New ICE horrors come to light

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Immigration and Customs Enforcement never sleeps. 

The agency has infinite money, infinite capacity for cruelty, and plenty of people willing to be violent goons on the government’s dime. It continues to be a stain on the American soul day in and day out. 

The atrocities it visits upon immigrants are both large and small—deadly attacks mixed with petty cruelties—all in the service of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic vision. Or, more accurately, the vision of senior White House adviser and racist monstrosity Stephen Miller. 

And thanks to government transparency being a thing of the past, we often don’t learn about the horrors until long after they’ve happened. 

That’s the situation with the detention of Aminata Seck, a Kentucky State University basketball player. Seck was arrested by ICE at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport on Aug. 7 while traveling with her team. 

Since then, ICE has relocated her at least four times, including to Chicago and eventually to Texas, where she’s currently being held. Since, of course, ICE is only abducting the worst of the worst, all to keep us Good Americans safe, surely her crime must have been staggering, right?

Yeah, it looks like Seck was detained after missing a deadline to renew her student visa because she was having back surgery. Thank god she’s off the streets.

Then there’s the lingering atrocity of what it looks like after ICE rips families apart.

 
In Birmingham, Alabama, high school sophomore and soccer superstar Orlando Avalos—literally the best boys’ player in the state—is currently being cared for by his 22-year-old brother, Marvin. That’s because, earlier this month, ICE abducted his grandparents, Roberto Avalos Magallon and Dolores Mendoza Cerda, after a family reunion in California. 

Are his grandparents the worst of the worst, criminal masterminds running an underground drug and murder ring or something? Nope. According to their attorneys, they entered the United States legally and are now in two separate ICE facilities in Louisiana instead of with their grandchildren. 

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Thank god ICE is here to keep us safe from scary grandparents.

Then there are the eight Somalis who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for weeks, after being told that they were stopping in Cuba for “refueling” en route to Somalia. 

Three of the men told Minnesota’s Sahan Journal that they had active asylum cases and valid work permits. One, Abdullahi Adam Mohamed, was pulled over at the start of Operation Metro Surge for what sounds a lot like Driving While Somali. 

His big crimes? Literally nothing. The Minnesota state court database turns up two misdemeanor snow emergency parking citations, so it definitely makes sense that ICE sent him to a place where prisoners are shackled, subjected to constant cold air, and held under around-the-clock surveillance. 

And the administration is gearing up for even more atrocities on a systemic scale, throwing more than $7 billion at efforts to expand detention camps in five states. Well, yeah, if you’re going to detain people for crimes like parking tickets, you’re going to need a lot of space. 

There’s also the illegal effort to simply hide thousands of detainees so their attorneys and families can’t find them. Detainees who have final orders of removal have simply been erased from the online locator system. And, of course, if they can’t be found by their own attorneys, they can’t challenge those final orders of removal. 

And finally, there’s the increasing use of third-country deportations, where immigrants are sent to dangerous places in which they’ve never even lived, where they do not speak the language, and where they have no resources. 

All of this is monstrous. All of this is unnecessary. And all of this is unforgivable. 

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