It’s been said once, it’s been said a million times: when Donald Trump and members of his administration claim Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using American taxpayer resources to prioritize dangerous people and “bad hombres” for arrest and deportation, they’re lying to you. Since Trump unshackled his mass deportation agents via executive order after taking office last year, the largest surge in ICE arrests haven’t been people who pose a risk to public safety, but rather undocumented immigrants with no criminal convictions at all:
The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.
Critics say ICE is increasingly grabbing at the lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants to meet the president’s unrealistic goals, replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.
That includes arrests resulting from what immigrant rights advocates have termed “silent raids”: “Those facing deportation who show up for periodic ‘check-ins’ with ICE to appeal for more time in the United States can no longer be confident that good behavior will spare them from detention.” In other words, immigrants just trying to follow ICE’s rules by checking in. But, “once-routine appointments now can end with the immigrants in handcuffs.”
In one recent “silent raid,” officials detained an Ohio dad who had gone to what was supposed to be a routine check-in, accompanied by Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) and noted immigration attorney David Leopold. “The first thing out of their mouth was, ‘We’re not going to beat around the bush. We’re going to take him into custody,’” said Leopold. Despite living in the U.S. for nearly four decades with no criminal record, Amer "Al” Adi Othman was deported to Jordan two weeks ago.
“Immigrants whose only crime was living in the country illegally were largely left alone during the latter years of the Obama administration,” reports The Washington Post.
“But that policy has been scrapped … more broadly, the Trump administration has given street-level ICE officers and field directors greater latitude to determine whom they arrest and under what conditions, breaking with the more selective enforcement approach of President Barack Obama’s second term”:
A Virginia mother was sent back to El Salvador in June after her 11 years in the United States unraveled because of a traffic stop. A Connecticut man with an American-born wife and children and no criminal record was deported to Guatemala last week. And an immigration activist in New York, Ravi Ragbir, was detained in January in a case that brought ICE a scathing rebuke from a federal judge.
“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust,” said U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, reading her opinion in court before ordering ICE to release Ragbir.
“We are not that country,” she said.
But we are that country, because ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been stains on our nation for years, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The difference now is, the increasingly atrocious violations of human dignity being carried out by unleashed federal immigration agents. Earlier this year, human rights groups exposed border patrol agents destroying jugs of water left out for dying migrants in the desert. Just hours later, group volunteers were arrested and charged.
And, it’s not just that the Trump administration has given agents “greater latitude to determine whom they arrest and under what conditions,” it’s that there are no more rules at all when it comes to prioritizing who to arrest. This means that rather than focusing resources and dollars on people who actually do pose a risk to public safety, ICE is taking people like a Kansas professor into custody as he was taking his daughter to school:
Last month, a college chemistry instructor in Kansas, Syed Ahmed Jamal, was taken into custody on his lawn while preparing to take his daughter to school. He arrived from Bangladesh 30 years ago and built a life in the United States. More than 57,000 people signed an online petition asking ICE to stop his deportation, describing him as a community leader and loving father.
“When his wife tried to hug him,” The Kansas City Star reported at the time, “an agent said she could be charged with interfering in an arrest, said son Taseen Jamal, 14.” In Jamal’s case, ICE does what it does best, which is to essentially claim he had it coming:
An immigration judge placed a temporary stay Wednesday on ICE’s attempt to deport him, but the agency’s account of Jamal’s case is starkly different. ICE said he arrived in 1987 on a temporary visa. He was ordered to leave the United States in 2002, and he complied, but three months later, he returned — legally — and overstayed again. A judge ordered him to leave the country in 2011, but he did not. ICE said agents took Jamal into custody in 2012. He lost his appeal in 2013.
At first glance, [ICE’s Matthew] Albence said, many of ICE’s arrests may seem like “sympathetic cases — individuals who are here, and who have been here a long time.”
“But the reason they’ve been here a long time is because they gamed the system,” he said.
But it’s been the immigration system that have been gaming immigrants, not the other way around. Undocumented immigrants are the backbone of various American industries and employers willingly take their labor. Regarding contributions, undocumented immigrants pay $12 billion in local and state taxes annually and have contributed $100 billion to the Social Security Fund over a decade—which the federal government takes without regard to their immigration status—yet there is no line for them to get into to become a part of this country on paper.
As Jamelle Bouie wrote last month, “ICE is out of control,” with officials telling The Washington Post, that “morale at ICE is up because its officers have regained the authority to detain anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.” ICE has gone from an agency with rogue agents to a rogue agency itself, so what do we do about it? Resisting any efforts to boost up ICE must be the default mode of all Democrats, especially right now as Trump is holding DACA recipients hostage in exchange for Stephen Miller’s white supremacist immigration wishlist. Ask your 2018 candidates what they’ll do to dismantle ICE as we know it and protect immigrant families, and while it’s still early, plan on asking your 2020 candidates too.