The roaming marauders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with masked faces, gallivanting around in armored vehicles and unmarked cars, are terrorizing communities across the United States.
Los Angeles, a California city with sanctuary laws meant to protect immigrant communities, is under a military siege: mothers, children, neighbors, and friends disappeared by unnamed, badge-less goons in military uniforms, with Marines and National Guard troops violently suppressing dissent.
ICE and the militant agencies supporting their kidnappings are fit for a dystopian alternative-history novel, not the streets of our country.
Donald Trump’s government has vastly expanded the already stupefyingly large role that this organization of political enforcers plays in our lives. In cities and towns across the country, there are millions of immigrants—of all statuses—walking on eggshells.
Since Trump’s resumption of power, an unknown number of our fellow human beings have been trafficked to countries across the world from their homes and families in this country, and to the newly-minted satellite concentration camp in El Salvador—in violation of our nation’s laws and our collective humanity.
ICE launders its draconian enforcement actions in racism and fear: by demonizing immigrants, scaremongering about supposed “criminals” in our midst, and falsely attributing the struggles that the poor and working-class face to the undocumented migrant—a group that can be easily identified as among the most desperate and lacking of agency in this society.
All of this—the unwelcome violence against our migrant brothers and sisters, the lie-ridden narrative about immigrants, and the ICE’s very existence—are a stain on this nation.
Entering the US outside of the terms prescribed in statute is not a crime. You read that correctly: undocumented entry to America is NOT a crime. It is a civil infraction. You can liken it to the speeding ticket you may have received when you sped to work, having been running a few minutes late. The fascists running the United States of America are exploiting that civil-infraction status, shamelessly framing people who in many cases fled to our communities out of self- and familial preservation as “criminal.”
Many liberals and centrists have lauded the fact that previous governments, such as the Obama and Biden administrations, conducted deportation raids “responsibly,” as former senior advisor to Barack Obama David Axelrod put it. They paint a picture that would have you believe that ICE and the human disappearance operations we see today could somehow be done with humanity.
They are wrong.
The Democratic Party should be leading the charge against ICE and the deportation of sick kids and law-abiding people, not waxing poetic about a past which saw other presidents utilize this disgraceful deportation force in an admittedly less disgusting way.
Any competent opposition to Trump would not accept the fictitious premise used to rationalize ICE: that immigration is a crisis. Immigration is not a crisis, and the immigrant is not why you, as an American, are struggling. Democrats should not only reject that basis, but counter with the substantive truth: the billionaire, not the migrant, is your enemy; and an organization like ICE is despicable and should not exist in any civilized country.
ICE exists to assign societal responsibility for generally worsening conditions to immigrants, rather than to the real culprits of our decline: the billionaires. By socially cleansing the United States of the immigrants that the powerful deem undesirable, Trump and his conspirators pretend to the American people that he is addressing the root cause of the issues facing them, while protecting the guilty parties, the obscenely wealthy, from culpability.
Any historian worth their title would tell you, contrary to the common phrase, that history does not repeat itself. But we can certainly learn from previous patterns. The road that our leaders have us driving now is destined to end in a fatal crash—and it already has if your parent or sibling, or yourself, have been violently removed from this country under the auspices of ICE.
Look no further than 90-some years ago, when capitalists and fascists in Germany united around the Nazis. Much like today’s Republicans, they falsely assigned guilt for the society’s failures to minorities. In the earliest stages of Nazi terror, many were deported or sent to camps. As time passed, the tumor of cruelty and inhumanity metastasized into the gas chambers and killing fields of Nazi-occupied Europe. The current American government shares many traits in common with that early Nazi government, and we all ought to be afraid.
They will not stop with undocumented people—they have already abducted and jailed US citizens. The de facto elimination of due process for one is the erasure of that right for all. Undoubtedly, people who write articles like this one will be targeted, as they’ve already threatened to deport a student studying in this country for the high crime of criticizing Israel’s holocaust of Palestinians.
ICE should’ve never existed, and it mustn’t any longer. Free all peoples in this land from the horrific realities of disappearances and deportation.
ABOLISH ICE.
Grant Chassy is a lifelong Champaign-Urbana-area resident. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Illinois State University. He serves as communications director for State Representative Carol Ammons and he is a former deputy Champaign County clerk and recorder. Opinions expressed are solely his own.
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