Rome fell for many reasons ranging from lead-lined aqueducts to barbarian hoards. My personal favorite, however, is that the backbone of the Roman empire, the once mighty legions made up of Roman citizens fighting for Rome, gradually grew to consist mostly of mercenaries, fighting for money. The United States of America faces a similar problem with not only our military’s reliance on mercenaries for both support and combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but here at home the paramilitary organization created only 15 years ago—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—relies on mercenaries, rather than federal employees, to spread fear among the people who might have been our grandparents.
ICE is an organization driven by profit. Franklin Foer, reporting in How Trump Radicalized ICE for The Atlantic, explains:
Fear is a contagion that spreads quickly. One ICE officer warned some Mauritanians sympathetically, “It’s not a matter of if you’ll be deported, but when.” Another flatly said, “My job is to get you to leave this country.”* At meetings, officers would insist that the immigrants go to the Mauritanian consulate and apply for passports to return to the very country whose government had attempted to murder them.
I have long held that there are a number of functions of government that ought never to be farmed out to for-profit corporations because the missions of those functions are often directly counter to a corporation’s requirement to increase shareholder value. Protecting our borders and managing immigration is one of those functions and ICE is doing a great disservice to our nation. Foer continues:
In 21st-century America, it is difficult to conjure the possibility of the federal government taking an eraser to the map and scrubbing away an entire ethnic group. I had arrived in Columbus at the suggestion of a Cleveland-based lawyer named David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Leopold has kept in touch with an old client who attends the Mauritanian mosque. When he mentioned the community’s plight to me, he called it “ethnic cleansing”—which initially sounded like wild hyperbole. But on each of my trips back to Columbus, I heard new stories of departures to Canada—and about others who had left for New York, where hiding from ICE is easier in the shadows of the big city. The refugees were fleeing Refugee Road.
Now our nation was founded on the idea of ethnic cleansing, just ask any Indian, but we did fight a couple of bloody wars—most recently in the former Yugoslavia—to end ethnic cleansing outside our borders and we ought not to succumb to the faulty rhetoric of the America versions of Radovan Karadžić and Mathieu Ngirumpatse. This is happening in our name because our president likes people who like him.
But one segment of the deep state stepped forward early and openly to profess its enthusiasm for Trump. Through their union, employees of ICE endorsed Trump’s candidacy in September 2016, the first time the organization had ever lent its support to a presidential contender. When Trump prevailed in the election, the soon-to-be-named head of ICE triumphantly declared that it would finally have the backing of a president who would let the agency do its job. He’s “taking the handcuffs off,” said Thomas Homan, who served as ICE’s acting director under Trump until his retirement in June, using a phrase that has become a common trope within the agency. “When Trump won, [some officers] thumped their chest as if they had just won the Super Bowl,” a former ICE official told me.
How much money are we talking here? How about $18 billion?
Since its official designation, in 2003, as a successor to INS, ICE has grown at a remarkable clip for a peacetime bureaucracy. By the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term, immigration had become one of the highest priorities of federal law enforcement: Half of all federal prosecutions were for immigration-related crimes. In 2012, Congress appropriated $18 billion for immigration enforcement. It spent $14 billion for all the other major criminal law-enforcement agencies combined: the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service.
And most of that money is going to the private contractors mercenaries. Some of that is kicked back to the Trump organization.
ICE quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology. This apparatus relies heavily on private contractors. Created at the height of the federal government’s outsourcing mania, DHS employs more outside contractors than actual federal employees. Last year, these companies—which include the Geo Group and CoreCivic—spent at least $3 million on lobbying and influence peddling. To take one small example: Owners of ICE’s private detention facilities were generous donors to Trump’s inauguration, contributing $500,000 for the occasion.
Godwin’s Law notwithstanding, the way that ICE goes about fulfilling its mission is horrifying and innocents are dying, again in our name, under ICE’s mission.
ICE, however, is assigned the task of removing undocumented immigrants from the country’s interior, and it has approached this mission with cold, bureaucratic efficiency. Until recently, the agency had a congressional mandate to maintain up to 34,000 beds in detention centers on any given day with which to detain undocumented immigrants. Once an immigrant enters the system, she is known by her case number. Her ill intentions are frequently presumed, and she will find it exceedingly difficult to plead her case, or even to know what rights she has.
