The Canada-U.S. border is a good place to
start this. It was there, in British Columbia, where Cedella Roman, a
19-year-old French woman who was visiting her mother, decided to go out for a
run. She ran along the beach, and when the tide came in, she ran up onto a
path, took a photo and got busted by the U.S.
Border Patrol.
Whoops, she said, I
didn’t realize I crossed the border. Don’t blame us, the two Border guys said,
in effect quoting Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, you broke the law. So off she
went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lock-up. She was allowed
to contact her mother, who brought her passport and other papers.
And two weeks later,
ICE decided she could go.
Another fortnight at
the world’s longest “undefended” border. Nothing at all like a day at the U.S.-Mexican
border. Well, maybe a little like it. A great again nation can’t be too
careful.
You may have noticed
two agencies were involved. The Border Patrol, which made the righteous bust,
patrols the border, and ICE runs down anything that eludes the Border Patrol. ICE
is the more Stasi-like of the two agencies, and a number of Democrats (starting
with Kristen Gillebrand, who doesn’t get much love on these pages) have called
for its abolition.
ICE does two jobs.
One is crime-fighting, chasing drugs and gangsters that cross the border and policing cybercrime. The
other is deporting people in this country illegally. The deportation teams are
the ones with the door-busters and “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” attitude.
Nineteen members from ICE’s crime-fighting side wrote a letter asking Homeland Security to think
about reorganizing ICE to separate the crime fighters from the head-bangers
because the head-bangers take time, attention and respect away from the job of
chasing drugs, gangs and cyber-criminals.
For reasons best
known to the president, Mexican food aficionado Kirstjen Nielsen is head of
Homeland Security and would have to distract herself from the invasion,
infestation and all the other “in”s of the Southern Border to make her agency
efficient. She also has to coordinate with Attorney General Sessions (bless his
little heart), and they both have to please their master.
ICE and the Border
Patrol are parts of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11 to
coordinate homeland security better. ICE has all kinds of trouble coordinating with itself. Nielsen, who recently was not in good odor with the president, and
Sessions (bless his little heart), who has been in bad odor with the president
for a long time, have had trouble coordinating with each other. The contradictions
and “I don’t knows” coming from the southern border are proof of that.
ICE has never been
good at law. It keeps running into judges who say it can’t do things the way it
usually does. Turns out, it isn’t red hot at incarceration either. Homeland Security’s Inspector General last
month looked at the monitoring reports on 35,000 detainees in 130 centers, and
it turns out the reports were pretty lame, whether done by ICE itself or a private
outside contractor (love that private sector). Just one thing: Inmates are
strip searched widely despite lack of probable cause. Just one more thing:
Credible reports of sexual assault never seem to get beyond the monitors.
Organizationally, ICE
has been a bit of a mess from the start. On top of that, the people in charge
in this administration, from the top down, are not the kinds of folks you’d want
running a PTA tea.
President Trump
tweeted Saturday that ICE is “one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law
enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen." I suppose it
is, by Trump Organization standards. ICE is about to get its third director
since Trump took office. They change, but they don’t get better. That’s a Trump
Organization standard.
In March the ICE
spokesman in San Francisco, James Schwab, quit. “I quit because I didn’t want to
perpetuate misleading facts,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I asked them to change the
information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to
deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time, and I quit.” That
would be standard, too.
James Schwab grew up in my mother's home town of 600 people in northern Michigan, where people are taught not to be liars. Bless his little heart.
ReplyDeleteI just started reading a library book, "Our 50-State Border Crisis" by Howard G. Buffett. Not far enough into it to judge what I think of it. Have any of you read it?
ReplyDeleteAbolishing a federal agency is a pretty Republican idea. ICE existed under President Obama. Were there calls to abolish it then?
ReplyDeleteThe idea of abolishing ICE first came to my attention a week or two ago, when some Microsoft employees wrote a public letter to their leader, requesting that Microsoft stop selling software licenses to ICE.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-employees-ask-company-cancel-contract-ice-open-letter-ceo/
But this was in the wake of the separating-children-from-their-parents fiasco, which isn't actually an ICE issue per se, to the best of my understanding. So it didn't seem very well-thought-out.
