ICE: The Making
of an American Gestapo
Special Agent Rodney Irby
waits for backup agents while searching for smuggled marijuana on January 18,
2011, in the Tohono O'odham Nation, Arizona.JOHN MOORE / GETTY IMAGES
July
23, 2018
An upsurge of opposition to the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is taking shape across the country,
catalyzed by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance policy” of forcibly separating
families and detaining children at the US-Mexico border and warehousing migrant
children in ICE detention centers.
Hundreds of thousands protested across the country
on June 30. Activists in Portland, San Diego, Detroit, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Columbus, McAllen, Atlanta, New York City, Washington, DC and other
cities temporarily occupied or blockaded strategic entrance and exit points at
ICE detention centers in order to effectively disrupt operations.
In the electoral arena, the
surprise Democratic primary election victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New
York’s 14th congressional district sent shock waves through the party
establishment and highlighted the growing number of left Democrats who, like
Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for the abolition of ICE.
Cynthia Nixon, a Democratic Party
candidate for governor in New York, has gone so far as to call ICE a “terrorist organization.”
The depth and breadth of outrage
against the brutal treatment of migrant and refugee families by ICE has even
extended into the agency itself.
At least 19 ICE investigators
involved with human trafficking and transnational crime have publicly called for the reorganization of DHS agencies
to effectively push into a separate entity those subdivisions in charge of
interior immigration enforcement. They assert that the abuses and mission creep
— and the resulting negative public reaction — of ICE’s interior operations are
making their work more difficult.
Responding to this tide of
opposition, congressional Democrats Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Adriano
Espaillat introduced the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act
last week. “President Trump has so misused ICE,” explained Pocan, “that the agency can no
longer accomplish its goals effectively.”
Is it possible to abolish ICE? If
so, what will it take? To answer those questions, an understanding of the
history and function of the agency is needed — one that goes deeper than
Trump’s current abuses.
ICE was founded on the basis of a bipartisan political consensus to increase
the policing immigrants at a time of heightened global economic competition,
rising domestic inequality and social volatility.
In its relatively short existence,
ICE has swelled into a muscular branch of the law enforcement apparatus. It has
developed in conjunction with border militarization and increasingly violent
inner-city policing.
The phenomenon of intensified
domestic policing has further spurred increased military expansion
internationally, increased exploitation of immigrant labor through
criminalization, and created new markets for accumulation through the
privatization of incarceration and other repressive state functions.
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In the hands of Trump, ICE has
also been more openly revealed to be an instrument in the service of white nationalism.
For a movement to abolish ICE to
succeed, it will also have to unmask and challenge the economic roots and inner
workings of immigrant repression as a function of US capitalism, and its
attendant foreign and domestic policy.
Turning the “War on Terror” Inward — Against Immigrants
Following 9/11, successive US
administrations carried out a massive, bipartisan military buildup and
aggressive projection of US power across the globe, spending an astonishing $5.6 trillion conducting wars
across several continents. Concurrently, there has there been an attendant
militarization of domestic law enforcement and its repositioning as if on war
footing as well.
In late 2002, the Bush
administration carried out a swift reorganization of federal law enforcement
agencies. The new and chillingly named Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
integrated 22 different federal agencies and a quarter of a million personnel —
including ICE and the Border Patrol — under one direct chain of command.
The stated mission of ICE prioritizes
anti-terrorism, immigration and border enforcement, customs regulation,
cyber-security, and disaster prevention and management. Operationally, the
agency quickly shed any pretense of being the frontline force defending
national security against internal threats. Instead, it emerged as become an
overt instrument of repression of working-class immigrants.
This contradiction of mission
versus function led researchers at Syracuse
University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), one
of the nation’s top immigration enforcement data collection centers, to
conclude in 2007:
Despite the repeated
statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its
core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake
of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration
Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters.
Rather than fulfill their stated
purpose, ICE’s targeted raids, systematic detention and institutionalized
practice of selective and ongoing deportation are designed to instill fear in
the immigrant community in accordance with the right-wing strategy of “attrition through enforcement.”
