Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
In a purely political move, President Donald Trump deployed ICE agents to “assist” Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees who have been understaffed due to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These agents are not trained for such tasks, nor are they trained to handle crowds or unforeseen situations in a civilized manner, as they demonstrated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in other cities across the country.
Let’s break down what is happening. First, Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade will continue now that the Senate has confirmed Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin as the new DHS secretary to implement an extremist immigration strategy based on cruelty. It is also based on a staggering lack of foresight regarding the economic damage it would cause.
Indiscriminate detentions continue unabated, and this includes people with protections, such as DACA recipients. And they continue to detain and deport people with no history of violent crime.
ProPublica reported that the detention of undocumented parents with U.S. citizen children has doubled since Trump began his second term.
“In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention,” states the article, based on an analysis of ICE data shared exclusively with ProPublica.
It is clear that the Trump administration is only seeking to play politics with the immigration issue. Public policy does not matter here. For example, the partial shutdown of the DHS is due to Democrats demanding changes in how immigration agents operate, whose excesses and violence have resulted in the deaths of U.S. citizens.
The American public does not support ICE’s excesses. A CBS News/YouGov poll found that 54% of Americans believe ICE operations should be scaled back.
But Trump has decided to make them even more visible by deploying them to 14 airports without the training to perform a task where crowds are overwhelmed by long lines and waits, and immigration agents are armed. What could possibly go wrong?
Government Executive reported that current and former TSA officials believe ICE personnel “will not have the requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays, or provide other key security services. TSA employees go through classroom and on-the-job training before they can staff those roles.”
“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe. They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.
Another sign of Trump’s politicking is his attempt to make the resolution of the partial DHS shutdown contingent on the Senate passing the SAVE Act—a measure that, under the guise of preventing non-citizens from fraudulently voting in elections (something that does not happen), would strip 21 million Americans who lack access to the documents required to vote of their right to vote.
Although the SAVE Act lacks the votes in the Senate, Trump insists it is the most important issue before the Upper Chamber—a “solution” to a non-existent problem that only fuels fears that Trump wants to interfere in the midterm elections.
His former advisor Steve Bannon stated that the presence of ICE at airports is a “test run” for their presence at polling places in the November 3 elections. Although, as Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director of Voting Rights and Elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, clarifies, “it would be a federal crime for interference to happen in that way.”
Lately, Trump has been solving everything by deploying ICE agents as if they were his private army. Let’s hope this isn’t a glimpse of things to come.
The original Spanish version is here.
