In my last two posts I wrote about how the corporate news outlets glorify the military and the FBI as non-political organizations whose job is to defend the country. In fact, as I and others have pointed out, their job is to ensure corporation profits abroad and enforce the hierarchy at home.

So far, though, I haven’t seen such glorification of ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). Hollywood hasn’t made movies about heroic border patrols, as they have about heroic soldiers and FBI agents. All the same, the media and most of the public seem just fine with ICE, except that they want it to be more aggressive.

According to an Ipsos poll, two thirds of our citizens favor deporting the undocumented, those mostly brown-skinned people who pick our crops, plaster and roof our houses, and care for the elderly and disabled. We just differ on the level of cruelty we’re willing to inflict in the process. Only 34% are willing to separate parents from their children.

Some Family History

I am the descendant of countless generations of immigrants. The first was a guy named Abraham, who left his home in Ur about 4000 years ago. Other Jewish migrants of note were a young couple named Joseph and Mary, who met and married around 2000 years later. Soon they had to grab their new baby and flee King Herod’s pogrom. Fortunately the Egyptians let them in.

My paternal grandparents immigrated more recently, fleeing from the Russian empire to the United States in 1910. Their children were all born here. By 1921 the United States was passing laws to keep out Eastern European Jews (among others), so when my mother’s family left Poland they went instead to Cuba. In 1930, during the Great Depression, Mom boarded a small boat, came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant, and went to work in one of New York’s garment factories. In 1939 she met and married my father. I arrived in 1943.

A Contemporary Herod

On January 20 of this year our would-be dictator issued an order ending birthright citizenship. The way it is now, any child born in the United States has citizenship, no matter whether their parents are citizens or have legal status here. This order would make it so that children born in the United States to parents without legal status here would not be citizens. This would override the Constitution and previous Supreme Court decisions.

Three days later a judge temporarily blocked the order.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be happy to enforce this order. Its agents are not known for their kindness, to say the least. According to The Trace, an organization investigating gun violence, ICE agents are trigger-happy. Between 2015 and 2021 they shot at 59 people, killed at least 23, and injured 24 others. They fired their weapons in public places and at moving vehicles. It’s even harder to get information from them than from the police but in at least a dozen of these incidents, The Trace “uncovered evidence suggesting that the shooting victims were unarmed.”

ICE agents consistently violate the rights of people they don’t shoot. Jacobin cites a study by Prof. Jacqueline Stevens, showing that between 2007 and 2015 ICE detained or deported more than 20,000 U.S. citizens. Unsurprisingly, the majority of those ICE profiles for deportation have certain characteristics in common—the wrong skin color, ethnicity, last name, and (if naturalized) foreign birth.

Incredibly, in Arizona, ICE has been arresting and detaining Navajos, saying that under Article 14 of the Constitution Native Americans don’t have birthright citizenship—and ignoring a 1924 law that says they do.

This is beyond outrageous. Who has more right to be here than Native Americans? And once ICE has rounded up the Navajo, where will they deport them to?

Not that world-changing heroics should be a requirement for citizenship, but do you know about the Code Talkers? These were Navajos and members of 14 other tribes who were instrumental in helping the United States win World War II. Major Howard Connor, a signal officer in the Marines at the time, reported to his superiors that “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

ICE seems ready to deport anyone with brown skin, even those whose ancestors were here long before any white people were

Personally, I have a list of people I’d like to see deported. I’m sure you can guess who they are. Transportation will be a bit pricey, though, and NASA will need to start building those spaceships sooner rather than later.