Robyn Newcomb
Just last Thursday, we saw the abuses of the U.S. Immigraton and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) escalate critically when an I.C.E. officer in Nashville, Tenn. shot a man in the arm and stomach when he left in a car after legally declining to provide identification to agents who asked without a warrant. The man was too afraid to receive medical attention until a local organizing group negotiated refuge for him; the officer has received no announced repercussions at the time of writing. What I couldn’t stop thinking about when I heard this was the discrepancy between how the majority of American media and elected officials characterize the now-popularized call to abolish I.C.E. as “radical” compared to how radical I.C.E. itself actually is.
How did we get here? Why exactly do we believe that abolishing I.C.E. is so outlandish?
If you’re a student at the College and unfamiliar with the agency’s history, you may be surprised to learn that it’s younger than you, me and every other student at the school. That’s because it was only founded in 2003, as part of Bush’s now widely condemned “War on Terror,” and predicated on the idea that immigrants are inherently a threat.
If you pay attention, the facts that refute this should be old news: undocumented Americans commit a fraction of the crimes that U.S.-born citizens do; they pay 11.7 billion dollars in state and local taxes every year; they balance Social Security; the only terrorism that increases in step with immigration is white, domestic terrorism against immigrants; immigration rates have already been steadily declining for the last decade. (If not, I cannot ask you genuinely enough to reach out to me — I’m more than happy to talk, share information or be critiqued. There’s no shame in being in the process of learning.)
But the vast majority of national discourse on immigration, both liberal and conversative alike, rests on what I believe is a foundationally incorrect notion that the United States government — even under the Trump administration — actually wants or intends to have a country without undocumented people. To the contrary, it knows it depends on them: both as a partisan tool and, more importantly, because of their labor.
Since the U.S.’s economy was founded on slavery, it has always been propped up by exploiting racial minorities and it has maintained the ability to do so by painting them as dangerous, as inhuman and as un-American. The current treatment of immigrants is a modern version of this 400-year-old dynamic, and it is absolutely crucial to the profit of corporations who depend on being able to pay illegally low wages to the estimated 7.5 million undocumented people in the workforce.
(Of course, as I’ve written in the past, if the U.S. truly wanted to “deter” immigration, then it would stop forcing wars, right-wing coups and crippling free trade policies on countries that innocent people then have essentially no choice but to flee.)
That’s why liberals should give this administration more credit when they mock proposed border wall plans for how obviously ineffectual it would be — because keeping immigrants out has never been the intention. Rather, the intention is to keep just the right number of immigrants to perform the exploited labor that our capitalist economy requires, to deport just enough to keep the rest terrified and to convince the rest of the country to hate them.
Let me say this again: the purpose of I.C.E. is not to deport all 10.5 million undocumented people — a never-ending, economically disastrous, wildly impossible agenda even for the most cold-hearted non-believer in human rights. The purpose of I.C.E. is terror: to keep people so afraid to ask for their rights that a permanent underclass of exploitable labor is maintained. We allot I.C.E. seven billion taxpayer dollars a year to do this.
More horrors have occurred under I.C.E.’s watch than I could possibly have space to list, from children dying in custody, to the destruction of sexual assault reports, to the beating of trans women to deporting the sole caregiver of a paraplegic six-year-old boy. It is perhaps best summarized by the recent story of Jimmy Aldaoud, a 41-year-old man who had lived in Detroit since infanthood. I.C.E. arrested and deported him to Baghdad, where he knew no one, did not speak the language and could not access the insulin that he relied on to survive. He died only a few days after posting a now-viral video begging for help, on the streets of a city that the U.S. bombed to the ground. To speak out against these atrocities but not for a solution is lazy activism; to call them merely “excesses” or “abuses” implies that the system itself is not abusive.
A vast array of activists, lawyers, researchers and civil servants have been envisioning a world without this kind of terror for much longer than most white Americans have even known what the letters in I.C.E. stand for, and I invite you to join them. It is only “radical” if you mean it in the Marxist sense that “to be radical is to grasp things by the root.”