Congress, What Are You Even Doing?
ICE’s murderous, unaccountable agents are uniting the country in outrage from north to south. The editorial boards of the Houston Chronicle and the Maine Trust for Local News issued a joint editorial, following the killings of two fathers, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián in Maine. It begins: “The state of Maine and the city of Houston, Texas, have little in common. But today we find ourselves speaking in a united voice about the violence and chaos that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has brought to our respective corners of the country.”
The killings are not limited to Texas and Maine, and the victims include U.S. citizens as well as immigrants. They include Black Americans like Dr. Linda Davis, who was killed in an illegal high-speed car chase initiated by ICE in Georgia, and Keith Porter, who was shot by an off-duty ICE agent in California with a history of racism and domestic violence.
The Results Are Predictable, Because ICE is Hiring the Worst of the Worst
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance took a look at who ICE and the Border Patrol are hiring, and documented 152 examples of agents charged, and mostly convicted, of heinous crimes against women and children. From serial rape to serial murder and serial child sexual abuse, 44.7% of these men also used their badge as a weapon against immigrants, women, and children. Many of these predators were not caught by the “system” or internal accountability mechanisms, such as they used to exist. They were reported by the very victims they attempted to silence — immigrants vulnerable to detention, immigrants who were deported, women, family members, and children.
Often, the victims of the criminals identified in our report had to seek help more than once. The police were called to Samuel Saxon's home 22 times before the near-fatal incident that finally led to his arrest. Two days before his final strangulation attempt, Saxon’s partner walked into the Blue Ash Police Department to report him. (Blue Ash is the city where the local ICE office is located.) Blue Ash PD turned her away with no safety plan, no list of domestic violence shelters, nothing. Two days later, Saxon strangled and nearly killed her.
And, as the examples of David Brouillette and Brian Palacios (the agent who killed Keith Porter) reveal, we have no idea how many current ICE and Border Patrol agents have racist and domestic violence histories, are on a power trip, and have no business being anywhere near a gun. Despite all of this, Congress continues to write these agencies a blank check to fund their hiring (and killing) sprees, and propose Band-Aids like “more training.”
Just 72 hours after OIA released their report about 152 criminal agents, the list had to be updated. On August 21, Louisiana ICE agent Thomas Bailey was arrested for “unauthorized entry into an inhabited dwelling” after breaking into a former girlfriend’s apartment.
We’ve Let Immigration Agent Violence Be a Problem For 100 Years
Border agents have been killing people for 100 years, and getting away with it. In 1927 Winston Titus, a Vermont teenager, was driving 18 cases of beer south from the Quebec border when federal immigration officers Joseph N. Faucher and Nelson Hines began to pursue him. Faucher fired at the fleeing vehicle, hitting Titus in the head and causing his car to crash. An autopsy confirmed Titus died from gunshot wounds. The officers were charged with manslaughter, but a grand jury declined to indict them.
Read OIA’s report to get more of the Border Patrol’s history; it isn’t pretty. It mirrors that of U.S. police generally, with origins in slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan.
Past is prologue, or nothing every really changed. The Southern Border Communities Coalition has documented over 378 people who more recently lost their lives at the hands of the Border Patrol. “The number one nationality [was] Mexican,” said Lilian Serrano, the organizations’s Director, “but it’s immediately followed by U.S. citizens. So we have known that this violence is beyond just the idea that they’re enforcing immigration law. It’s really about the impunity that exists within the system.”
Some people say “Abolish ICE” isn’t realistic, but they forget the agency only existed since 2003.
Art from Kevin Necessary
ICE Is Learning from its Big Brother, The Border Patrol
There is a tactic creep going on at at ICE that must be reversed immediately. The author of OIA’s report, Lynn Tramonte, described it this way: “It’s as though the Border Patrol has passed on the cycle of abuse to its younger brother, ICE.”
Tramonte was a consultant at the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1998-2000, and worked in Washington, DC during the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. “Enforcement agents worked behind desks,” she said, referring to the “enforcement side” of INS prior to the creation of ICE and its location within the new Department of Homeland Security, as opposed to the Department of Justice.
“They did carry out workplace raids, and those were horrific. But they didn’t patrol U.S. communities with guns and tear people out of cars. That’s absolutely terrifying and totally uncalled for. They are enforcing civil paperwork violations. There’s a totally different branch that deal with criminal violations. These civil violations are paperwork issues that require paperwork resolutions, not guns, jails, and a potential loss of life,” she said.
“Prior to 1980, there were no standing interior detention facilities in the United States. And for most of our history, deportation proceedings were initiated with a notice in the mail, not with handcuffs,” said Peter L. Markowitz, Professor at the Cardozo School of Law and the author of “A New Paradigm for Humane and Effective Immigration Enforcement.” The increased use of guns, and violent and even aberrant policing tactics to carry out civil immigration arrests in public are creating deadly environments far out of proportion to the severity of the alleged violations.
For example, said Lauren Bonds, Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project, “There is a consensus in the policing community, not [from] like people like me who are civil rights lawyers, but police chiefs who are saying, you should not do a PIT maneuver to stop a vehicle unless there's some dangerous felony afoot. We're seeing ICE do that just to serve immigration warrants and to detain people. That is just beyond the pale of what we'd expect even the worst local police agencies to accept. And so seeing that not only being co-signed by the administration, but encouraged by higher levels of DHS, ICE, and CBP is really concerning because it's below the standard of a very low standard already that we have for American policing.”
What Can Congress Do About It?
The bottom line is, no other civil law enforcement agency works this way. “We don't give IRS agents guns. We don't let them loose in communities. We don't let them pull you over. If you didn't pay your taxes, you don't go to IRS jail. So the fact that we've had this tactic creep once we created ICE, and every administration gets to do more and more crazy things, and they don't have anywhere near the constraints on them that state and local police do, which are not adequate enough — it's madness. We need to make civil immigration enforcement truly civil,” said Tramonte. “And then it won't be an attractive job to people who want to run around playing cops and robbers.”
The editorial boards in Houston and Maine wrote, “Outrage over these killings shouldn’t be limited to Houston and Maine. All of the United States now faces an out-of-control federal immigration agency that acts as if it can kill without accountability.”
The truth is, border communities have been dealing with this for a long time. Now that the rest of the country is involved, will Congress finally do something about it?
