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How to stop ICE |
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With another government funding deadline looming, congressional Democrats can at least partly curtail Trump’s thugs. |
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ICE has frequently been labeled as America’s own Gestapo, but that’s not the only historical antecedent that we should invoke. It’s also, I would submit, a resurrection of the Klan, but this time with de jure, as opposed to de facto, state power.
In its second flourishing—roughly 1915 through 1929—the Klan expanded to Northern states and directed its violence and threats of violence against not just Blacks but also Catholics and Jews, all of whom they saw as threatening the white Protestant essence of the United States. They were the tip of the nativist spear, which in 1924 led Congress to restrict immigration to the overwhelmingly white Protestant nations of northwest Europe.
The ads that the Trump administration is running to bolster recruitment to ICE’s ranks are pitched to white nationalists. One borrows the lyrics of a white nationalist ballad, which promise that “We’ll have our home again” if only we can restore it to its pre-immigrant purity. One social media posting shows a classic car parked on a beach, under the words “America After 100 Million Deportations.” In this case, the mythic past that fascism always invokes is that of the Beach Boys circa 1964—white teens on white beaches.
Getting to 100 million, of course, means it’s not just immigrants but most of non-MAGA America that stands athwart our recapturing of white hegemony. By that standard, the killing of Renee Good was, if not exactly official policy, at least well within the administration’s meta-policy (i.e., conforming to Stephen Miller’s hatreds).
So how can we stop the violent maraudings of our 21st-century Klan? At the state level, some Democratic legislators have introduced legislation that would at least ban state police agencies from hiring ICE employees and former employees. At the congressional level, another federal spending authorization to keep the government open will come before Congress later this month; in theory, at least, the government will have to shutter most of its doors again on January 30. Could the Democrats refuse to pass it unless it defunded ICE?
Not in the House, of course, since the Republicans hold a small majority sufficient to prevail over any Democratic modifications. But it requires only 41 of the Senate’s 47 Democrats to keep a bill from clearing the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold. |
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And the public’s opinion of ICE has tanked since they began raiding homes, workplaces, and communities last June. An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday afternoon shows that the share of Americans who support abolishing ICE has risen from 27 percent to 46 percent over the past year (with 43 percent opposed); 77 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of independents are ICE abolitionists. Other polling from YouGov shows that ICE had a net approval rating of +16 percentage points one year ago; today, it’s at -13 percentage points, with 62 percent disapproving (40 percent strongly disapproving) against 39 percent approving.
There are, of course, complications when it comes to abolishing ICE. For one thing, Trump has assigned a host of agencies to serve as deportation cops, including Customs and Border Protection agents who by now are functionally indistinguishable from ICE agents on their patrols. For another, it’s clear that Trump would happily transfer funds from, say, the Defense Department to fund ICE if it were abolished, or put ICE agents on the DOD payroll. Ultimately, it will require a Democratic Congress and president, I fear, to make Trump’s deportation thugs stand down.
There are also political complications. Polling shows overwhelming support for the deportation of undocumented immigrants who’ve been convicted of violent crimes; last March, a Pew poll found that position commanded the support of 97 percent of Americans. But the percentage who supported the deportation of all undocumented immigrants was one-third of that: a bare 32 percent.
I’d be hugely surprised if there were 41 Senate Democrats who are willing to shut down the government unless ICE is abolished. There are swing states and swing districts where that stance could reduce the Democrats’ chances of victory, and of retaking Congress—the latter being the most certain way of curtailing our 21st-century Klansmen. But 41 Senate Democrats can probably be found who would impose conditions on the Department of Homeland Security as to who could be deported and who couldn’t be, along with some restrictions on our daytime night riders. Today, the Congressional Progressive Caucus adopted a policy of opposing new funding for immigration enforcement within DHS “unless there are meaningful and significant reforms to immigration enforcement practices.”
As the Democrats plainly have to do something, and as ICE abolition almost surely isn’t in the cards, asserting themselves on deportation policy and deportation tactics in ways that actually make a difference would, well, actually make a difference.
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Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large |
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Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large |
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