Gus Thomas
Contributing Writer
Last Sunday, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came under scrutiny after detaining and deporting over 2,000 Haitian refugees seeking Temporary Protected Status at the Texas border. Following the recent catastrophic earthquake in the country, as well as the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, these refugees are rightfully fleeing economic and political upheaval in the country.
But they find no solace in the U.S. Despite the recent change in administration, the country is as dedicated as ever to deploy ICE to intern refugees, unlawfully extract their forced labor, and expel them. The ethical position isn’t to decrease detentions or deportations as the Democratic Party has, but to undermine the power of unjust systems and abolish ICE entirely.
ICE is but one of many heads of the systemically unjust hydra of the United States Federal Government (USFG); it deploys violence in a specific way in a specific time, but inherits the objectives of racism and the institution of chattel slavery. Founded in 2002 in accordance with the passage of the Homeland Security Act, ICE follows an ideology dedicated to inflicting pain and misery on non-white communities domestically and abroad, as well as excluding Black and Brown people from the American body politic.
The violence carried out by ICE is sinister and terroristic. Apart from forcing detainees with the threat of violence to perform unpaid labor for GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections and other private prison companies, ICE facilities continue to have awful living conditions. Prolonged periods of solitary confinement, prolonged exposure to extreme cold temperatures, forced use of chemical suppressants, use of force as intimidation against seeking counsel, and many other forms of torture have been catalogued in these facilities. On the streets, ICE officers have been reported using unmarked vehicles to detain people without due process, engaging in racial discrimination to make arrests and enforcing unlawful search and seizures.
The messaging around the issue of ICE is opportunistic at best, and outright fascistic at worst. Democrats as recently as spring 2018 supported the abolition of ICE and its replacement with a new customs enforcement agency. However, this political rhetoric was largely devised as an alternative to the GOP’s anti-immigration agenda, and has obviously not been implemented under the Biden administration. On the other hand, the Republican Party has long supported the use of surveillance and detention tactics for the sake of protecting what they deem “homeland security.” Neither position offers an ethical injunction on the issue of systemic violence being carried out by the USFG on non-white people, irrespective of the administration’s party affiliation.
I leave the reader with this: invisible skirmishes for survival take place daily at the peripheries of the U.S. security state; millions of lives have been destroyed and tarnished in the name of this inconspicuous thing called “homeland security.” Do you care? Or do you prefer to preserve the fantasy that justice can reign despite this?