Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Quantum physicists theorize that there are indeed alternate universes. If so, I think I might enjoy living in the one depicted in the above cartoon. In the alternate universe shown here, Trump himself is just about to board the prison bus to be deported to an unknown location. See the freaky Trump hair in the door window and the red tie dragging on the ground?

If I could choose my universe, I might go with one where Trump is very slowly lowered into a vat of lye or perhaps a live volcano. "How do you like your Trumps, sir?" "Nicely cooked," I would reply. "Nicely cooked to eliminate the danger of parasites." Then again, maybe I would just choose a universe where Trump is bundled up and dropped off at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center. He could be stuffed into the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Suite, with his entire administration as his neighbors in the cellblock. Oh, how I'd love to see youtube footage of Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, and the rest of them banging their tin cups on the bars, screaming for service!

Instead, we live in a universe where a massively mentally ill head case is running our country for the purposes of personal profit and nurturing his dreams of inflicting maximum cruelty upon as many people as he possibly can. He obviously gets off on this sort of thing or we wouldn't see it every damn day of his administration. He's so sick that, in a total banana republic or Third Reich move, he even directed his I.C.E. gestapo to go to Mississippi and round up 200 people, over 40 of which are legal U.S. citizens, at exactly the same time that he was poorly faking compassion in El Paso and turning El Paso into yet another "it's all about me" moment. And, get this: Many of the people rounded up came from... you guessed it, El Paso! Coincidence? Not a chance! You could almost see the White House staff cackling in their offices.

ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications

Surveillance images from East German Stasi archives (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

This is yet another reminder that we live in a nation in which citizen surveillance is assumed, with our permission, to be a infinitely expandable right possessed by government.

Even ICE, the immigration control service, spies on Americans, and has done so since at least 2014 under President Obama.

This surveillance takes two forms. First, ICE contracts with a major private company to engage directly in wiretapping and other targeted surveillance. Second, ICE buys and collects data from private big data aggregators — like Thomson Reuters — to add to what it knows about its enemies. Yes, that Thomson Reuters, the news people. Seems they're part of the big-data spook-state industry as well.

From Privacy International (emphasis mine):

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the centre of carrying out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement and family separation, has for years been contracting a US surveillance company to intercept peoples’ communications across the United States.

The wide potential scope for the use of the powers raises concerns about their use for the real-time surveillance of people, families, and communities caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown, including in sanctuary cities that have otherwise limited the extent to which local law enforcement are allowed to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

In 2014, US-based surveillance and analytics company, JSI Telecom, signed a contract with ICE worth over $19.7 million for annual support, operation, and maintenance of its “Title III digital collection system”, according to US procurement records. The latest contract is due to end in January 2020.

The enforcement agency intercepts wire, oral, and electronic communications—which includes the contents of calls, text messages, and emails—pursuant to judicial orders issued under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Acts of 1968 and subsequent amendments.

A judge can issue such an order when there is probable cause to believe that particular people committed particular felony offenses. Since 2014, federal and state authorities have submitted 14,683 applications for wiretap orders to judges, who have granted all but three of them.

How broad is the scope of ICE's surveillance? Very broad:

Such a wide scope raises huge concerns that judges and authorities could use such orders to monitor and criminalise millions of Americans, including almost six million citizen children under the age of 18 living with a parent or family member who is undocumented. ICE has said it deported 256,000 people in 2018, a record amount, including 5,571 unaccompanied children. ICE is also known to be monitoring people sympathetic to enforcing immigrants’ rights, labelling them as “Anti-Trump” protestors. It was reported earlier this week that ICE is locking up thousands of people it has detained in solitary confinement by exploiting measures supposed to be used as a last resort.

JSI Telecom, a company you've likely never heard of, is a big deal in the government-corporate surveillance game:

JSI Telecom, which describes itself as a “leading provider of communications intercept collection solution”, is one of over 500 companies worldwide which profits from governments' demand for advanced surveillance tools. In addition to ICE, JSI has surveillance contracts with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has also received payments from the State Department for projects in Guatemala and Indonesia, part of a broader programme of US agencies using aid and other public money to empower foreign security agencies with surveillance capabilities.

ICE also buys big data datasets from major third-party data aggregators like the news organization Thomson Reuters:

Last year, media multinational Thomson Reuters defended its contracts with ICE after Privacy International highlighted the company had made nearly $50 million from selling the agency access to a “vast collection of public and proprietary records”. This includes phone records, consumer and credit bureau data, healthcare provider content, utilities data, DMV records, World-Check listings, business data, data from social networks and chatrooms, and “live access to more than 7 billion license plate detections”.

