There was a shooting in Tennessee, and then one in New Mexico, and most recently a shooting on the streets of New York. The shootings may seem unrelated and unremarkable — except all three were by immigration agents, and all three make clear that the Trump administration’s militarization of the immigration system, which he is expanding by sending the Border Patrol into so-called sanctuary communities, is having dire effects on the communities being targeted.
Advocates have ramped up their already aggressive protests against the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies responsible for policing immigrants. They have been fighting to close immigration jails and to rollback the expansion of policing powers granted by President Donald Trumps to the agencies.
But these advocates are fighting an uphill battle, because too many Americans see these shootings as normal, the way too many see shootings by police in African American neighborhoods as normal. They don’t see the dangers expanded police powers and the federalization of law enforcement pose, so they ignore it.
But we are at a precipice here. The confluence of white supremacy and militarized law enforcement, of anti-immigrant rhetoric and federal policing leaves all of us vulnerable. The Border Patrol dates back to early in the last century, a part of a xenophobic assault on immigration that resulted in the setting of national quotas designed to maintain a white Christian majority. It was given more powers during the Second World War and was a party of the expansion of federal policing powers during the Cold War, but exploded in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
ICE was created during this aftermath, with the November 2002 passage of the Homeland Security Act. As ICE states on its own website (www.ice.gov/features/history), this “set into motion what would be the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense.” The agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, “was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and strengthen public safety in response to the deadly attacks perpetrated on 9/11.”
The language here, of course, is designed to paint the agency in a positive light, but the reality has been a grim one. The list of ICE abuses is long and well-documented, and they track the kind of abuses engaged in by local police departments: no-knock raids, wide-spread sweeps, warrantless searches and arrests, intimidation, and so on. The difference is that local law enforcement is accountable to local communities, or at least potentially accountable. ICE answers to no one but the administration, and it also portends the further nationalization of policing.
The agencies are baked into its DNA, and they presage the growth of an American police state that is likely to reach beyond the immigrant community. Katrina Eiland, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, told Pacific Standard magazine in 2018 that the agency had “taken off the gloves” and was “going full throttle without regard to consequences” — or sense of proportion. “They don’t have any logical enforcement priorities anymore — everyone is an enforcement priority.” This was the case under Barack Obama and it is getting worse under Trump.
Immigration often is painted in one of two ways, both relying on the notion that immigrants are “the other.” Immigration-restrictionists describe those migrating here as threats, while many who view themselves as supportive still see them as outsiders and not as extensions of themselves, or ourselves. This allows many well-meaning liberals to view immigration reform as a tangential issue to others they view as more important — the economy, war, climate change. The reality, however, is that migration internationally is being driven by economic displacement, the violence of war, by warlords and gangs, by environmental collapse. American-style capitalism, with its thirst for profit and appetite for scarce resources, creates massive instability that batters vulnerable populations, who then are force to flee their homelands.
At home, the expansion of police power, especially federal police power and the use of the military to help contain mass migrations at our borders, is unlikely to be contained to those communities and will instead become the norm in all communities — echoing the War on Drugs. It’s why calls for ICE to be dismantled should be taken seriously. Reforming the agency and reining it in is not enough. Its existence creates its own imperative to act, meaning immigrants will remain targets, with other marginalized groups slowly moving into the crosshairs.
To paraphrase Martin Niemoller, first they come for the immigrants. Once it’s clear there are no consequences, that the police agencies will face no punishment, they will come for others. It’s inevitable.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/Newspoet41.
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
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