I’m writing this introduction after seeing a story—from CBS News of all places—about a school district in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, where four students have been taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Among those students was five-year-old Liam Ramos, who was used as bait so that ICE officers could also capture his father: he knocked on the door of his own house asking to be let in, allowing those officers to see who answered and snatch him, too.
Operation Metro Surge began in early December and has grown to encompass the entire state of Minnesota, with ICE officers going from school to school, from business to business, from house to house, and from person to person looking for…
I know I’m supposed to say something like undocumented immigrants or illegal aliens here, but the truth is just that they’re looking for people of color, or people with foreign sounding accents, or people with foreign sounding names. It is racism, pure and simple.
But it isn’t only racism. ICE officers are tackling members of the press, deploying chemical agents on crowds, spraying chemical irritants directly into people’s faces, asserting that they can issue their own warrants to enter people’s homes, and more.
And they are using five-year-olds as bait so that they can abduct not only the five-year-old, but their parents, as well.
There is room for debate over the finer points of definitions of fascism, but those debates belong in university classrooms. At least, the classrooms of universities that still allow this sort of discussion. Here, on the ground, this is what fascism looks like.
As one Twin Cities local put it several days ago:
For folks not in Minnesota, you may not understand how terrible things have gotten. ICE is sweeping up U.S. citizens (including members of our indigenous community), legal residents, and yes, undocumented people. Schools have cancelled classes and businesses have closed. They are terrorizing school children and have murdered a member of our community. This is not "like" a military occupation, this is the real thing. Fascism is on full display.
There are many stories that we could tell about ICE. Created in 2003, ICE was one of the three agencies formed in the new Department of Homeland Security to replace the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which operated under the Justice Department) and the United States Customs Service (which operated under the Treasury Department). The other two agencies formed to replace the Immigration and Naturalization Service were the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and US Customs and Border Protection.
There is a path of trauma here. It’s hard to describe the experience of the morning of September 11, 2001. I had family in Washington, DC, at the time who reacted and responded to the horrors there. And I, who lived almost a thousand miles away in the safety of relatively rural Illinois, vividly remember that morning: the disturbing images on the television, the speculative accusations being thrown out by talking heads, and the near-impossibility of escaping from the news for even a few hours.
After those attacks, Americans wanted to restore the sense of safety that had been shattered and exact revenge on the people who had shattered it. Through the military, we took that revenge on people throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, most famously the people of Afghanistan and Iraq through wars in those countries, but also in other areas through drone strikes and other incursions. Through our new immigration apparatus, we took that revenge on brown-skinned people throughout the United States.
Don’t get me wrong, the American immigration system has always been racist. The first naturalization law (The Naturalization Act of 1790) restricted naturalization to free white people of good character who had lived in the United States for at least two years. The first immigration law (the Page Act of 1875) specifically excluded some people from Asia, and was followed up by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration for ten years. While the racism of the American immigration system has ebbed and flowed, there are compelling arguments that the United States has always prioritized white immigrants over others.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, created in a moment when white Americans were especially afraid of people from the Middle East, was an embodiment of flowing racism in the American immigration system.
Donald Trump, of course, has made this exponentially worse, both in his first term—among other things, he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on,” during his first campaign and acted on that call during his first term—and, now, in his second. During his campaign, he proclaimed that immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country, he claimed that countries were emptying their prisons and asylums into the United States, he accused Haitian immigrants of abducting and eating pets, and more. And, of course, we are now seeing the policies of his second term: more than doubling the number of ICE officers, repeatedly increasing ICE’s budget, and deploying anti-immigration forces for massive operations in multiple American cities.
Donald Trump is an unabashed white nationalist,he leads a white nationalist administration, and he is turning ICE—and the entire immigration apparatus of the United States, and the Department of Homeland Security more broadly—into a force for white nationalism.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence and actions in Minnesota are simply another instantiation of white Americans’ fear, using an apparatus created at time when that fear was particularly high, focused on sating that fear by securing white Americans’ power.
What is happening in Minnesota is hitting me hard for a lot of reasons.
Partly, it’s hitting me hard because I have family, friends, and colleagues in Minnesota, and I’m worried about their safety. While I trust that most of them will be safe—and that those who find themselves in danger will be in danger because they followed God’s call to stand up for the oppressed and marginalized—I am also worried that ICE’s increasing lawlessness will, in fact, put them in danger one way or another.
Partly, it’s because this is not what I want the United States to be. There is a dream in the founding documents of this country that we could live up to. There have always been times when we have been walking toward that dream and times when we have been walking toward it; and there have always been people calling us toward that dream and people trying to keep us away from it. It is simply hard to live in one of those times when the people trying to keep us away from that dream hold the reins of government power and seem unwilling to put limits on how they will use that power to drive us toward fascism.
And, partly, it’s because I own a doomscrolling device, and it’s as hard to escape the horrors coming out of Minnesota as it was to escape the news on that September morning a quarter of a century ago. Harder, even.
I am reminded of that Tolkien quote from The Fellowship of the Ring that pops up in my feed every few days:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I believe that one of the first steps in repairing the damage that has been done—and a necessary step toward putting this country back on the path toward the dream in which our founding documents took root—is to abolish ICE. In fact, I believe that abolishing ICE is the moderate position.
Before I get to that, let me be clear about what the extreme position—the position that I actually hold—is. I believe that we made the mistake of sacrificing safety for security, and I believe that is almost always a bad exchange. I believe that as part of working toward safety, we should abolish the entire Department of Homeland Security and disperse its agencies and duties in ways that make America more open. I also believe that, again as part of working toward safety, we should make immigrating to the United States, either for the short or long term, including becoming a citizen, much easier.
(I know that someone is asking what the difference between safety and security is. I’ll try to write about that in another post.)
But, more than any of that, as a Christian and as a pastor, I believe that a security apparatus has no place in the reign of Christ. And some of what I want to do with the time that is given to me is work for a world that is less fearful and more like God’s reign of love.
But, for now, I am willing to accept the abolition of ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot be reformed precisely because it was formed in a moment of national trauma and it has been fed on a steady diet of white racial fear. It is, in effect, the embodiment of a national trauma that has been turned toward the purposes of white nationalism. Its very core is rotten and Trump’s administrations have only made it more toxic.
The only way to restore trust between immigration services and the people they are supposed to serve is to abolish ICE, hold its members accountable for their crimes, and create a different—and vastly more humane—immigration enforcement system.
And I am not the only one who thinks that. While it’s a wedge issue among Americans, a plurality of us support abolishing ICE, and I’m confident that number will only grow as ICE’s abuses continue and its officers become more brazen. I am also confident, of course, that Republicans will continue to demand more personnel, more money, and more power for ICE; and that Democrats will shrink back in the fear that they will be seen as soft on crime. But I believe that abolishing ICE is the right thing to do, and I have enough faith in the American people that I believe a majority of us will think the same thing well before the midterms.
So let’s abolish this embodiment of national trauma and work for an America that welcomes immigrants.