This trope of keeping beds full is one we’ve heard before in the Private Prison Industry. Those full beds are a central tool in our own rein of terror waged by militant anti-immigration wonks that include Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton and de facto secretary of homeland security, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
Under the current administration, many of the formal restraints on ICE have been removed. In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, ICE increased arrests by 42 percent. Immigration enforcement has been handed over to a small clique of militant anti-immigration wonks. This group has carefully studied the apparatus it now controls. It knows that the best strategy for accomplishing its goal of driving out undocumented immigrants is quite simply the cultivation of fear. And it knows that the latent power of ICE, amassed with the tacit assent of both parties, has yet to be fully realized.
One of the early thoughts I had when Trump’s anti-immigrant policies began to roll out was: where are they going to find all the people to make this work? What Trump, Sessions and ICE did to raise their wall was to lower the bar; really, really low.
No one, as a child, dreams about growing up to deport undocumented immigrants. Some 6,000 officers work in the Enforcement and Removal Operations wing of ICE, but this is not always a first-choice career option. “Many in ICE applied to other agencies that rank higher in law-enforcement prestige,” says David Martin, a scholar of immigration law who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The ranks of ICE are drawn in large part from retired members of the military and from former Border Patrol agents, who prefer the metropolitan locations of ICE offices to the remote outposts dotting the nation’s southern border. The job is a solid option for high-school graduates, who are not eligible to apply to federal agencies that require a college education. It makes for an accessible entry point into federal law enforcement, a trajectory that comes with job security and decent pay, and perhaps the hope of someday storming buildings or standing in the backdrop of press conferences, beside tables brimming with seized contraband. Such reveries are easy enough to entertain, until the first day on the job.
When these men and women sign on, however, they get a very different reality.
ICE consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in a survey of employee satisfaction. Even as Trump smothered the organization with praise and endowed it with broader responsibilities, ICE still placed 288th last year.
Pre-ICE staffers aren’t happy.
When ICE was created, two workforces merged, one involved with immigration enforcement and the other, a higher-status group, investigating transnational crime. Members of the latter have since requested to be released from ICE.
Frustrations are building.
“Regular cops get frustrated when a plea agreement is too soft,” says Sandweg. “With ERO, about 50 percent of the people you arrest will still be in the country a year later.” This is one of the many consequences of a system that—whatever one’s political views on immigration—has obvious elements of dysfunction. ICE’s capacity to detain immigrants long ago outstripped the capacity of courts to process them. Immigration courts currently have a backlog of 700,000 cases, which means that someone might wait several years before ever seeing a judge. A sense of futility, therefore, has become a prevailing ethos for much of the ICE rank and file. One former agent recalls learning a maxim on his first day on the job: “It’s not over until the alien wins.”
The workers, frustrated or not, must fill the beds.
It’s one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets; it’s another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty. But the system that Byrd helped enshrine encourages precisely that. Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ICE official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that “he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center’s beds full of inventory.”
A common idea in any war is that you must first dehumanize the enemy. In our revolution we weren’t fighting our relatives on the other side of the pond, we were fighting lobsters. The Union army fought the rebels. We yanks were after the Hun and the Japs and the Gooks and the Ragheads. In our current internal fight, the enemy is even more banal. It’s inventory.
The description of immigrants as “inventory” is a logical extension of how ICE has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump’s election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.
The war is not just along the southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
But even as the nation solves one problem, politicians and bureaucracies concoct new ones. Border Patrol has started aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an expansive definition of border, encompassing all terrain within 100 miles of the physical frontier. It has leveraged this flexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regular presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio—and its officers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio.
Finally, our reign of terror is not about bad hombres.
A similar mission creep afflicts ICE. It’s hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native-born population. ICE simply doesn’t have enough criminal targets to justify its enormous budget. That’s why, when Obama provided ICE with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted.
At the end of Foer’s cover story, I came away with this thought: unchecked and well-funded, ICE may actually accomplish our own final solution to make America great again. What then?
*This and all subsequent emphasis is mine, JH