Big data and its abuse is not your friend. It's used by the powerful for the obvious purpose, to suppress and arrest their enemies. But it's also used for a more insidious purpose — to influence U.S. elections in their favor.

Yes, there are now several ways to buy elections. Directly purchasing candidates is just one of them. Pervasive, unnoticed, constant, soft propaganda, visited on the whole population to promote the candidates and causes of the wealthy, is another.

Welcome to the world that Americans continue to allow themselves to live within.
  

The Weak And Vulnerable Always Get Preyed On... First

Not every child molester is a wresting coach or a Republican legislator. Yesterday, Michael Graball and Topher Sanders reported for ProPublica that the ICE prisons (redubbed "immigrant youth shelters") Trump is sending children, are a "gold mine" for predators. Are they sending Jim Jordan (R-OH) down to investigate? The way Trump's Gestapo (ICE) has kidnapped children and now unable to reunited them with their families is a human rights crime... and one of the most horrible things Americans have ever done to Americans, at least in my lifetime. And now we find out the the shelters-- which hold around 10,000 kids on any given day-- are being used as rape rooms by the Trump Gestapo.

Just five days after he reached the United States, the 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter one morning in 2015 to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach.

When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen’s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. “I know what you want, I can give you anything you need,” said the worker, who was later convicted of molestation.

In 2017, a 17-year-old from Honduras was recovering from surgery at the shelter when he woke up to find a male staff member standing by his bed. “You have it very big,” the man said, referring to the teen’s penis. Days later, that same employee brushed the teen with his hand while he was playing video games. When the staff member approached him again, the boy locked himself in a bathroom.

And in January of this year, a security guard at the shelter found notes in a minor’s jacket that suggested an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.

Pulled from police reports, incidents like these at Southwest Key’s Tucson shelter provide a snapshot of what has largely been kept from the public as well as members of Congress-- a view, uncolored by politics, of troubling incidents inside the facilities housing immigrant children.

...[I]mmigrant advocates, psychologists and officials who formerly oversaw the shelters say the Trump administration’s harsh new policies have only increased pressures on the facilities, which often are hard-pressed to provide adequate staffing for kids who suffer from untold traumas and who now exist in a legal limbo that could shape the rest of their lives.

“If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine,” said Lisa Fortuna, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. “You have full access and then you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.”

Southwest Key wouldn’t discuss specific incidents, but said in a statement that the company has a strict policy on abuse and neglect and takes every allegation seriously. HHS declined ProPublica’s requests to interview the refugee resettlement program’s director, Scott Lloyd. The agency released a statement saying it “treats its responsibility for each child with the utmost care” and has a “zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior” at the shelters.

...The reports also reveal dozens of incidents of unwanted groping and indecent exposure among children and teenagers at the facilities. Some kids fleeing threats and violence in their home countries arrived in the United States only to be placed in shelters where they faced similar dangers. In March, a 15-year-old boy at the Southwest Key shelter in Tucson reported that his roommate lifted up his legs as he was trying to go to sleep, made thrusting motions and said, “I’m going rape you.” And in late 2016, a 15-year-old at KidsPeace told police that another boy there had been forcing him to have oral sex. After an investigation, one teen was transferred to a more secure facility. (KidsPeace said it wouldn’t discuss specific information about kids in its care.)

While it’s difficult to get a complete count, the police reports show that children go missing or run away from the shelters roughly once a week. Several shelters, including Southwest Key's Tucson facility, have seen a significant increase in missing person and runaway calls since the start of 2018. St. PJ’s Children’s Home in San Antonio, which primarily cares for immigrant children, has had 26 such calls in the first half of the year, records show, compared to 14 for all of last year and nine for 2016.

...Many children have experienced traumatic events in their home countries, are desperate for stability after the long journey, and have little understanding of American laws-- all things that make them particularly vulnerable.

“When a perpetrator is trying to pick a victim they’re picking somebody that they think is less likely to report the abuse,” Chavez-Dueñas said. “Children and youth that are coming from outside of the country, that have no legal status here, that don’t speak English, that don’t have access to lawyers or people who can protect them-- they already might think they’re not going to be believed.”

In the back of their minds, she said, is the fear that speaking up could ultimately hurt their immigration case.

The worker who was convicted of molesting the boy in Tucson isn’t the only shelter employee to face criminal charges. Last year, according to court records, a youth care worker at a Homestead, Florida, shelter was sentenced to 10 years in prison after she sent nude photos of herself to a 15-year-old boy who had recently left the shelter and asked him for sex. In 2012, a case manager at a Fullerton, California, shelter was convicted of molesting several teenage boys when they went into his office for regular calls with family, court records show.

