DHS Abandons Fighting Actual Crime To Focus All Of Its Attention On Undocumented Migrants

Legal Issues

from the billions-of-dollars-in-exchange-for-Home-Depot-raids dept

Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren’t enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump’s bloated, fact-free “invasion” claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce.

This time around, the pretense of ejecting dangerous criminals from our country was abandoned pretty quickly. While the government may occasionally claim someone being sent to a foreign gulag is one of the bad guys, for the most part our extrajudicial rendering program is largely based on bogus gang tie assumptions and the administration’s willingness to constantly violate constitutional rights until it’s finally forced to stop.

Trump’s budget bill adds another $30+ billion to ICE’s bottom line, hoping to ensure that the agency will finally be able to achieve the administration’s bigoted wet dream of 3,000 arrests per day. Numerous other federal agencies, including the DEA, US Marshals Service, ATF, and FBI, have been directed to prioritize assisting in immigration enforcement. And the Department of Homeland Security isn’t all that concerned about all the other crime it’s supposed to be keeping tabs on, as this lengthy, extremely harrowing report on the current state of ICE under Trump by Nick Miroff of The Atlantic points out.

At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”

Serious crimes are no longer worthy of ICE’s attention. Nor are they apparently worthy of the larger investigative unit operated by the DHS itself, which tends to handle more of the human trafficking and child exploitation cases. Along with rerouted agents from other federal law enforcement agencies, HSI is now just supplying warm bodies to help ICE reach its 3,000 arrests per day quota.

HSI agents have been told to shift their focus to civil immigration enforcement and assisting ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations], effectively relegating them to be junior partners in Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Some agents and officials told me they suspect HSI is paying a price for wanting to distance itself from immigration enforcement.

“Their personnel are being picked off the investigative squads, and there’s only so many people to go around,” another former ICE official told me. “There are national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed.”

This is all on top of existing problems that have been made worse by the administration’s focus on immigration enforcement. ICE has never been popular, but morale is falling off a cliff now that officers are expected to work 60-80 hours a week doing things like “chasing day workers across Home Deport parking lots.”

Officers are also seeing plenty of resistance from people who aren’t targets of their enforcement efforts, which has only encouraged more of them to cover up identifying markings, as well as their faces, when performing mass arrests of people who are, for the most part, working hard at their place of employment.

Injecting billions of dollars into ICE isn’t going to fix the morale problem. All it will do is give it bigger problems to deal with while presumably adding even more untrained officers to the mix, which just means the morale problem will spread to the new hires as soon as they realize what they’re in for. And while Trump may send out the occasional “THANK YOU!!!” via social media, this is the day-to-day reality for ICE officers as they try to meet the administration’s 3,000 arrests per day quota.

“No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the [ICE] official told me. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”

And, just like the DOJ, ICE is losing lawyers left and right as people who actually know the law find it’s no longer possible to retain their morality and ethical standards while working for the Trump administration.

Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats. […] The hallway arrests sent the message that the immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said.

Nothing about this makes America any safer. It definitely doesn’t make it any greater, no matter what the hats and t-shirts and loudmouthed bigots wearing them might say. The administration isn’t interested in fighting crime. It’s only interested in silencing dissent, implementing martial law, padding its mass deportation stats, and eliminating as many non-white people from this country as possible.

What the administration has going for it is the fact that the law enforcement business tends to self-select wannabe fascists and gives bigots legal cover for their racist actions. Anyone left at ICE who isn’t in it for the racism will be replaced by people who are there explicitly for the opportunity to oppress minorities. The administration’s blind hatred is leading the blindly hateful to a future only people who still bleach their hoods religiously every Sunday will appreciate. We’re living through a particularly ugly chapter in American history right now. Let’s hope this will just be another thing we learn from, rather than something that’s just setting itself up for perpetual reruns.

Filed Under: dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, trump administration