The Weaponization of I.C.E. is a Danger to Immigrants and a Disgrace to America

Recently, I was in a local church here in my home state of North Carolina discussing the impact of the Trump Administration on vulnerable populations.

One director of a local ministry that has previously offered coastal town residents shelter during hurricanes and other dangerous weather events shared that many immigrants in her community are expressing a reluctance to take advantage of such services moving forward. This is not because they do not worry about their safety or are prone to put their families in harm’s way, but because they fear that entering a public shelter makes them vulnerable to I.C.E. harassment.

Similar sentiments were echoed from those overseeing area food pantries and free clinics for low-income and migrant neighbors here, who are also noticing a sharp decline in people coming for help and care.

These men and women, teenagers, seniors, and children have spent the past few months watching the agency become fully and violently weaponized in the hands of a predatory President, who knows that making monsters out of immigrants plays well to a white base weaned on irrational fear of non-white people.

This is where we are now: people of color would rather face the fury of a natural disaster, the continual pangs of hunger, or the throbbing of a broken bone than the cruelty of our Government, and I don't blame them. They have good reason. The body of work is expansive.

The incessant, unnecessarily violent, and largely illegal assaults on neighborhoods, workplaces, and school carpool lines all crystallize this Administration's commitment to cause trauma for people of color, not protect them from it—and it's a flat-out human rights disgrace.

This isn't the America our forebears made their way to (if they came here on their own accord, that is), braving sea and sickness and death.
This isn't the America etched at the feet of Lady Liberty, about the welcoming arms open to a disparate multitude seeking refuge.
This isn't safe harbor in a tempest world.
America is quickly becoming a gated community of terrified white people who believe the good fortune they've had of being born here is some kind of moral achievement or divinely appointed birthright.

We should weep that we have so many people here who would rather brave a Hurricane, hunger, or illness than rely on those in power here to treat them with dignity, in the times when they are most vulnerable. We should grieve that marginalized people who were not born here are finding as much marginalization here as wherever they fled.

And before Trump supporters want to respond that people like me want open borders or no accountability, they can save it. That's a lazy, tired, fake news story about the Left, run in heavy rotation by a President who knows his base is short on critical thinking and addicted to parroting every irresponsible word that leaves his sneering lips, as long as it continues the narrative of their supremacy and oppression.

Progressives and Liberals believe we can have laws and systems and safeguards, but we can also have compassion and respect for humanity under duress, striving to have a deep commitment to not harming. We believe we can have a thorough due process that ensures innocent people are not caught in the fervor of a weaponized element of our Government’s blind bigotry.

Right now, we don't have that.

Right now, we have an Administration that is the storm to millions of people, not a shelter in it.

We have a President who manufactures suffering instead of seeking to alleviate it.

Right now, we have a party in power whose sole priority is creating, leveraging, perpetuating, and legislating white fear.

That's not a country we want our children to inherit, or at least it shouldn’t be.

We need to regain our collective soul here, so that we become exhausted, tired, threatened people's greatest safety, not their greatest danger.