...At a Southwest Key shelter in Conroe, Texas, in May, a boy told a youth care worker that his mental health counselor brushed his shoulders, rubbed his arm and caressed his face while continually peeking out of the office’s blinds “as if he was checking to see if someone was coming.” The counselor began to unbuckle his own pants, but stopped, the police report said.

The boy later repeated the story to a state child welfare worker. The counselor was suspended during the investigation. But a more formal forensic interview didn’t take place until six days after the incident.

At that point, the police report said, the boy “made no outcry regarding any criminal offense” and the case was closed.

Waiting six days for a forensic interview is not on its face unusual, said David Palmiter, a psychology professor at Marywood University who has conducted forensic interviews of abused children. But he noted that the interview should be done sooner rather than later.

“Everything from legitimate confusion to some calculation of what the consequences could be or whether they would please or hurt the adults around them could impact the child,” he said. “There could be any number of reasons why the story changes.”

A large part of the current pressure on the shelters stems from a series of changes made by the Trump administration in how it handles unaccompanied minors, immigrant advocates say.

As part of an information-sharing agreement, the ORR is now required to provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement with potential sponsors’ names, dates of birth, addresses and fingerprints so that ICE can pull criminal and immigration history information on the sponsor, usually a family member, and all adult members of the sponsor’s household.

Officials say the vetting is being done to protect children. In one case a few years ago, the agency unintentionally turned teenagers over to a smuggling network that forced them to work on an egg farm to pay off their debts.

But immigrant advocates say the policy is deterring family members who are often undocumented from coming forward, leaving children to languish in shelters where they may become increasingly desperate.

Why did people work for Hitler's Nazi regime? Why do people work for Trump's? The people at the top can't do much without people at every level helping them. Can they? Just say NO. Tell your children to just say NO... even if the pay is good.

Which Democrats Support Anti-Immigrant GOP Stunts-- Very Few... But That's More Than None

Congress never seems to have the time or energy to work on anything beneficial to the American people... but the Republican leadership always has time for stunts and games-- like the one they did Wednesday. Ryan, McConnell and Scalise put GOP nitwit Clay Higgins up to it. Higgins represents one of the reddest districts in Louisiana, a big swath of the southern coast, from Morgan City through New Iberia, Lafayette and Lake Charles right to the Texas border. The PVI is R+20 and Trump beat Hillary there, 67.3% to 29.2%. There's no accountability for doing idiotic things-- as long as they'll idiotic things that Hate Talk Radio will extol.

It's a foolish non-binding resolution expressing support for ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the kidnappers who act as Trump's Gestapo. Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and likely to be that committee's next chairman: "It is a meaningless stunt. We have more important things to do." McConnell tried doing the same stunt at the Senate by using unanimous consent but it was blocked by Kamala Harris on the floor.

It passed 244 to 35. Does that look like a strangely low number of votes? Well, it was. 133 Democrats voted "present." Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Whip explained that "This is exactly the kind of 'gotcha vote' which alienates Americans from their government... Democrats refuse to play the Republicans' game. We’re not falling for this trap. But 18 Democrats did fall for this trap, Pretty repulsive that Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ) did but they're both running for the Senate and I guess they think Hispanic voters will have no choice but to forgive them.) Among the 18 Democrats who voted with the GOP on this 14 were Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, also known as Democraps.

• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Connor Lamb (Blue Dog)
• Al Lawson (New Dem-FL)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Tom Suozzi (New Dem-NY)

The only Republican to vote NO was Justin Amash (R-MI). Most Democrats who want to abolish ICE want to make sure the legitimate work they do-- not the kidnappings and family separations-- are done by another agency. Last week Democrats introduced legislation two abolish ICE which the GOP isn't allowing to come to the floor. Mark Pocan is one of the cosponsors. He said that "Trump has so misused ICE that the agency can no longer accomplish its goals effectively. As a result, the best path forward is this legislation, which would end ICE and transfer its critical functions to other executive agencies." But where and how and who? With the congressional Republicans preferring to weaponize the slogan, "Abolish Ice," to use against Democrats, there is no mature debate about how to go forward.

If signed into law, the bill would set a one-year window before ICE is shut down, while also establishing a commission to undertake a 90-day review that would identify ICE’s essential responsibilities and the agencies that could take over those roles. A second act of Congress would then be needed to establish where its former powers should go. Commission members would also be charged with accounting for any constitutional infringements and abuses of power committed by ICE agents and officials during its existence.

