Matthew Albence, the latest person so far to serve as the Trump administration’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is leaving his unconfirmed post, CNN reports. In a statement thanking Albence for his work, another unconfirmed official, acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf, claimed Albence “helped restore integrity to this country’s immigration system.”
Sure, Chad. When the administration was in the midst of public backlash over its family separation policy back in 2018, Albence went in front of legislators to defend his statement that ICE’s migrant family jails are like “summer camps.” When eventually pressed by not one but two senators on his ridiculous and offensive claim and asked if he’d send his own kids to one of ICE’s “summer camps,” he refused to directly answer.
I noted both interactions back in 2018. In the July hearing on the separation policy, Albence and other officials stammered and refused to answer when Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii asked them if they’d send their own kids to one of ICE’s family jails. ”Again, I think we’re—we’re missing the point,” Mr. Summer Camp replied. So no, he wouldn’t. At a second hearing the following September, Albence again refused to answer when Sen. Kamala Harris of California posed a similar question, responding: “That question's not applicable.” So, another “nope, I wouldn’t.”
NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff noted Albence’s role in the family separation disaster, writing that “[a] month before the summer camp comment, Albence told an HHS data analyst, who asked about where he could find data to reunite parents and kids, that ICE ‘may not have some of it.’” He wrote back in 2019 that “[t]he gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration's ‘zero tolerance" policy.’”
But Albence “helped restore integrity to this country’s immigration system,” Chad claimed. So much integrity that Albence looked away when confronted with video of a child crying after being separated from her parent following one of his mass workplace raids last year. “What would you tell that little girl?” NBC News reporter Gabe Gutierrez asked. “Well, I don’t think I’d speak to the little girl,” Albence responded. That, folks, is a coward.
Don’t forget ICE is still trying to separate families. Over 100 children continue to remain jailed at those “summer camps” because the agency won’t just release them together with their parents even though a federal judge said they were “on fire” due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“Though reports submitted to the courts indicate that ICE has improved sanitary conditions inside its detention centers, the threat of the coronavirus is still very real,” Mother Jones reported this week. “Forty-seven cases of the virus have been documented at the Karnes family detention center and one at the Dilley detention center, both located in Texas. And lawyers say their clients still aren’t being adequately protected.”
Meanwhile, people detained at adult ICE detention facilities have been pepper-sprayed and assaulted for protesting their cruel and ongoing detention amid a pandemic that has now killed over 150,000 people in the U.S, including several people while in ICE custody. “It’s like they have us kidnapped here,” one Cuban asylum-seeker told Mother Jones last month. “That might sound a bit harsh, but it’s like being kidnapped. It sometimes seems to us like they’re running a business here.”
In his statement on his retirement, Albence wrote that “[t]his was an exceptionally hard decision to make, a decision prolonged due to the uncertainty of a global pandemic and the essential role ICE continues to play in our nation's response,” he said according to CNN. I’m sure he really believes that ICE has been essential. Maybe to his bank account, or to add on to a résumé when he tries to land a job with some private prison profiteer, where he can continue adding to his tally of human misery.