The theory behind this doctrine,
articulated first by a white nationalist think tank and championed
by anti-immigrant ideologue Kris Kobach, is that
undocumented people will be encouraged to “self-deport” if their lives are made
sufficiently miserable through oppressive measures, selective punishments and
being maintained in a state of constant fear of capture, detention, and
deportation.
Both parties have continued to
pump additional billions into immigration “enforcement,” framing it in the same
“war on terror” rhetoric as a means to protect national security.
Between 2003 and 2016, ICE’s budget nearly doubled from $3.3 billion
to $6.1 billion under Bush and Obama, and has jumped again under Trump — to
$7.3 billion in 2018 and a proposed $8.3 billion in 2019.
By 2013, the US government was
already spending more on armed federal immigration enforcement than on the FBI,
DEA, Secret Service and all other federal criminal law enforcement agencies
combined.
ICE has also gone international, working
alongside other federal agencies in more than 70 countries around the world to
enforce the anti-Muslim “travel ban,” surveil and investigate people coming
into the US, and participate in drug enforcement operations.
With this increased funding has
come the rapid extension of ICE operations throughout the interior of the
country, the expansion of detention facilities and the ramping up of deportations. ICE currently
operates out of 24 regional “field offices” staffed with over 20,000 agents, officers,
investigators and other field support positions, a sprawling complex with
minimal oversight.
As a feature of its rapid
incarnation, covert character, and lack of oversight and scrutiny, the agency
increasingly operates with a culture of impunity; opening the door to rampant
corruption. As a Guardian report noted in 2015: “[T]he
systems to monitor [ICE’s] vast network of field directors, detention officers
and arresting officers under its purview are either nonexistent or wracked with
the same corruption they’re intended to prevent.”
From the Workplace to the Community: ICE’s Reign of Terror
Immigrant workers comprise about 17
percent of the US workforce, with workers from Mexico and Central
America making up about half of that total population.
This section of the workforce is
disproportionately concentrated in low-wage, manual labor positions, paid about
15 percent less for same work as native-born workers and distributed throughout
the economy and nation. This section of the US working class has also been the vital source for union growth and revitalization
since the 1980s.
In 2006, at least 3 million
immigrant workers, their families and supporters turned out to the streets to
protest the passage in the US House of Representatives of the
Sensenbrenner-King Bill (HR4437), which would have made it a felony to be
undocumented within the territorial boundaries of the US
Hundreds of thousands went on strike or stayed
away from work, walked out of school, refused to spend money and participated
in other activities under the slogan of “a day without an immigrant” to
demonstrate their social and economic significance. The bill was killed in the
Senate as a result.
In the face of such a potent
display of collective defiance, the Bush administration turned loose ICE agents
to target, detain and deport immigrant workers at various points of production.
Under ICE’s jurisdiction of investigating
“document fraud” (a division of Homeland Security Investigations), heavily
armed agents began raiding workplaces across the country after the passage of
the REAL ID Act in 2005. These raids were intensified after May 2006,
ostensibly to suppress further protests through selective, punitive targeting.
Different workplaces were swarmed by heavily armed ICE teams and workers
whisked to detention centers. In 2008 alone, there were hundreds of raids,
culminating with the arrest and detention of over 6,000 people.
As part of its “enforcement and
removal operations” ICE raids have fanned out through immigrant communities
across the country. Despite the rhetoric of suppressing “criminal aliens,”
these highly staged and advertised raids largely scoop up “non-criminal
immigration violators,” who can be more simply described as undocumented men,
women and children who step outside their door into public spaces.
Take ICE’s “Fugitive Operations
Program,” which established 24 regional field offices whose operational
directive is to locate and apprehend “dangerous individuals” with existing
“removal orders.” A Migration Policy Institute study found that,
from 2003 to 2008, 73 percent of the nearly 100,000 people arrested in
“fugitive recovery operations” had no criminal record or pending charges.
This pattern continued into the
Obama administration. ICE removal operations in Obama’s first year
led to the deportation of 389,834 people, of which 253,491 — or 65 percent —
were “non-criminal immigration violators.”
These numbers dipped later in the
Obama administration, as “prioritization memos” issued by his office
de-emphasized the detention and removal of non-criminal offenders. But more
recent data shows a continuation and intensification under Trump, who has rescinded
the Obama-era prioritizations and replaced them with his own.
