Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly plans to launch another racist terror campaign targeting immigrant families within the next few weeks, The Washington Post reports, with mass deportation agents looking to target communities in California, Denver, and Philadelphia. In the middle of a fucking pandemic.
Whether it’s more fearmongering or a real sweep, it’s a plainly political move by the administration. It’s coming just weeks before Election Day, it’s targeting only blue areas that we know of so far, and it’s plainly political because because the administration says so: “[t]wo officials with knowledge of plans for the sanctuary op described it as more of a political messaging campaign than a major ICE operation,” the report said.
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Further adding to the political nature of this campaign is that instead of using his time to combat white supremacist terror threats against the U.S., unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf is instead reportedly planning to tag along for at least one of the stops for full effect. Besides, Unlawful Chad probably isn’t allowed to focus on white supremacists because it might eat into his boss’ votes.
It’s despicable, and advocates quickly pushed back against the reported raids, noting other times impeached president Donald Trump has used federal officers for blatantly political actions, from suppressing voters to suppressing public anger over the state-sanctioned police murders of Black men and women.
“In 2018, the Border Patrol planned a series of ‘crowd-control’ exercises—purely coincidentally, I'm sure—for election day in El Paso, which they only cancelled after a huge public outcry. Nothing to see here am-i-right?” tweeted Philip Wolgin, managing director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress. “Oh and there's Portland—have we forgotten about Portland, where the President and illegally-appointed-acting-Secretary Chad Wolf sent in DHS personnel to meet peaceful protestors?” he continued. “Surely that wasn't political, am-i-right?”
And yes, we can talk about how corrupt this whole campaign is until the cows come home, but what about what it’s doing to undocumented families who are being targeted, and who already live their daily lives with the threat of detention and deportation hanging over their heads?
“#DontLookAway this admin continues to make scapegoats out of immigrants,” tweeted Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. “Using a major @ICEgov operation a month before an election as a political ploy in the name of ‘Law & Order’ is nothing less than an attack on our communities. Lives are on the line.”
Quite literally. ICE has continued detaining people in the middle of a pandemic, with the Miami Herald reporting that when federal immigration officials should be emptying immigration prisons as a safety measure, they instead “quietly announced they would resume regular apprehension and detention practices, an apparent reversal from an earlier temporary suspension of non-criminal enforcement due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Let’s not forget ICE is doing this as their ongoing human rights abuses continue to disgust decent people.
“Generally speaking, as ICE has noted for years, in jurisdictions where cooperation does not exist and ICE is not allowed to assume custody of aliens from jails, ICE is forced to arrest at-large criminal aliens out in the communities instead of under the safe confines of a jail,” ICE spokesperson Mike Alvarez claimed to The Post. Oh fucking please. From thumbing its nose at Congressional oversight to keeping people detained for years even after they won pardons, ICE isn’t forced to do anything. It’s doing exactly what it wants to do.