Top 10 reasons to be outraged by the racist, violent and unAmerican actions by ICE, Trump and Noem
Please don’t nag me about my social media behavior! I know I spend too much time looking at a screen and it makes my life too sedentary. It’s hard to run or exercise while holding my computer.
But where nagging won’t help, the nature of the news may. The material is so often contemptible! I find myself commenting on posts I see with one word: despicable!
Despicable is defined as “deserving hatred and contempt.” I’m not into hatred. Even ICE agents must have some degree of humanity buried behind those masks. But I fear my response to all those homemade videos I’m seeing depicting ICE behavior, has left me with intense feelings of contempt. It’s hard for me to fathom how you can treat people that way.
So today I’m forced to share my top 10 reasons for finding ICE contemptible.
1. The number one reason for me is the violence! So often it is unnecessary. ICE always seems to work in groups. All they need to do is surround the subject, pressing close till they are secured.
You don’t have to slam a person on the ground with knees on their neck and two or three others securing other body parts. And ICE might ask how to get into a locked car without breaking the windows. People do it every day!
2. Most people would be a little uneasy if they were approached by masked men in military gear and driving in unmarked cars. It might be frightening enough, you would want to leave the scene.
Why the masks? Why the unmarked cars? Why the military gear? Why not say clearly who you are like the local police? The statistics suggest most arrestees don’t even have a criminal record!
3. We like to believe we are a family-friendly society. Does ICE include social workers, to work with children born in the USA as citizens, when fathers are thrown to the ground and deported?
Are pregnant women languishing in detention centers? Why aren’t family members informed when others are detained? Many are left in the dark for days!
4. The National Immigration Law Center says that ICE ignores due process, available to all according to the laws of the land. There is no charge, legal process and ruling. Most arrestees just disappear and end up in their home country, or perhaps another.
5. The process ICE uses is racist. ICE stopping people simply by their race was recently affirmed by the Supreme Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he said. (He wishes!)
6. Contrary to the opinion of Justice Kavanaugh, ICE doesn’t know citizens from illegals! Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration officials. Some were forced to stand in the rain in their underwear. At least three were pregnant. One woman had her door blown off while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem watched. Two dozen citizens were held for more than a day without allowing contact with a lawyer or family.
7. ICE is rooted, not in investigation, charges and judicial proceedings, but in trauma and terror.
8. The cost of ICE is enormous! ICE is the highest-funded part of federal law enforcement, with more money than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons. New agents can get a $50,000 signing bonus and earn between $49,000 and $89,000 a year. Oh, and then there’s a $10,000 yearly bonus for the next four years.
9. With ICE activities, the cost to the U.S. economy, especially agriculture, will be enormous. Workers have left the fields. In late October there had been 1.6 million self deportations so far this year. Even with work documents, why risk it? This, along with 200,000 ICE deportations and 527,000 DHS deportations, who will do all those jobs?
10. The SILENCE! Where are the political opponents? Why the silence of government officials? Since when is a gestapo, or Presidential Militia, popular among members of Congress? Where are the courts demanding due process?
Where is the press? And where is the Christian church proclaiming love of neighbor? Must we be satisfied with the laments of a few Catholic bishops? The whole Christian community should be up in arms!
God only knows what terrors await some of these deportees. It’s a shame they have to face similar terrors here in the “home of the free.” And who is still working in Congress on immigration reform after Trump killed a bipartisan effort in 2024? Anyone?
Despicable! Despicable!
Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
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