In 2017, ICE Enforcement and
Removal Operations carried out a total of 226,119 deportations, a 30 percent
rise from fiscal 2016. While ICE
makes the incredible claim that 92 percent of those arrested and deported had
criminal convictions or pending charges, the agency report blatantly
omits how it arrived at such a high number by lumping together those charged
with civil (non-criminal) and “criminal offenses.”
But this only begins to tell the
story of how ICE stretches the definition of “criminal” beyond all recognition.
Under Trump, ICE has established a
new priority of targeting immigrants in the country with “final orders of removal.”
This status refers to a population
of over a million people who have standing deportation
orders or pending removal proceedings that have resulted from non-criminal
“civil” circumstances, such as collateral arrests, rejected green card or
refugee applications, and dozens of other scenarios.
As much as 10 percent of this
population participates in annual “check-ins” at ICE offices, with the hope of
achieving normalized status, making them a soft target for the administration
to find and arrest. Without this duplicity, it is estimated that the number of
“criminal fugitives” would drop from 92 percent to 58 percent.
Furthermore, many of the
convictions or pending charges against other undocumented immigrants are for
various categories of infraction, misdemeanors and otherwise nonviolent,
victimless crimes.
During its second term, the Obama
administration was pressured to reduce the percentage of people being deported
for nonviolent, minor crimes through the implementation of a deportation priority system. A three-tiered
schematic ranked deportable crimes from serious to minor, with DHS agents and
officials instructed to decrease the numbers deported for low-level crime.
Trump has removed the schematic
altogether and rescinded the prioritizations in order manufacture numbers to match
his rhetoric, using ICE as his propaganda weapon.
Trump has since further widened
the purview of ICE and given it more license with his so-called “zero tolerance
policy,” which began with a series of DHS memos and directives that removed other
Obama-era protocols that established a meager set of ground rules for ICE
policing.
Trump’s new rule is that there are
no rules, at least when it comes to the direct policing of undocumented people.
Federal agents can now deport undocumented people who were convicted of any
crime, no matter how minor, including things people “could be charged for” —
i.e., things determined solely by the agents themselves.
This includes the Orwellian logic
that an agent could detain anyone they encounter who is undocumented as someone
who “potentially crossed the border without authorization.” These guidelines
make every undocumented person deportable, regardless of circumstances.
Trump has also attempted to strip all protections from the 700,000 recipients of
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and used ICE as an
instrument of political repression that targets immigrant rights activists across the
country.
Trump and his fellow white
nationalists further aim to revamp and expand partnership and
information-sharing programs between ICE and local police departments such as
287(g) and “Secure Communities,” expand the eligible
period for “expedited removal” within 100 miles of the border from two weeks to
two years, and pare down acceptance and resources for the refugee process,
which is at its lowest rate since 1980.
To accomplish these plans, Trump
has mandated the DHS to hire an additional 10,000 new ICE and 5,000 Border Patrol
agents. In order to expand as quickly as possible, DHS plans to
outsource the hiring process to private contractors.
ICE plans to hire 6,597 support personnel positions, who will in
turn handle the hiring of 10,000 new agents. DHS has already inked a $297
million contract with the consulting firm Accenture to help them hire the
Border Patrol agents, 2,000 customs officers, and 500 other agents for its Air
and Marine Operations.
The Corruption and Profitability of the ICE-Fueled Detention
Industry
Another facet of ICE operations,
immigrant detention, further illustrates the abysmal record of the agency and
the depth of corruption that has penetrated into its very core.
In 2018, ICE will spend more than
$3.6 billion — about half its budget — on immigrant detention
through contracting private, for-profit and “non-profit” jails and prisons.
This is a billion-dollar increase from 2017, reflecting the speculative boom in
immigrant incarceration anticipated for Trump’s second year in office.
In the war on immigrants, the
detention industry has sprouted in the role of camp follower, swelling through
generous ICE contracts and guaranteed revenue arrangements, and protected
by deregulation.
Currently, ICE operates or
licenses an estimated 51,000 detention beds spread out over a vast
and subterranean network of hundreds of detention facilities (estimated
to be as many as 637 in 2015), almost three-quarters of which are
currently contracted out to private companies.
