Icing ICE

Icing ICE
A contributor to "The Nation" magazine believes that ICE has become  "a genuine threat to democracy, destroying thousands of lives. Moreover, abolishing it would only take us back to 2003, when the agency was first formed." By placing ICE under the purview of DHS, the federal government framed immigration as a national security issue rather than an issue of community development, diversity, or human rights."

The writer of the article "It's Time to Abolish ICE" (April 9, 2018),  Sean McElvee, looks back to the last two democratic administrations, those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to point out they both were supporters of substantial deportation of immigrants., especially those with criminal records. Rahm Emanuel, the current Mayor of Chicago, recommended to President Clinton  -- when he was a senior adviser, that Clinton achieve record deportations of criminal aliens. McElvee notes that even Barack Obama, though he took pains to distinguish between "good" and "bad" immigrants, presided over aggressive deportation tactics in his first term to try to build support for a path to citizenship that never came.

ICE acting director, Thomas Horman, has threatened to jail and prosecute local officials in so-called sanctuary cities that do not fully comply with ICE mandates. The agency has clearly been targeting immigration activists for  deportation and has worked to deport individuals for speaking to the media about ICE.

Prior threats to separate parents from their children if there is information about criminal activity have come to fruition, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recently announced that parents can be separated from their children at the border if criminal activity has been found to be  involved.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a candidate for the U.S. House, has done a study of ICE's detention facilities, in which she found a long and protracted history of sexual assault and uninvestigated deaths. She also spoke of the corrosive impact ICE has had on schools, courts, and communities.

The thrust of the article is that ICE should be abolished and immigration no longer be treated as an issue of national security but rather as an issue described in the first paragraph  above.

ADDENDUMS:
*In August 2017,  President Trump repealed an Obama-era executive order requiring more stringent building standards for government-funded infrastructure projects, like bridges and levees, in at-risk areas.

*President Trump's infrastructure plan, released in February 2018, does not include the words "climate," "warming," or "disaster."

*The director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that the agency will no longer use a phrase in its mission statement that describes it as securing "America's promise as a nation of immigrants."

*Stacy Mitchell's prime breakdown of Amazon ["The Empire of Everything," in the March 12, 2018 issue of  "The Nation"] described the Jeff Bezos' behemoth as "the giant black hole that it actually is, gobbling up what's left of American free enterprise, extorting and steamrolling the competition and smaller players and establishing a labor paradigm straight out of Dickens.".0