….I cite all this not to diminish any of today’s awfulness, but to see it more clearly. We have been a brutal deportation nation long before our Trumpian 21st Century gambit. What’s different now, it seems to me, are four things: the sheer scale of it; the frantic pursuit of quantity over quality; the relative paucity of resources for courts and judges; and the fact that the enforcers are anonymous, masked, and unknowable — and will soon be on every street in America.
ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notesthe inevitable result of such spurts;
“Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.”
And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:
“I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.”
And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.
Miller is demanding that ICE beat Obama’s record of 438,421 removals in one year, by any means necessary. In fact, he wants Operation Wetback’s numbers in one year rather than ten. Trump’s daily quota was initially 1,800; then Miller pushed it to 3,000; and now Tom Homan says, “Do the math, we have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch the ones Biden released into the nation.” And that’s a sky-high goal made much, much, much harder when there are so few deportations at the Southern border. No wonder ICE officers are drained.
Resources to speed up trials and shorten detentions by adding more immigration courts and judges? A mere $3.3 billion. A 2023 analysis by the Congressional Research Service found we need more than 1,300 judges to make progress on the backlog of cases. But the bill actually caps the numberat 800. You mean we could process deportations too quickly? E-Verify is off the table. So what this policy represents is actually a dramatic increase in the backlog of cases, meaning ever-more arrests, and ever-more people in custody, for ever-more years. Why, one wonders? Why not make real progress on the backlog in the courts, and leave less need for mass detention?
And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:
“We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.”
But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do. …
America not as a shining city on a hill, nor as a republic diligently enforcing its immigration laws as humanely as possible. But as a potential gulag for the ages.
