Cobb County renewed its agreement with ICE under the IMAGE program.
IMAGE reviews documents from employees to determine their immigration status.
Cobb resident Pat Burns, who has been active in immigrants rights issues delivered a statement to the Board of Commissioners opposing the renewal.
Cobb is intertwined with ICE through the 287-G program and the IMAGE program.
The presumption by the board is that the IMAGE program is only an internal HR program intended to insure that all employees are legally eligible to work.
When I see what reader reaction to this article is, I might do one of my extremely rare opinion pieces (we normally only print local hard news and occasional features). If readers largely like the article, there’s no use veering off our hard-news-only format, which I think is what we do best.
But if there’s significant backlash I might as well write the op-ed.
If I do write it, this will be my thesis (along with why I decided to so extensively quote Pat Burns in the article linked below):
- The United States has an imbalance in the demand for workers by employers and the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country to work legally.
- This imbalance is resolved by the growth of a large undocumented workforce.
- This workforce is stripped of rights and due process, subject to exploitation and abuse.
- The opposition to increasing the quotas for legal immigration is almost entirely based on racism and xenophobia.
- The Trump administration has made ICE a nearly explicit tool for this xenophobia and racism, whether or not individual ICE agents view themselves as racist.
- Local governments have compelling ethical reasons for distancing themselves from ICE.
Of course one potential effect of this could be to lose about a quarter of our readership, so the article below is to start the ball rolling on ramping up our immigrants rights coverage in the way we do it best — through straight hard news.;
Here’s the link to the article “New Mutual Agreement Between Cobb County Government and ICE approved by BOC”