ICE detentions are a cash cow for
the private detention industry, which profits off the super-exploitation of
detainee labor.
Kevin Landy, a former ICE official in the Obama administration,
told NPR last year that “contractors save a lot of money by using detainee
labor because they’re performing work that would otherwise have to be performed
by paid employees.” That work can include cooking and cleaning for as little as a dollar a day
— or less.
GEO Group, the largest immigrant
detention center contractor in the nation, earned over $2.26 billion in revenue
in 2017 from housing over 600,000 detainees in detention centers and prisons.
The company proudly proclaims in its financial report that 64 percent of
revenue came from detention and correctional facilities operations, and 22
percent from providing privatized health and educational services to detainees
within their facilities. ICE is their single largest customer.
In anticipation of a big payoff, GEO Group donated $475,000 to a Trump-supporting Super
PAC and for Trump’s inauguration festivities in early 2018.
CoreCivic, the other major private prison contractor in the US, gave $250,000
to support Trump’s campaign and inauguration.
Since Election Day, GEO Group’s stock price has gone up 63 percent,
and CoreCivic’s has risen 81 percent.
The dismantling of government
regulation and incestuous relations between high-ranking ICE officials and the
corporate investors they are supposed to regulate has created an industry rife
with corruption.
GEO’s deals with ICE, for example,
have steadily grown since 2012, when
it hired David Venturella, ICE’s former head of deportation and
detention operations under the Obama administration. In July 2017, the company
hired Daniel Ragsdale, ICE’s senior executive operating officer.
Southwest Key Programs, a Texas “nonprofit”
contracted by ICE, operates a series of facilities housing up to 11,900
detained migrant children, including a converted Walmart in Texas that has
become the focus of national attention.
The company has made nearly a billion dollars in government contracts
since 2016, and the CEO of this “nonprofit” has seen his annual pay increase to
$1.5 million.
The rapid growth of ICE has been
accompanied by diminishing oversight. The surge in hiring of agents, staff and
support personnel has led to an influx of abusive and corrupt elements into the
agency, while an inefficient inspection regime has contributed to the
degradation of conditions and oversight. According to the New York Times:
Over the past decade,
dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and contract guards
responsible for the detention and removal of undocumented immigrants have been
arrested and charged with beating people, smuggling drugs into detention
centers, having sex with detainees, and accepting bribes to delay or stop
deportations, agency documents and court records show.
Between January 2010 and July 2016
(i.e. during the Obama years), the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
(an oversight agency within DHS) received over 33,000 complaints of sexual assault or physical abuse
against children, women, men and LGBTQ people in detention by DHS agents —
mostly from ICE. The inspector general, the office in charge of looking into
complaints, investigated less than 1 percent of these cases.
Public outcry against this ongoing
neglect led the current inspector general to acknowledge the problem with
publication this year of an internal report outlining ICE’s continued failures
to provide basic oversight.
There are multiple examples of how
the matrix of repression and profitability creates the conditions for violence,
corruption and abuse to thrive.
In 2014, the DHS’s Inspector
General, Charles K. Edwards, was forced to resign after
it was revealed that he changed or delayed multiple reports — including audits
focused on misconduct within ICE such as numerous cases of abuse within the
“Secure Communities” program.
A review by advocacy groups of
five years of ICE inspections of detention centers between 2007 and 2012 found
that ICE failed to properly inspect facilities under its jurisdiction and shrouded their operational methods in secrecy.
The human toll of this corruption
and impunity is enormous. At least 172 detainees have died in ICE custody
between 2003 and 2017. Most recently, Efrain De La Rosa killed himself at a
privately run ICE detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
In July of 2017, ICE requested authority to begin destroying records
of its operations — including those of the detainees in their custody.
There is seemingly no end to the
stories of corruption and abuse — and corruption to cover up for abuse — inside
ICE.
A former special agent in charge
of DHS’s Office of Inspector General was sentenced to prison in 2014 for conspiring with three other special agents to falsify
documents and tampering with criminal investigations of corruption
by Border Patrol and ICE personnel.
