For years, immigrant rights and human rights activists have been trying to expose the abuses from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the cruel tactics they’ve used to tear immigrant families apart. Under Donald Trump, ICE agents have been unleashed, resulting in a surge of arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record at all. “Job One, if the Congress changes hands in the elections next fall,” Charles Pierce writes in Esquire, “is an intensive investigation of ICE, which has turned into the most brutal kind of national police force.” Pierce excerpts the recent group of Somali detainees who, after they alleged abuse at a West Texas Detention Center, were deported before the investigation concluded:
Last month, immigrant rights groups reported that the men were physically and verbally abused at a detention center in Sierra Blanca, near El Paso. In phone interviews and conference calls with reporters, several of the men described beatings and indiscriminate use of pepper spray at the West Texas Detention Center, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The men were interviewed by officials from ICE’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, said Fatma Marouf, a law professor and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Texas A&M University. But by deporting the men, ICE may have hamstrung its own internal investigation as well as any criminal investigation that might have been conducted by the Justice Department, Marouf said.
Angela, the wife of one of the men, said she had no idea her husband had been deported until “his arrival in Somalia and contacted them via a video messaging app,” according to the San Antonio Express-News. She said the deportation was ICE retaliating against the detained men and families for going public with the abuse allegations. “I felt like as soon as this stuff started getting circulated, they just wanted to silence all of us and throw it under the carpet,” she said. “Complain about being brutalized while in ICE’s custody,” Pierce continues, “get sent back to the one place in the world you most do not want to go. This kind of activity is positively Soviet in its bureaucratic brainlessness. We only learn from the best.”
But, there is a sea change coming. According to Newsweek, at least 13 congressional contenders so far have called for ICE to be eliminated all together, and ICE as we know it will undoubtedly be an issue any viable 2020 Democratic presidential candidate must address. “What the country needs,” Jamelle Bouie wrote earlier this year, “is an honest discussion about whether ICE can be effectively reformed or if it must be abolished and replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.” Newsweek: “Just a year ago, such a suggestion might have been deemed fringe or too far left for a viable candidate to reasonably propose.” But what’s truly radical is what ICE has been doing to our nation, our communities, and our families.