The federal government’s anti-immigrant obsession is making us poorer, more lawless and less safe
The Trump administration and its Congressional enablers rejected a number of common-sense reforms that would begin to rein in the growing number of abuses against the American people by our own federal immigration agents. At the same time, the federal government is ignoring the will and popular sentiment of the American people. As a result, we are now in the third partial shutdown in the past six months – with one of them being the longest in U.S. history.
“Democrats sent a list of 10 demands to the top Republican lawmakers in Congress earlier this month that included ICE halting racial profiling in its policing, prohibiting masks and stopping officers from entering private homes without a judicial warrant,” Reuters reported Feb. 15. Protections from unlawful searches are already the law but that’s apparently a bridge too far for administration officials like so-called “border czar” Tom Homan, who “brushed off Democratic demands to reform ICE amid mounting backlash over the agency’s tactics,” Reuters noted.
But the reality is that Homan and his allies are in a dwindling camp as the number of Americans demanding real change is only growing larger and louder. In just one recent PBS/NPR/Marist poll, 65% of Americans said ICE has “gone too far.” By a similar margin, Americans also said ICE is making us all less safe. Of course, it goes far beyond that. From wasting hundreds of millions on industrial warehouses to targeting toddlers for detention, the administration’s mass deportation agenda is damaging our nation on an unprecedented scale.
Billions in taxpayer funds are going to private prison companies as working families are struggling to pay their bills: Americans can barely afford to keep up with their grocery bills and rent, yet the federal government has spent $500 million (and counting) in taxpayer dollars to purchase industrial warehouses in multiple states with a goal of transforming these structures into mass camps to jail our immigrant neighbors. The numbers are staggering in size and scope. Two purchases in Maryland and Pennsylvania totalled $243 million in taxpayer dollars alone. In Georgia, ICE has reportedly finalized one deal that would turn an industrial warehouse into a detention camp that could detain as many as 10,000 immigrant neighbors, more than double the capacity of the nation’s largest federal prison. Those poised to financially benefit from the detention of our immigrant neighbors include private prison companies like GEO Group, whose CEO, J. David Donahue, stated during a quarterly earnings call last May that he was “very excited to support the mission at hand.” Attorney General Pam Bondi “is a former GEO Group lobbyist,” The Appeal reported in May. “The company is under contract with ICE for 16,000 beds, which Donahue said is ‘the highest level of utilization in over five years.’” And, despite the astonishing sums being spent on these industrial warehouses, it pales in comparison to the $170 billion in anti-immigrant funding that the federal government received last year.
Violent predators who target children are going uninvestigated: The administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions have been a boon to child predators, following DHS’s decision to divert agents from their critical investigative work and instead deploy them into neighborhoods to round up our immigrant neighbors. “The shift has had consequences,” The New York Times reported in November. “Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years, according to a NY Times analysis of data obtained through the F.O.I.A. lawsuit.” MS Now reported in September that the diversion has affected investigations into members of 764, a “nihilistic violent extremist” group that coerces vulnerable children “to post graphic sexual imagery of themselves and then blackmails them to post more imagery, including images of self-harm.” Hany Farid, a computer scientist who helped create software that aids agents in their investigations, called the diversion of resources heartbreaking. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children,” he told The NY Times.
Drug cartels and fentanyl traffickers remain in business poisoning Americans: The government’s obsessions have also disrupted investigations into illicit drug traffickers. “The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had shifted about a quarter of its personnel (2,500) and, according to the recent disclosure, nearly half of its agents to deportation efforts (2,200),” the Cato Institute said in September. “Special Agent in Charge Brian Clark admitted, ‘That is new to DEA. We’ve always only done drugs and narcotics.’” The diversion of resources has also impacted CBP officers who staff prominent fentanyl trafficking routes along the southwest, The Wall Street Journal reported in October. “Many CBP agents who used to staff them have been redirected to other states to detain migrants far from the border, said one person familiar with the situation. Ports of entry are understaffed. Some border patrol sectors are stretched thin, this person said.” This diversion of resources has frustrated and even driven out some senior officials, the report said. “In Houston, at least six top HSI agents have resigned in recent months, according to people familiar with the departures. Other resignations have come from Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston.”
The mass deportation agenda is a threat to national security: The federal government has diverted critical resources from counterterrorism investigations in order to aid in mass deportation. “A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear,” The NY Times continued in its November report. As the Cato Institute noted this month, nearly one in every five FBI agents who were tasked with conducting “complex” investigations into espionage, terrorism, cyberattacks, and transnational gangs were reassigned to abduct immigrant moms and dads. “ICE returned some terrorism investigators to the FBI in June after a terrorist attack, effectively admitting they had compromised national security,” the Cato Institute said. Despite claims that ICE is targeting “the worst of the worst,” less than 14% of individuals arrested in the first year of the second Trump administration have a serious criminal record.
Masked and lawless ICE and CBP agencies remain the actual public safety threat: Despite Homan’s repeated claims that the administration has been winding down operations in Minnesota, residents in smaller areas outside the Twin Cities are being targeted, legal observers are getting detained for exercising their rights, and the government’s recklessness continues to cause physical injury. Additionally, kids like Liam Conejo Ramos are still being harmed. Other detained children include 18-month-old Amalia, “who was suffering from respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, where she spent much of the next ten days on oxygen. Upon release, federal officers took her right back into detention at Dilley,” The Bulwark reported. Meanwhile, claims that agents have shot individuals out of self-defense keep falling apart, after acting ICE Director Todd Lyons admitted that his agents “seem to have lied about why they shot someone,” The New Republic reported. This month, an AP review also revealed that at least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes including physical and sexual abuse since 2020. Under ICE’s rapid expansion and loosened hiring standards, ICE’s misconduct “is going to be a countrywide phenomenon as they pull in so many people who are attracted to this mission,” Cato Institute’s David Bier told the AP.
The polling continues to make clear that Americans want any end to this chaos and cruelty, not more violence and lies. “Congressional Republicans would rather bow down to Donald Trump and Stephen Miller than keep America safe and secure,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “The American public is standing up in community after community to loudly and actively condemn the mass deportation crusade that threatens our collective safety and values. This administration and their GOP allies own all of it – the shutdown, the chaos, the lies, the violence.”
