Public Safety for Whom? The Mandate to End ICE’s Terror

The blue tsunami of Tuesday’s midterm elections signals the advent of the end of President Donald Trump’s despotic choke hold on our democracy and an unequivocal repudiation of his regime, characterized by economic deprivation we naively call an unaffordability crisis, a war unauthorized by Congress, and xenophobic violence by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Of the top concerns midterm voters trafficked to the polls, democracy and immigration rounded out the top three, according to CNN exit polls, not just the question of personal and collective economics. Accented by the cratering support from Latino voters garnered two years ago, the political massacre the Republicans sustained signals a mandate for the new Congress to end ICE terror on our streets.

Since the activation of Trump’s long-promised deportation machine, federal bullets have ripped through the flesh of at least 24 human beings, ending the lives of at least three US citizens and three noncitizens. Unconscionably, over 52 people have died in our nation’s immigration detention centers. At the expense of the true promise of public safety, ICE, now coordinating with approximately 2,000 local and state law enforcement agencies due to section 287(g), snakes its way through our streets, airports, school parking lots, and grocery stores under a now grossly unpopular presidential mandate to squelch “migrant crime”—a criminological category equally as hyperbolic and racist as Black-on-Black crime. Despite the dramatic claims and overblown press conferences, by all metrics, immigrants—documented or otherwise—actually participate in criminal activity at lower rates than US-born citizens. Facts notwithstanding, the anti-crime saviorism increasingly targets noncitizens without criminal convictions.

According to the United States Department of Homeland Security, in a year of staggering numbers of immigrant detainments, August alone accounted for more than 50,000 ICE arrests—the highest single monthly total on record. On average, 2,000 people a day are currently sucked into this black hole of menacing uncertainty and predictably substandard accommodations for months and months. Last month, agency leadership deputized their agents to increase immigration arrests to 3,000 daily arrests nationwide.

Only 23 years old, ICE is a creature of post-9/11 panic and collective grief. We managed, though imperfectly, for two centuries without it and can again.

The normalization of the mass detainment and deportation of our undocumented neighbors exists alongside this republic’s heritage of racialized policing and punishment, namely the overpolicing and hyper-incarceration of Black lives and the egregious overfunding of local police departments, jails, and state prisons. Mass deportations are to the immigration system what mass incarcerations are to the criminal legal system. The detention center, prison, and jail, and police, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection may as well be one. In fact, in many cities throughout the United States, they are one. We must end this expansion of Blue power and Blue privilege. As white privilege is not about individual white people, Blue privilege refers to the systems, logics, and patterns that insulate a culture of law enforcement violence and unaccountability, not individual law enforcement officers. It’s an unearned, advantaged way of being. Blue privilege dupes those of us without it into believing the police state is normal, necessary, and unchangeable.

Our criminal legal system draws oxygen from the disproportionate over-surveillance and custodial control over Black, brown, and poor bodies—documented and undocumented alike. In fact, immigration detention centers and public and private prisons rhyme politically and economically in our nation, warring to reckon with a seemingly inconvenient truth of its decreasing demographic whiteness. Fueled by police and ICE zealotry, both systems reflect two branches of a single meta-system of retributive whiteness. The popular notion of crimmigration—the violent intersection of our white supremacist criminal legal system and the immigration system—disabuses us of the fiction of national innocence about the structural violence by which we “thingify” and demonize a plethora of distinct non-white communities unwelcomed into the narrow definitions of Americanness. As I say in Outing Blue Privilege, we are living through a war on the image of God as law-and-order enthusiasm empties homes of parents and breadwinners, the media amplifies the criminalization of certain races and the racialization of certain crimes, and the predominance of police firepower indiscriminately walls Black flesh into poverty-racked neighborhoods drained of opportunities.

The unprecedented surge in arrests extends the specter of Blue power—law enforcement resources, personnel, sovereignty—all too familiar to descendants of chattel slaves and those who share our many shades of melanin. The Southern police forces originally emerged as slave patrols designed to surveil and contain Black bodies, preventing them from running off to freedom or congregating for unsanctioned purposes. In 1838, the first professionalized US police department started in Boston to control poor Irish immigrants. According to the same logics, the Midwest constabulary formed to intimidate Indigenous Americans into a unique form of segregation. Odiously, the originating anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-poor ethos of our policing systems keeps these histories alive in ICE—the wealthiest law enforcement agency in US history.

Dangling the carrots of financial incentives in front of law enforcement institutions, our government invents reasons to dispatch Blue power to enforce social closures for immigrant communities, not unlike the ones we manufactured against Black people during the five-decade-long war on drugs. Despite the visually documented death of Renée Nicole Good and the climbing number of deaths and abuses at detention centers, nearly no ICE officer has been held accountable—a desert of meaningful oversight. The cardinal rule of any law-and-order regime: ICE merely investigates itself. James Baldwin excoriated, “This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police… by the most powerful forces in American life… creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already, visibly, is close to martial law.” That’s one of the public hazards of Blue privilege.

Under the detainment theatrics of our federal government, a father unsuspectingly disappears during a routine outing to purchase diapers in New Jersey, while a 19-year-old Babson College student unwarrantedly loses her freedom in Boston’s Logan Airport en route to celebrate one of America’s uniquely treasured traditions, Thanksgiving. Even if no other person is shot on our streets or dies in a cell, our spirits cry out for balm for the psychic wounds borne by those who have been, or have watched others be, tear-gassed, spat on, pushed to their hands and knees, flattened on the hood of a car, shoved to the bottom of stairwells, or starved, neglected, and brutalized in the care of the government. This is what public safety looks like under Blue privilege. It amounts to a tool that reserves safety for some publics, while doling out terror in the name of “justice” to other publics.

Desensitization threatens a far graver danger: the shriveling of our souls. Our very humanity is at stake if we cannot dare to build new practices that foster safety and flourishing for all. This mass panic, inordinate anxiety, immobilizing fear, looming outrage, and bewildering despondency teeming across the nation cannot signify anything we'd expect as public safety. Perhaps public safety is not enough after all. Only 23 years old, ICE is a creature of post-9/11 panic and collective grief. We managed, though imperfectly, for two centuries without it and can again. Viewed unfavorably by more voters than favorably in every poll this year, ICE was most certainly on the ballot. Congress has the mandate to end the terror and must avoid squandering public trust by trampling on the will of the people. The survival of our humanity requires ending ICE itself.