Former Housing and Urban Development secretary and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro said that instead of targeting immigrant families, we should be targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the mass deportation agency that’s separating them.
“I’ve said that instead of breaking up families, we should break up ICE,” he said at the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, last weekend. “We would make sure that the kind of abuses that we’ve seen never happen again. This administration traffics in cruelty, and the images that we saw yesterday were just one more example of that.”
The former San Antonio, Texas, mayor was referencing the inhumane conditions clearly visible when Vice President Mike Pence visited a Texas border facility on Friday, where men were caged and jailed like animals. They complained they’d been jailed for as long as 40 days, without access to a toothbrush or even a mat to sleep on. Some cried out for water, and reporters there described the stench as “horrendous.” But Pence lied about the conditions, claiming Border Patrol was “providing humane and compassionate care.”
Castro’s “People First” immigration plan address overhauls of both of these agencies, in particular splitting ICE in half and “keeping national security functions such as human and drug trafficking and anti-terrorism investigations within the Department of Homeland Security, and reassigning the enforcement functions to other agencies as appropriate to increase oversight and raise standards.”
Castro hasn’t been alone in calling for an overhaul of ICE, an agency which was formed in 2003. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s immigration plan, released last week, stated a need to “reshape CBP and ICE from top to bottom,” and to designate a Justice Department task force with the authority to investigate criminal abuses of immigrants. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has also said that when it comes to ICE, her administration would “start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works.”