It’s fucking laughable when Donald Trump tweets during his executive time that “ICE and Border Patrol Agents are doing a great job for our Country. MS-13 thugs being hit hard.” Immigration agents are hitting hard alright, but the largest surge in ICE arrests haven’t been people who pose a risk to public safety, but rather undocumented immigrants with no convictions at all. In fiscal year 2017, sweeps of undocumented immigrants without a criminal record more than doubled.
So remember, when Trump and members of his administration claim ICE and Border Patrol are using taxpayer resources to prioritize dangerous people and “bad hombres” for arrest and deportation, they're lying to you. Ask Syed Ahmed Jamal, the Kansas professor and dad arrested by ICE in front of his kids earlier this month. Despite having no criminal record, Jamal has been languishing in detention.
Or ask Rosamaria Hernandez, the ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy arrested by Border Patrol last November in Texas after undergoing emergency gallbladder surgery. During the week she spent alone in a federal detention facility—officials refused to release her to family members in the area—advocates alleged she was twice blocked from going to two follow-up medical visits ordered by her physicians.
“MS-13 thugs being hit hard,” he tweeted. Right. As The Stranger’s Dan Savage writes, since they’ve been unleashed, federal immigration agents “are being paid to do unbelievably cruel things to other people … and if you're a US taxpayer, these unbelievably cruel things are being done in your name and on your dime. The ICE agents who threatened to arrest that chemistry professor's wife if she tried to hug him goodbye? Those people work for you.”
The “thugs being hit hard” are Lilian Calderon, a Rhode Island mom of two U.S. citizens who was taken into custody by ICE last month after she and her husband, a U.S. citizen, had gone to a meeting with immigration officials in their ongoing attempts to adjust her status. “It was just a routine interview,” Calderon later said. “We didn’t think anything of it.” While she was eventually freed from detention following an ACLU lawsuit, she could still face deportation. “Everyone thinks that when you get detained by ICE it’s because it’s either drugs or violence or crime,” she told UPRISE RI. “But it’s not true.”
The “thugs being hit hard” are Maru Mora-Villalpando, an undocumented immigrant in Washington state who has been targeted for deportation for her “extensive involvement with anti-ICE protests and Latino advocacy programs,” according to a recently revealed ICE document. When Mora-Villalpando was put into deportation proceedings despite having no criminal record, her advocates called on ICE to explain why she was targeted. They refused. It took the assistance of Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell to obtain the document, with the case even garnering the attention of U.N. experts, who, in an extraordinary statement, condemned the U.S. for “an increasing pattern of intimidation and retaliation against people defending migrants’ rights in the US.
And the “thugs being hit hard” are Jorge Garcia, the Michigan dad and husband who was torn from his family and deported on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Garcia, who was too old to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections, had lived in the U.S. for three decades and spent at least $100,000 in his unsuccessful attempt to gain legal status through Cindy, his U.S. citizen wife. During this time he was ordered removed, but received numerous stays that allowed him to continue living here and keep working legally. Then came the Trump presidency.
“What's the goal here?” Savage asks. “It's not about making America greater or safer or richer. It's about making America whiter. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, John Kelly, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell all hope to make America as white as possible, for as long as possible.” And, he’ll lie about and smear America’s immigrant families in the process to try and get there. Don’t let him. Keep speaking out about Syed Ahmed Jamal, and Rosamaria Hernandez, and Lilian Calderon, and Maru Mora-Villalpando and Jorge Garcia. Keep speaking their names. Keep fighting. And keep working to sweep the true bad hombres out of bastions of power.