ICE’s Record Day Wasn’t About Safety. It Was About Theater.
Agents lured migrants into field offices, snatching even those who played by the rules.
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, ICE bragged it had locked up 2,200 people in a single day, the most in its history. They said it like they were announcing the Yankees hit a new home run record. Except these weren’t home runs. They men and women, some with ankle bracelets, cell phones that pinged ICE headquarters on time every time, people who showed up to every check-in. People who played by the rules, because they were told that if they did, they could keep living their lives while their cases wound through the courts.
And then the government pulled the oldest con in the book: “Come on down, we just want to talk.” Hundreds of them walked into ICE field offices and never walked back out. Margaret Cargioli, a lawyer in Los Angeles, said her client went to every appointment, never missed one. ICE snatched him up anyway. “Very cooperative,” she said. That’s what he got for cooperating — a one-way ticket to a cell.
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The Numbers Game
This wasn’t law enforcement. This was Stephen Miller standing at ICE headquarters and barking out quotas like a bad foreman at a sweatshop: 3,000 arrests a day, or else. The field bosses with the lowest numbers? Fired. ICE called it “Operation At Large.” They might as well have called it “Operation Pad the Stats.”
The dragnet swept up people with jobs in construction, kitchens, orchards — the same people holding up the country’s economy while the politicians pound their chests about “saving it.” Deporting them by the thousands is like setting fire to the scaffolding while you’re still building the skyscraper.
The economists say yanking out a million workers would chop a full percentage point off GDP. Deport eight million, and the whole economy tips into a crater. You think the Great Recession was bad? Try pulling the cooks out of restaurants, the roofers off ladders, the farmhands out of the orchards in California. You’ll be paying $15 for a head of lettuce.
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A Theater of Power
They said the arrests were about “public safety,” but anyone watching can see the show. Five thousand agents borrowed from FBI, DEA, IRS, CBP — a federal dragnet storming Home Depots and check-in offices, corralling immigrants who thought they were playing by the rules.
The truth is the White House needed a number. ICE gave them one. It looked good in a press release, on Fox, in a stump speech. Meanwhile, kids in Maryland, Texas, California, everywhere, went to bed without a parent.
Here’s the real record: America spent $170 billion to terrorize families and shrink its own economy, all so Stephen Miller could claim a victory.
That’s the real record we broke.
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Fuck Ice and all the enslaved minds that support this atrocity!
This is such Evil, such hate, such bigotry. The most corrupt regime in US history. Hopefully, their day will come soon. How can anyone think this is ok?! It is not!