public school education. In its place, these states want to either exclude undocumented children entirely or charge tuition for their enrollment.
Chip Roy, a Republican member of Congress who is running for attorney general in Texas is campaigning with a call for the Texas legislature to force the issue by passing a law banning taxpayer funding for the education of undocumented children. Roy has said, “…we shouldn’t have any taxpayer funds going to children who are illegally present in the United States.” Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming is one of many who agree with Roy. She says that spending on these immigrant children “…is breaking budgets from the standpoint of being able to provide an education to meet the needs of American citizen children.”
Meanwhile, Idaho and Montana are moving to criminalize undocumented residents, and others are aiming to invalidate their drivers’ licenses.
Even before Trump 2.0, Florida invalidated licenses issued by 19 states and the District of Columbia. The state has required employers to verify the citizenship status of their workers and cracked down on the transport of undocumented workers across state lines. Florida hospitals are now required to report the immigration status of patients and the cost of providing care through the Medicaid system.
All in all, Red states are implementing the Trump anti-immigrant agenda in ways the federal government cannot. The result: more distress for undocumented immigrants who are coming under greater pressure to leave the U.S.
Learning From The Twin Cities Terror
For more than two months, beginning in December, thousands of ICE agents occupied the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, terrorizing immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Deployed as part of Operation Metro Surge, groups of agents -- five, six, or more -- swooped down on immigrants and citizens alike. Dressed in military-style clothes with their faces covered and weapons at the ready, they raided businesses, stopped drivers, and plucked men and women off city sidewalks.
In the midst of Metro Surge, Trump declared that its main purpose was to arrest and deport Somali refugees who had broken the law. They were “garbage,” he said. Ultimately, fewer than 160 of those detained were Somalis. Many more were either American citizens or legal residents. At the height of the operation, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest ICE‘s actions, and hundreds participated in a campaign to track agents and warn people in the neighborhoods where they conducted raids.
In the first major tragedy of the ICE operation, an agent shot and killed one of the volunteer monitors as she was behind the wheel of her car. Renee Nicole Good was a U.S. citizen and mother of three. The killing, by an agent acting against established procedures, was captured on video, which was played on news programs hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Two-and-a-half weeks later, a protester named Alex Pretti, also a U.S. citizen, was killed by two agents who shot him a total of ten times. This killing was also recorded by onlookers and was shown repeatedly on television and online.
A week after Pretti was killed, ICE announced that 700 of its agents were leaving the Twin Cities, and two weeks after that, on February 12th, Operation Metro surge was shut down, and the Department of Homeland Security shifted its focus to smaller communities. In many, however, they are running into opposition inspired by the Minneapolis/St. Paul protests. In South Burlington, Vermont, for example, locals have rallied around detainees, including several who were wrongfully arrested and freed by state judges. Similar community actions have taken place in small towns across the country.
For now, Markwayne Mullin seems to be achieving his goal. ICE is no longer the focus of national attention. What’s changed? Well, the war is being fought in small-scale skirmishes and not big battles. This strategy makes it more difficult to track what they are doing, but the terror for law-abiding immigrants, some of whom have been here for decades, continues. That’s why it is more important than ever that conscientious American citizens keep their eyes open for bad actors who will implement Trump’s deranged agenda with the signature cruelty of the boss.
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