ICE
On deputized cruelty
Evoking the sheltering wings of God and country, armed and masked men assault and kidnap people regularly in America. Some of these men are beginning to feel important enough to kill civilians. Regardless of the pleasures and stresses of their work, these men obey paltry sums of money and their President’s orders.
The DHS is a paranoid institution created in one of the most murderous and racist periods in American history, just one year before our government and soldiers began their decade-long campaign of killing, poisoning, maiming, and impoverishing three million people for the sake of preventing some imaginary weapons from being built, the same three million people who just so happened to live above two hundred billion barrels’ worth of oil. And the DHS is the origin of ICE, the most well-funded and now de facto secret police force in history. What we see in Minneapolis, what we have already seen in Portland and Los Angeles and El Paso and Chicago, is the consequence of formerly powerless people being paid and deputized en masse to terrorize communities. (The accusations of the powerful are always confessions.) ICE, whose current bosses are petty and feckless men obsessed with power, is animated by people too weak and too stupid to recognize the fact that their work each day writes yet another episode of American self-sabotage.
We can easily dispense with ICE’s pretense of “policing” when we have now thousands of videos in which their agents look and act like an invading army. Whether or not their cruelty is “legal” is beside the point (at least for anyone who can think more complexly and sustainedly than a middle schooler). The armed and masked men are breaking car windows, assaulting children, raiding schools, running people over, deploying chemical weapons in the suburbs, and kidnapping mothers and fathers and children at whim. These are the men wreaking havoc in our country, not those who have made their homes here after having committed the supposed crime of being born poor.
It is the twenty-first century so we are no longer like Albert Johnson, the man responsible for one of our nation’s most influential and childish delusions, when he said that “the character of immigration has changed and the newcomers are imbued with lawless, restless sentiments of anarchy and collectivism.” In other words, we are not stupid and miserly. Or at least we needn’t be. It is only the losers in power who believe that difference is some horrible nightmare from which we must wake at any cost.
I am proud of all those risking their lives in order to prevent, or at least document, the dumb violence perpetrated by ICE. They are the people whose actions future historians will praise; they are the people worth naming.