This month marks 22 years because the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
Created within the wake of 9/11 underneath the guise of nationwide safety, Ice was supposed to focus on actual threats. As an alternative, it has change into a machine of mass surveillance, indiscriminate arrests and fear-based enforcement that does little to maintain us safer. Through the years, the harshest post-9/11 insurance policies have been rolled again after proving ineffective. However as we speak, we’re watching historical past repeat itself.
The resurgence of Donald Trump’s immigration insurance policies indicators a harmful return to a failed technique – one which prioritizes public spectacle over public security, conflates civil violations with legal threats, and emboldens vigilantes to police immigration standing as if it have been their responsibility.
I noticed this firsthand in my 13 years as an assistant chief counsel for Ice. The US immigration system was not designed to grant due course of or guarantee equity; as an alternative, it was constructed to prioritize deportation as a fallback when legal prosecutions weren’t politically fascinating or possible.
Historical past has proven us that mass immigration enforcement doesn’t make us safer. The George W Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance applications, such because the Nationwide Safety Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), failed to stop terrorism and as an alternative fueled racial profiling. The Bush administration applied Operation Streamline to criminally prosecute border crossers en masse and clogged federal courts with non-violent immigration instances. It wasted assets on prosecuting asylum seekers as an alternative of concentrating on actual safety threats. These insurance policies have been finally scrapped as a result of they didn’t work. But as we speak, we see them creeping again to “Make America Protected Once more”.
Ice has used social media to show non-citizens’ arrests into leisure. Mugshot-style photos of detained immigrants flood Ice’s feeds, lumping civil violators like visa overstays alongside critical offenders like drug smugglers. The message is obvious: to Ice, all non-citizens are criminals. However this isn’t regulation enforcement – it’s propaganda designed to stoke worry and justify an indiscriminate dragnet that ensnares even these with no legal report in any respect. By intentionally blurring the strains between civil and legal violations, Ice fuels the false narrative that non-citizens are inherently harmful. In actuality, practically half of these arrested haven’t any legal report – however Ice is betting the general public received’t care to examine the information.
Past social media theatrics, Trump’s resolution to rescind the 2011 Delicate Places Memorandum marks a harmful return to unchecked immigration enforcement. The memorandum required supervisory approval or urgent circumstances earlier than authorities performed arrests, searches, or surveillance in colleges, hospitals, locations of worship, and different places. It was applied to steadiness immigration enforcement with fundamental human rights – guaranteeing that worry of deportation wouldn’t forestall individuals from looking for medical care, sending their kids to high school, or practising their religion. However now, with the border czar, Tom Homan, brazenly declaring that non-citizens “ought to be afraid”, immigration has strayed from recognizing these human rights – shifting as an alternative to a technique of worry in each side of day by day life, pushing non-citizens into the shadows and leaving them susceptible to exploitation. And we’re already seeing the implications.
Take the case of 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, who died by suicide after classmates threatened to report her household to Ice. Her demise is a reminder that Trump’s immigration agenda doesn’t simply empower officers to implement the regulation – it emboldens abnormal individuals to behave as enforcers themselves. By stripping away essential safeguards just like the Delicate Places Memorandum, the federal government is sanctioning a tradition of worry the place lecturers, neighbors and even classmates really feel justified in weaponizing deportation. This turns immigration standing right into a instrument of exclusion – one which doesn’t simply separate households however erodes the very establishments meant to serve and defend communities.
This reckless, fear-based method isn’t simply emboldening vigilantes in our communities – it’s dismantling federal regulation enforcement as we all know it. Trump’s government order Defending the USA from Overseas Terrorists and Different Nationwide Safety and Public Security Threats claims to bolster safety, but in actuality, it guts companies just like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It pulls assets away from essential missions and redirects them in direction of sweeping immigration crackdowns. Research present precision-based enforcement successfully removes threats, whereas blanket policing wastes assets and weakens public security. As an alternative of strengthening nationwide safety, Trump’s order scatters essential regulation enforcement belongings, pulling them away from counter-terrorism, drug trafficking and violent crimes. By casting an indiscriminate internet, his method makes it tougher, not simpler, to catch actual threats, like looking for a needle in a haystack whereas torching all the subject.
We’ve seen this playbook earlier than: insurance policies that dehumanize, divide and erode public belief. However historical past doesn’t need to repeat itself. We all know these insurance policies don’t work. The query now isn’t simply how a lot harm they are going to do – it’s whether or not we are going to cease them earlier than it’s too late.
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