After all the news and social media posts regarding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), I decided to research a bit more into this controversial topic, and I learned just how unjust and scary the system really is.
According to NPR, a news site, ICE agents are allowed to arrest, interrogate, and question people based on “reasonable individual suspicion” and “reasonable suspicion”. From accent, looks, language, and perceived ethnicity, ICE agents are allowed to seize people that they see fit the category of “immigrant”. Part of what's scary is that our Supreme Court allows this. They allow ICE to base their arrests on perceived race, and yet their judicial oath explicitly says they will judge impartially and for justice.
The current issue of ICE being allowed to arrest people based on assumed race goes against everything we learned in school as children. From the earliest years in preschool to now, we were told not to treat people who looked different from each of us with disrespect; not to assume someone was worse than us because they didn’t look like us; not to judge someone who didn’t have the same skin color as us, hair color as us, eye color as us. In high school, we learned about the Emancipation Proclamation and the Black Civil Rights Movement. While both those historical events didn’t completely abolish slavery or racism, they developed the idea that in our nation, “all men are created equally”.
This means everyone, no matter their race, ethnicity, or traditions, should be treated the same. The official Immigration and Customs Enforcement page calls the people they arrest “criminal aliens”. These people are not aliens or a foreign species, they are humans. It's about time ICE starts treating people as humans, but this hasn’t happened yet, and the grip the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing President Trump to have on ICE agents and government plans, doesn’t seem like it's going to loosen anytime soon. On October 9th of this year, ABC30 Action News from California reports that ICE declared a new target of 3,000 arrests a day and “19,000 per week nationwide”. What we're seeing right now is mass arrests that are fueled by the government's goal of detaining anyone who looks somewhat like an “immigrant”.
Let's dive a bit deeper. We know that ICE agents have arrested hundreds of thousands of people, but do they have a legitimate reason for most of these arrests? The answer is rarely. While around 12,000 of these arrested individuals are recorded as gang-related, that is such a small number compared to the estimated 610,000 total people already detained since Trump took office. The number of detainees that don’t have any criminal convictions is high, around 70%. This shows just how unjust the ICE detention system is. Only an estimated 30% are actual criminals; the other tens of thousands of people are innocent humans that unexpectedly had their lives ripped apart.
Why does our country allow this? What are we doing to stop this? While I do think some level of border control is important to ensure no weapons or drugs are being smuggled into other countries to destroy a society, I think this has gone way too far and has been for a long time now. When are we going to rise up as a people and put a stop to this? After all, the Declaration of Independence for this nation we live in states that if a government becomes destructive of the rights of its people, “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.”
