POLITICIANS and pundits were mostly amused when US president Donald Trump mused aloud back in his first term about making Greenland part of America. But now Trump has remade the United States into ICEland.
And it is no laughing matter. Team Trump has done what the boss ordered – which meant doing it rashly, inhumanely and certainly injudiciously.
Google’s Artificial Intelligence short-cutter tells us “ICE officials are federal agents and law enforcement officers, not police or military troops.” But almost every day, we see news screen videos of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rushing to meet the new high arrest quotas their Department of Homeland Security bosses got from their Trump White House bosses.
We’ve all seen news videos of gun-bearing federal agents, wearing face masks, sometimes “ICE” shirts or armoured vests, sometimes swarming but sometimes just quietly cuffing and taking into custody men who gathered at a Home Depot parking lot for the crime of getting picked to do an honest day’s work. Or women who are working at restaurants or cleaning jobs. Or even kids going to schools, or whatever.
Then we have seen ICE agents hauling off their day’s catch (whose names they often didn’t yet know; but they looked Latino) and if those caught weren’t documented, we’ve seen them being swiftly deported to their home country or maybe some other country – sometimes before they received the due judicial process they are constitutionally guaranteed, even though they aren’t US citizens.
Your eyes and sense of human decency tell you that this just isn’t right. It just isn’t America. But then again, we all want to feel safe. And Trump and his spokespeople repeatedly assure us this was keeping us safe because those being grabbed and rush-deported are “the worst of the worst.”
You may have taken great comfort from the president’s assurance. Except ICE’s own statistics tell us Trump’s welcome words did not have the added virtue of being true. ICE’s statistics showed us that “more than half of those removed from the country since Jan 20 (Trump’s Inauguration Day) do not have a criminal conviction,” The Washington Post reported in July.
The Post added: “Over 60% of the undocumented immigrants removed from the country did not have a criminal conviction. Nearly 40% did have a conviction, though many of their crimes involved nonviolent offences.” Another 32% had pending charges of some sort.
Trump knows how repeated visual news images can shape public opinion. So no wonder Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller months ago set a goal for ICE to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants daily – a vast increase from ICE’s past totals of just hundreds daily. ICE’s arrests topped 1,000 in June. But the number arrested who were convicted of crimes fell to just 30%.
Also, despite Trump’s assurance that he was deporting the “worst of the worst,” his team ended up deporting some of the best of the best. Such as Nory Sontay Ramos, 17, a Los Angeles high school honours student and track athlete.
Her story was superbly told and documented by MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff. When she was 8, in Guatemala, she saw the powerful 18th Street Gang beat her mom, Estela, bloody. The terrified girl fainted. The beatings continued, so the mom fled with her children, entered Texas illegally and built a new life in Los Angeles. Until ICE cracked down in June. ICE rush-deported them back to Guatemala, where they live in fear and danger.
Years ago, America granted asylum to all who were fleeing communism in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. That’s how once-overwhelmingly Democratic Florida now has a huge base of patriotic Cuban-American citizens who proudly vote Republican. Including Miami-born Marco Rubio. But Rubio’s maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia benefited big-time from a kinder, humane US policy.
Garcia fled Castro’s Cuba and entered Florida without a visa in 1962. He was detained and an immigration judge ordered him deported. But later that afternoon, an immigration official reconsidered, reversed – and allowed Rubio’s granddad a life in America.
“I learned at his feet, relied on his counsel and craved his respect,” Rubio wrote in a 2012 memoir, decades after Garcia’s death. “I still do.”
It’s a fine tale, and an even finer lesson. Secretary of State Rubio may want to share it with his boss. — Tribune News Service
Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.
