ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

Failures

from the sticking-it-to-the-least-of-us dept

The “worst of the worst” ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry.

The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it’s doing “God’s work” is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance.

Because there simply aren’t enough criminals to satisfy Trump ghoul-in-chief Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, ICE and the DHS are now targeting anyone seeming vaguely foreign, no matter how much reality the Trump administration has to ignore and how many rights it needs to violate to accomplish this.

Rather than find dangerous criminals, Trump’s hate squad is going after taxpayers, productive workers, poor people in need of medical assistance, and literally anyone who looks brown enough to be detained for possible removal.

Migrants are more respectful of US laws than natural-born, whiter citizens. They also do the jobs most people fortunate enough to be born here won’t do. There’s a vacuum being created that will never be filled as long as people like Trump are in charge.

ICE has been behaving like a rogue agency for years now, but has been given explicit permission to go wild now that Trump’s back at the helm. That’s why things like this — incidents that have no (non-World War II) parallel prior to Trump’s second term in office — are making headlines almost daily across the nation:

Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ICE agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.

Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens. 

That’s NYC youth baseball coach Youman Wilder relating his recent run-in with ICE officers. I’m sure the officers saw an opportunity to round up a bunch of kids without being subjected to invocations of rights or other objections from their parents. Unfortunately for them, they ran into Wilder, who refused to allow ICE to intimidate these kids into an ICE detention center.

ICE, of course, issued a statement that is just as meaningless as its untargeted operations all across the nation:

(A spokesperson said that ICE had not conducted any recent “enforcement activity” in the vicinity of the park.)

Of course it didn’t. This wasn’t actually “enforcement activity.” This was just some ICE officers hoping to luck into a few detentions. It wasn’t an operation. It was a crime of opportunity. So, it obviously can’t be called “enforcement activity,” especially when the officers decided to back down once they encountered a slight bit of resistance. This is an empty statement, one as hollow as the souls of everyone standing behind it.

That’s why ICE has been spotted roaming around homeless shelters, schools, libraries, and even a Puerto Rican history museum — despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are, in full fact, natural born American citizens!

And the deflection above makes even less sense when you take a look at the directive Trump’s DHS rescinded to make way for the oppression of some of the most powerless people in this nation, especially if they aren’t recognizably white.

Issued January 20, 2025 — literally the same day Trump was sworn in for the second time — this memo rescinds a directive issued by then-DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas less than four years earlier. What got rolled back by Trump’s DHS were blanket protections for areas mostly filled with children or people seeking help from medical providers or other government agencies.

The list of “protected areas” ICE should not be engaging in untargeted enforcement efforts included schools, daycares, healthcare facilities, places of worship, playgrounds, youth centers, day care providers, foster care operations, social service providers, disaster relief centers, funerals, weddings, and people attending/participating in protected First Amendment activity like protests or rallies.

And, of course, this is where the current version of ICE is looking to pick people off. While most of its efforts have focused on places of employment (again, an extremely dubious use of resources), it has expanded to cover a lot of places that might have seemed a bit too close to the lines drawn by this previous guidance to be considered an acceptable risk.

It’s not that ICE is any better or worse in terms of personnel since Trump took office. It’s that those overseeing ICE operations have gotten worse and somehow have found enough people in the ICE ranks willing to send officers into places that previously would have been considered off-limits, if not actually morally repugnant to ICE officers supposedly tasked with finding “the worst of worst” migrants to deport.

And if there are a lot of ICE officers who disagree with the new tactics, it’s on them to exit the department before they become a further part of the problem. Standing by while others engage in evil doesn’t absolve you of their sins. It just makes you complicit in them. And if you’re the sort of thug who actually thinks it’s a good idea to accost kids playing baseball, you’re a terrible human being who should never have been allowed to wield as much power as you do. You’re no soldier in God’s army and you sure as shit aren’t worthy of living in the nation that employs you.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, kristi noem, mass deportation, todd lyons, trump administration