There is something deeply unsettling about a system so consumed by its own mandate that it fails to recognize the very people it claims to protect. When immigration agents arrest American citizens, Native Americans whose ancestors lived on this land long before any borders were imagined, it becomes impossible to pretend the system is merely “overwhelmed” or “imperfect.” No, what we are witnessing is a culture of enforcement that has lost the ability, and perhaps even the desire, to distinguish right from wrong. ICE’s war on legal immigrants has spiraled so far beyond reason that even citizens are caught in its dragnet. And that truth alone reveals a reality many prefer to ignore: an institution this reckless cannot be trusted to carry out a mission that demands precision, fairness, and humanity.
The defenders of ICE often insist that the agency exists to uphold the rule of law. But the rule of law depends on competence. It depends on restraint. It depends on a sober, clear-eyed understanding of who is a threat and who is not. When agents detain Native Americans, people whose identity, history, and citizenship should be unassailable, the argument collapses. This is not safeguarding the nation. This is not protecting the public. This is bureaucratic violence wielded by people who have confused authority with legitimacy.
The pattern is not isolated. For years, legal immigrants, green card holders, refugees, and naturalized citizens have lived with an omnipresent fear that one wrong interaction, one officer’s misunderstanding, one typo in a database, could lead to detention or worse. The message from ICE has been brutally consistent: if you are not white and your paperwork is not immediately recognized, you are suspect. You are detainable. You are someone who must prove their right to exist inside the lines someone else drew.
This is the quiet tragedy underlying every mistaken arrest: the shock on a person’s face when they realize that it doesn’t matter what documents they have, how long they have lived here, or even more damning, that they were born here. The machine has decided they do not belong, and the machine does not apologize.
What does it say about a country when the descendants of its first peoples are stopped and interrogated as foreigners? When their accents, their appearance, their communities, their lives are treated as if they are intrusions rather than origins? It says that we have not simply lost our way; we have lost our memory. And ICE, charged with enforcing the smallest technicalities of immigration law, has taken on the role of arbiter of identity, a role it is wildly unqualified to perform.
At its core, ICE is an agency built on suspicion. Suspicion is not inherently bad; any enforcement work requires some level of investigative instinct. But ICE’s version of suspicion has metastasized into paranoia. It now operates as if everyone is lying, everyone is dangerous, and everyone is deportable until proven otherwise. This mindset is not law enforcement; it is ideological enforcement. And it leads exactly where we see it leading: to citizens arrested, legal residents intimidated, entire communities treated as enemy territory.
Critics are often told that calling for reform or abolition is extreme, that ICE is simply enforcing laws written by Congress, that the fault lies elsewhere. But laws do not detain citizens. Databases do not interrogate people. Policies do not handcuff Native Americans on their own land. People do. And when a system repeatedly fails, repeatedly harms the wrong individuals, repeatedly abuses its power, we must question not just its leadership but its foundation.
The cruelty is not accidental. And the incompetence is not incidental. In fact, the two feed each other. A culture that encourages officers to treat migrants as threats naturally encourages sloppiness, because compassion and accuracy come from the same place, the recognition of another person’s humanity. Strip that away, and mistakes multiply. Abuses multiply. Arrests of citizens, once unthinkable, become shrugged off as “regrettable errors.”
ICE’s defenders often warn that without aggressive enforcement, the nation will be unsafe. But safety built on humiliating citizens and terrorizing legal immigrants is not safety at all. It is domination disguised as order. It is fear masquerading as patriotism.
The United States can choose a different path. It can choose immigration enforcement that is evidence-based, rights-respecting, and rooted in the understanding that citizenship is not a matter open to debate on the side of a highway. But we cannot take that path until we recognize the reality of the current one, a system that arrests the very people whose heritage predates this country’s founding is a system that has stopped serving the nation and begun serving itself.
There is nothing patriotic about that. There is only violence, bureaucratic, casual, and profoundly un-American.
No comments:
Post a Comment