“This legislation would establish a commission to look at transitioning essential ICE functions to a new agency that would have accountability, transparency and oversight built in from its inception,” Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal, another Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “It’s time to change the system to one that is accountable, efficient, humane, and transparent.”

...At its broadest level, #AbolishICE isn’t just about changing DHS’ most controversial agency. It’s about changing the nation’s deadlocked immigration debate. “Everyone’s entrenched,” [Former ICE director Sarah] Saldana said, referring to Congress. “I don’t blame one side or the other for the lack of comprehensive immigration reform. Both parties are responsible, and I would hope that at some point the public gets serious enough about it to say, ‘You’re not working on a major issue in this country and we need someone who will.’”

By calling for ICE’s abolition, activists on the left are hoping to tilt that debate in their favor. “ICE is now contested,” [Sean] McElwee said. “Detention beds are contested. ICE’s funding in omnibus bills is no longer a given-- a thing that is seen as the thing that’s done automatically. The contesting of deportation is very valuable. We actually have some space now to question the consensus that was fundamentally a center-right consensus.” For those hoping to build a new approach to immigration after Trump, that long-term shift is more important than whatever form ICE takes next.

Needless To Say, Not All Democrats Are For Abolishing Ice

The other day, I mentioned on Twitter how interesting it will be to see the next Congress' likely most progressive member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, join the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Some of the most conservative Democrats in Congress are part of that caucus. A full dozen have F's for their lifetime crucial vote score from Progressive Punch-- from bad to worse-- Tony Cardenas (CA), Juan Vargas (CA), Norma Torres (CA), Darren Soto (FL), Salud Carbajal (CA), Vicente González (TX), Pete Aguilar (CA), Filemon Vela (TX), Raul Ruiz (CA), Lou Correa (CA), Jim Costa (CA) and Henry Cuellar (TX). The caucus has been warning that they oppose abolishing ICE, which normal Democrats, including Ocasio, have been calling for in their campaigns. The caucus' talking points stress that immigration enforcement is just one part of the agency’s portfolio and ICE also does good work on narcotics enforcement, investigating cybercrimes, human smuggling, firearms smuggling and counterterrorism. "ICE needs greater oversight and accountability," they wrote, "so that we can protect the homeland and better manage our broken immigration system."

And the House Hispanic Caucus isn't alone there. Over the weekend, Axios reported that top Democrats see the danger on sudden party push to abolish ICE. Does that surprise anyone at all? It shouldn't. "Top Democrats" are afraid of looking weak on security. Who are these "Top Democrats?" We have to take Axios' word that they're really top-- or even Democrats-- since they don't name them.

Although one top Democrat, tasked with messaging for the Senate, is on the tip to get rid of ICE and replace it with something better: Elizabeth Warren. Saturday she said that Trumpanzee's "deeply immoral actions have made it obvious we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and that works," pointing in Boston that the orange ape "seems to think that the only way to have immigration rule is to rip parents from their family, is to treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists and to put children in cages. This is ugly and this is wrong and this is not the way to run our country." She's on the same page as Bernie and Kamala Harris.

It could become an issue in the California Senate race where conservative Dianne Feinstein will face a progressive Democrat Kevin de León in November. He supports abolishing ICE, while Feinstein, desperate to win Republican votes to counteract his hold on progressives, is avoiding saying anything specific about ICE.

Just over a week ago, Kaniela Saito Ing, the progressive running for the Honolulu-based congressional seat (in competition with a gaggle of conservatives from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party) wrote an OpEd for Civil Beat, Mobilize To Change ‘Immoral’ Immigration System. You can read the whole thing at the link above. This is a brief excerpt:

In the legislature, I championed investigations into allegations of human trafficking in the long-line fishing industry, fought to pass driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, and introduced the nation’s first Sanctuary State Bill. We can do more. The Sanctuary State Bill passed both chambers, but died in conference. We can make sure it passes next session and elect a governor who promises now to sign it into law. Hawaii’s county councils can work with our police departments to prevent cooperation with ICE. All congressional candidates must support defunding ICE. I am the only candidate at this time to support abolishing ICE in the 1st Congressional District.

It’s important to remember that ICE was only created in 2003. The creation of ICE was a George W. Bush scapegoating tactic to pit us against “others” and help justify the Iraq War. We didn’t need ICE then, and we don’t need it now.

ICE is what our immigration policy looks like when it’s rooted in fear and scarcity. It has become the American Gestapo. