ISTM there is a major difference between protests against, say, police brutality, and the protests against ICE. With protests against police shooting unarmed black men, the protesters are contending that the police didn’t do their job right (shooting people who don’t pose a threat isn’t what cops are supposed to do,) but nobody protests against the existence of Dallas, St. Louis or Minneapolis police itself. But with ICE, there are many people who are protesting against the very existence of ICE, or ICE *doing its very job.
There are of course many who protest against ICE doing its job in an inhumane way (i.e., kids in cages or excessive force, or laughing cruelly at kids in detention), but beyond that, the protests against ICE seem to be against the very primary task of ICE itself - deporting people. Isn’t that what the job description of ICE is - to deport people? Someone has to do it, and if it weren’t ICE, it would just have to be some other governmental agency who’d be doing the exact same thing. One can argue that it should be done more humanely, or with more oversight, but the very job description of ICE is…what it’s doing, deporting people who are to be deported.
If ICE were really to be abolished as the protesters demand, then who would be doing the deportations? …No one?
It would be replaced with an agency that doesn’t resort to concentration camps.
The concentration camps and the Gestapo policing is the issue, not enforcement. Federal agencies typically don’t do well with cultural change and sometimes replacing them is much better to solve the problem.
But to be clear the main problem is neither party is able or willing to make changes to our immigration system to actually implement laws that better fit the need, ICE is just a symptom of that problem.
While it’s lovely to believe your opponents are idiots or demons, it doesn’t actually help you understand the world. The number of protesters who want deportations reduced to zero is very small.
Instead, protesters who want to abolish ICE want instead:
-to deprioritize the deportation of those who have been here a long time.
-to deprioritize the deportation of those who are obeying all the laws they can obey while remaining in the country (e.g., not getting into fights, not dealing narcotics, not stealing, etc.).
-to prioritize deportations of violent people.
-to ensure that those fleeing violence have a good chance of moving here.
-to ensure that, for the love of all that’s good and decent in our country, our tax dollars aren’t paying for children to be trapped in cages for months at a time when with a small change of government policy they could be with their parents.
ICE has a sick culture and should be disbanded. That doesn’t mean deportations should stop, but it does mean the focus should be radically shifted.
The main thing that Trump seems to have added is a gleeful cruelty, in which pain and suffering caused to those being deported is viewed as a something to be encouraged rather than avoided.
This is more like protesting against the Dallas SWAT.
I don’t know how old you are but before the Patriot Act (which IMHO still makes Bush a bigger fascist than Trump) divided the INS into three groups. USCIS, CBP and ICE. ICE if NOT supposed to be in charge of border security, it is supposed to be investigating and dealing with criminal activity. Dangerous or national security type criminal activity. Not mothers crossing the border with little children. The role of dealing with moms trying to screw the US citizens out of a public education and a chance at the American dream for her kids is left to US Border patrol and Customs and Border Protection.
I understand the arguments that we can’t just let everyone in. But we are doing more than keeping them out. We are demonizing and vilifying these people and that lets us do all sort of horrible shit.
There are other agencies that do what ICE does, there always have been. You correctly point out that people are pissed at ICE because of how they did what they did. I think you always run the risk of tyranny when you elect would be tyrants.
Customs and Border Protection. US Border Patrol. The Coast Guard in some cases.
I don’t think we need to get rid of ICE, if we got rid of ICE, this president would just use some other agency to do the same godddam thing until finally he gets our military to do it. We need to vote this guy out and if we don’t, its our fault.
[QUOTE=Velocity;21371978 Isn’t that what the job description of ICE is - to deport people? [/QUOTE]
It’s a job description, but it’s not the job description. Homeland Security Investigations deals with other crimes not directly related to immigration, including financial crimes and weapons smuggling. The mission statement for Enforcement & Removal Operations, the section that is responsible for deportation is
The problem people have with ICE is what they believe to be an overemphasis on the “as well as” section of the mission statement. Nobody has a problem with the first half, or the rest of ICE functions.
Brutal? What else is the government supposed to do with people in the country illegally? Ignore it? And if so, is there any other first-world country that does not have any immigration controls? Hint: certainly not the UK. It is nearly impossible to immigrate there.
If those people aren’t causing any trouble, it should be like the last of the government’s priorities, right after people who throw cigarette butts out their windows while driving.
Also, our immigration laws are super messed up. As long as they’re so dumb, enforcing them should not be a high priority. Other things are way more important, like enforcing anti-pollution regulations or catching tax cheats or labor law violators or five million other offenses that actually hurt people.
The campaign against undocumented immigrants is as if half our nation suddenly went apeshit over jaywalkers and became convinced that if we didn’t stop them, we’d see the end of civilization.
So basically because this is a political squabble, the list of yours or your side’s priorities takes precedence? Except your political party is not the one that gets to decide at this time, so it is turned into a larger than life political squabble. Shit throwing
From a guy who really has no dog in the fight for either side , it gets really really tiresome seeing the same big heads fight over the same stupid ass bullshit and makes it incredibly difficult to vote for one side or the other.
I like how you think “political” means “team.” It is political in the same way that opposing Jim Crow is political, or in the same way that not wanting to lock up gay people is political.
This is naive. ICE does not make immigration law, congress does. ICE’s job is to enforce the law. It is not up to them to decide that there should be amnesty for people who stay long enough.
If there are no people who don’t want to deport illegal immigrants who break the law why is there a movement to make sanctuary cities and states? The whole point of sanctuary is not to cooperate in the deportation of people who have been arrested.
ICE does not get to decide who is legally allowed to immigrate to the US. The congress passes immigration law.
If immigrants know that having a child accompany them means that they will get to stay in the US then more children will be smuggled across the border. Do we really want to encourage people to bring kids on this dangerous journey? The idea that kids are held in cages for months is a wild exaggeration.