The other day, agents from ICE rounded up some men in a neighboring town. It’s getting pretty close to home, here in the ‘burbs. Those detained were reported to be Hispanic, possibly employed by a landscaping company, leaving their damaged car to be impounded. A day or so previously, ICE took a Hispanic woman from her home in Worcester. People, including the woman’s teenage daughter protested, and the girl was arrested by the Worcester police for interfering with her mother’s apprehension. Although the police said they were not empowered to enforce federal immigration law, they nonetheless enabled ICE’s dirty work.
ICE was active this week in other communities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. These events have been widely discussed on social media; I have followed local discussions on nextdoor.com, where opinion seems almost evenly divided between those who support the detentions and those opposed. The supporters feel there is nothing wrong with removing “criminals” from our neighborhoods, and tend to call undocumented aliens criminals because they lack legal status. But ICE seems not to care whether they’re documented or not, or even criminals (see chart below).
Let’s be clear about what’s at stake. The feds claim to be deporting criminals. Well, a criminal is someone convicted of a crime. Until then, they are not criminals. Getting a traffic ticket is a civil infraction, and doesn’t pass the bar of criminality. So is overstaying a visa or not having one a civil offense; the proper response is to take them to immigration hearings, not to shovel them to a third country where they have no rights. And misdemeanors like public drunkenness or disturbing the peace may be crimes, but are they worthy of deportation?
Everyone ICE detains deserves a day in court, which the government is not affording in most cases, such as Tufts graduate student Rumesya Oztürk’s, who has just been released under court order pending deportation hearings.
Ms Oztürk had been snatched in front of her home in Somerville MA and taken to a detention center in Vermont, from which she was airlifted to one in Louisiana. Judge William K. Sessions III of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont ordered her immediate release on the grounds of protected speech under the fifth amendment. Homeland Security reluctantly complied, saying it will pursue her deportation in immigration court.
So while Ms. Oztük is currently free, her troubles are far from over, as are those of hundreds of other aliens who have been summarily detained. Dozens of them have been deported to third countries (El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica). Besides them, hundreds of foreign students have had their visas abruptly revoked by the State Department without any justification or even notification. After lawyers went to court in their behalf, most were given injunctive relief, leading to the State Department cancelling most of the visa revocations, for now.
So, what is ICE and how does it work? The the American Immigration Lawyers Association says:
Created in 2002, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has over 22,000 full-time employees, with a total annual budget of more than $9 billion. The agency has three core operational directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA). Housed within the Department of Homeland Security, ICE joins Customs & Border Protection (CBP) in making up the nation’s largest police force.
—AILA.org, Immigration Detention and Alternatives to Detention
ICE can’t police immigration just on its own. The agency depends on hundreds of private contractors for administrative, technical and logistical support to manhandle aliens. Online muckraking journal Sludge has compiled a list of current ICE contractors, presented as an interactive map, an image of which you see up top. Take a few minutes to tap around it. Maybe you know someone who works for one of these companies. Should you, ask them about what it’s like to do their job.
ICE is masterminded by Thomas Homan (not pronounced Human), whom Trump dubbed his “Border Czar.” A former third-generation police officer, Homan has been a commentator on Fox News and worked at the Heritage Foundation, where he framed the immigration sections of Trump’s playbook, Project 2025. He was the father of Trump’s family separation policies when he headed ICE in Trump’s first term, having first worked there under Obama. In 2024 he spoke at AmericaFest in Phoenix (watch here), saying, if “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” In response to NY Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez educating immigrants about their constitutional rights, Homan threatened to have her investigated for impeding law enforcement. (Or did he mean lawless?)
So how well is ICE doing its job? Here are some statistics for immigrant removals by fiscal year from ICE’s web site (FY2025 figures are incomplete):
Blue indicates criminal convictions, grey pending criminal convictions, and orange other immigration violations. In FY2025, about one out of five were convicts, down from two out of three in FY2021. Also surprisingly, peak enforcement activity occurred during Biden’s last year in office. Given that, why has ICE, with all its resources and urgent mission, not kept up? If, under Biden, ICE could detain criminals and migrants in general at higher levels without draconian measures, what is being gained by ICE’s unconstitutional and illegal detentions under Trump and Homan? Methinks these guys get off on being mean.
I really wish our Constitution had included an article to the effect:
“No officer of the United States Government, Member of Congress, or Member of the Judiciary shall abuse his official capacity by officially or personally exacting retribution on political opponents or any other citizens. Nor shall they enact legislation, promulgate orders, render judgments, or issue regulations that punish states, localities, or any groups within them, with the sole exception of individuals duly convicted of criminal violations.”
I wonder what the courts would do with that.
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