Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the least popular federal agency among the American public, a new survey from the Pew Research Center finds, with 54% percent viewing it unfavorably and 42% viewing it favorably. It’s not hard to figure out why the out-of-control agency is viewed even more unfavorably than the Internal Revenue Service: ICE has a bad reputation because it’s earned one.
“More than 50,000 immigrants are currently being held in ICE custody, with private, for-profit prisons housing nearly three-fourths of them,” Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate. ICE has routinely jailed more immigrants than it’s supposed to, in defiance of limits set by Congress. Continues Stern, “Reports issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General in June 2019 and September 2018 found that ICE facilities are filthy, brutal, and dangerous. Immigrants, including children, are routinely denied access to medical care.”
This negligence has been deadly. Stern reports, “At least 24 immigrants have died in ICE detention under Trump.” Among ICE’s youngest victims was 19-month-old Mariee Juárez, who died after weeks at a migrant family jail in Texas. Her mom, Yazmin, described unsuccessful attempts to get the child appropriate medical care after she got sick in custody. ICE released them only when the child had become “limp and hot.” She died in a hospital six weeks later. Yazmin has since filed a $40 million lawsuit against CoreCivic, the private company that operates the jail.
ICE has broken many families apart under previous presidents, but for the first time in the agency’s history, the current president openly advocates for immigration agents to break the law to do it, telling them to commit crimes against the vulnerable now and be assured of a pardon later. The agency has also been emboldened under unleashed officials such as former acting Director Thomas Homan, who went on TV to call for the arrests of pro-immigrant leaders, and unleashed agents who have targeted hundreds of U.S. citizens.
In just one example of this out-of-control agency’s tactics, U.S.-born Peter Sean Brown was wrongly targeted for deportation to Jamaica last December with the help of a Key West, Florida, sheriff’s office that already had a history of harassing immigrants. Brown, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, had never even heard of ICE before. The agency has also targeted U.S. military service members, deporting Miguel Perez Jr. over a year ago. He said that when he was being flown to Mexico, the ICE agents escorting him on the flight took selfies with him “like fishermen with a prize fish.”
Underlying ICE’s behavior and radicalism has been contempt for people of color, best exemplified by Homan himself during a recent House hearing, Stern notes. “Homan repeatedly hijacked the hearing to express his outrage about the real victims of all this, himself and the agency he used to lead. He shrieked at congressional Democrats, accusing them of making ‘inaccurate and disgusting’ attacks on his agency.” He screamed over Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a woman of color and immigrant, telling her, “I’m a taxpayer, you work for me!” when he refused to recognize that his time had expired.
If Homan is angry about how his former agency is seen, perhaps he should look in the mirror, but maybe it’ll be some comfort to him to know that some people are into his lawlessness and cruelty. According to Pew, “Attitudes toward ICE continue to largely break along partisan lines: While 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have a favorable view of the agency, just 19% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say the same.”