In 2015, a for-profit “tent city”
prison in Willacy County, Texas was forced to close after inmates organized a labor strike and uprising
against abusive conditions there — including the lack of access to basic health
care services. The company that ran the prison, Utah-based Management &
Training Corp., recently won a contract from ICE to reopen the
facility as an immigrant detention center.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement
(ORR), which partners with ICE and the CBP, is currently housing 11,000 children. As a result
of the ballooning numbers created by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, the Texas
Health and Human Services Commission has permitted 15 of the for-profit institutions
contracting with ORR to cram in more kids than their child-care licenses allow.
“Nonprofit” detention centers are
also guilty. Texas regulators found over 150 violations at more than a dozen shelters
run by Southwest Key in the last two years.
The agency recently came under the
national spotlight when Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley was barred from entering
its Brownsville facility, a converted Walmart holding almost 1,500 immigrant
children between the ages of 10 and 17.
The blocking of public oversight
has been linked to how ICE officials are interpreting Trump’s 2017 executive order calling on ICE to
“take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for
violations of immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings
or their removal from the country to the extent permitted by law.”
There are fears that there may be
multiple detention centers in operation that are not publicly known or have no
public oversight whatsoever — so-called “black sites.” Last March, over 400 organizations and immigrant rights advocates
issued a statement calling on ICE to provide public access to all of
its facilities.
What Will It Take to Abolish ICE?
In all facets of its supposed
mission, ICE has failed to resolve more problems than it has produced.
At best, it has evolved into a
thoroughly corrupted moneymaking scheme that serves to enrich a segment of the
capitalist class that has shifted its investments into the booming markets of
the repression industry. At worst, it’s a quasi-fascist arm of the repressive
state apparatus that operates as little more than a heavily armed, aggressive
and unchecked overseer of the immigrant working-class population.
ICE may act like a rogue agency,
but it serves neoliberal capitalism well by subjugating a sizeable section of
the working population into a precarious state ripe for hyper-exploitation,
while also creating secondary markets for investors eager to exploit new
profit-making opportunities.
That means that despite the sudden
and inspiring growth of calls to abolish ICE, this agency won’t be done away
with very easily, and not without a coordinated pushback from both political
parties as well as the repressive apparatus of the US state.
One early tactic of the fledgling
“Abolish ICE” movement has been a series of occupations of ICE facilities to
gum up operations in and around regional ICE detention centers. Unlike at the
high point of the Occupy movement, most of these Occupy ICE blockades have not
attracted sufficient numbers to avoid being repressed and dismantled by police.
The growing calls from politicians
to defund and dissolve ICE have pushed the conversation forward. But there are
limitations to the electoral path, which shifts the initiative to elected
officials working inside parties largely financed and controlled by the same corporate interests
they seek to confront.
The lack of “political will” for
the Democrats to get behind “Abolish ICE” became apparent when the same
Democrats who introduced the bill to abolish ICE quickly collapsed their efforts.
They introduced the bill only to
score points with the immigrant rights movement, knowing full well it would
never pass a Republican-controlled Congress. When Republicans called their
bluff, threatening to bring the bill to a vote on the House floor, these same
Democrats announced they would not vote for their own bill.
Some of the most promising initial
steps in the movement have come from workers at Amazon, Microsoft and other companies where employees
are refusing to collaborate with ICE’s ongoing atrocities.
These efforts are modest but
important steps towards the source of our greatest potential power as workers.
It will also be important to build on existing efforts, such as pushing local
and state governments to pass sanctuary resolutions or to strengthen them where
they exist.
ICE is precisely designed to
repress that labor power among immigrant workers — and to foster racism and
divisions among their non-immigrant co-workers and neighbors. Ultimately, it
will likely take the re-emergence of a fighting immigrant worker movement on a
scale last seen in 2006 to lead to the dismantling of ICE.
We’re not there yet, but the
initial burst of actions — from occupations to campaign slogans to worker
petitions — are crucial steps towards drawing in larger numbers into organized
and coordinated campaigns, and laying the foundation of a movement that
delegitimizes ICE in popular opinion and brings the agency one step closer to
its much deserved demise.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout
with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without
permission or license from the source.
Justin Akers Chacón is the author of Radicals in the Barrio, co-author with
Mike Davis of No One Is Illegal and a contributor at
SocialistWorker.org.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
