A Nation of Immigrants Under Attack
Mario Romero was among those arrested by
ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him
“chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los
Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.
“It was a very traumatic experience,” she told The
Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families
would endure.”
The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide
Stephen Miller, has demanded that
ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal
basis.
To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace
violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship
appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home
Depots, farms,
and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause,
violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.
In one disturbing case in
Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as
he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours
before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.
In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both
U.S. citizens — one
undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation
flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE
deported him without his medication.
The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of
private prisons and county jails.
The U.S. spends over
$3 billion annually on the world’s largest immigration detention
system, which is primarily operated by for-profit
prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic. These facilities are
notorious for poor
medical treatment, dangerous
overcrowding, due
process violations, and preventable
deaths.The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.
The prison has a sordid
history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without
blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or
towels for over 10 days, reported the Los
Angeles Times.
If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following
the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise
their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law.
Their due process rights would be respected.
In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country —
including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to
agency data compiled by
research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention
as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.
Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s
rampant human
rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE
functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses
private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized
surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.
The current system has a vested
interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real
immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which
includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.
People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.
OtherWords columnist Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer,
policy analyst, and educator.