Anyway, during this presidency, I've witnessed Democrats speak out against tariffs (because Trump loves them), in favor of globalization (because Trump keeps unilaterally canceling our foreign commitments), and in favor of prudent fiscal spending (because Trump's tax cut will almost surely cause the deficit to balloon). So in my conservative book, Democrats are three for three. And now they want to abolish a federal agency. If they start calling for increased military spending, I'm going to start wondering what rabbit hole I fell down.
Jim, The changing sides on trade by the Rs under the man of little experience should shake you up as much as the Ds getting it right for a change. The Ds (Truman, Marshall) invented globalism. The ins always spend like drunken sailors; we have to rely on the minority party for fiscal responsibility, although it is going to be hard for the Rs to pose as deficit hawks after the Trump budget -- that is, if there ever is a D president again.
ReplyDeleteICE was a little-respected agency under Obama but it went the full Monte under Trump. I get a GoogleAlert every day on what ICE did, which means I see stories that never played outside the borders of Iowa or New Hampshire as well as the national stories. Here are two overviews, predating the child-abuse policy, that you may find interesting:
http://theweek.com/articles/755454/end-ice
and
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180427-htmlstory.html
ICE can't be "abolished." The jobs the 19 complainers are doing have to be done, and efforts have to be made to find border jumpers and visa overstayers. But we don't need anyone finding Green Card holders who got a DWI 15 years ago and deporting them, which ICE seems to see as the main event, and we don't need swaggering agents who don't produce warrants when they crash through doors. It needs leadership and reform, neither of which it is likely to get now.
Yes, who of either party talks of reform of any government institution? If you have a beef with Obamacare, don't reform it, annihilate it. If ICE is deporting immigrants because they jaywalked in 2005, eliminate it, don't curb their excesses. Everything has become so binary. I think it started with the Repubs, who never talked of reforming government. I worked for the US government, which always needs reform, but the only language you heard was cutbacks. Well, if you only cutback on something with problems, you still have something with problems. Do the Democrats really want to ape the Republicans in this regard? Ocasio-Cortez worries me on this. But I'd vote for her purely on her rejection of corporate funding. Just doing that makes her "third party".
DeleteTom, yep, I'm with you all the way. Trump, to the best of my reckoning, was the first to see ICE as a political asset and urge agents to embrace their worst instincts.
DeleteThere is reform in government sometimes. I am thinking of food stamps becoming SNAP, and the benefits being delivered via a magnetic-strip card.
DeleteOne of the points of creating the Department of Homeland Security was to get disparate agencies working together and able to share data with one another. Whether any of those benefits actually were delivered, I don't know.
Jim, yes SNAP cards were a good improvement. My teen-age summer job was working in a grocery store. The old style food stamps (they were actually books of coupons) were a headache for both users and store clerks. I give credit to my boss at the time that he said, "A customer is a customer" and we weren't supposed to treat food stsmp users any different than cash customers.
DeleteStanley, Ocasio-Cortez has a piece in America I happened to come across while checking out other things:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-her-catholic-faith-and-urgency-criminal
All, This one is interesting, too. The never overwrought Kaiser Health News has a feature on 3-year-olds being called before a judge to explain their asylum claims.
https://khn.org/news/defendants-in-diapers-immigrant-toddlers-ordered-to-appear-in-court-alone/
That, of course, isn't ICE. It is another arm of our cruel and unusual administration. The Los Angeles Times (which is doing good work on the subject) has the weekly update on the ICE agents who arrest documented grandfathers instead of undocumented gangbangers. (Grandpa is easier to bust.):
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lawful-resident-20180628-htmlstory.html
Tom, one thing I noted in the story of the French girl who crossed the border on the coast (with no signs to indicate a border) is that she is not a caucasian French girl. I don't suppose the color of her complexion influenced the border folk to detain her for two weeks even after receiving her passport and papers.
ReplyDeleteAnne C., Gee, I hope not. ICE's explanation sounded like an anally retentive bureaucrat was missing a paper clip or a Maple Leaf seal. But she did look as if she is not One Of Us. So they would have to check everything for explosives.
ReplyDelete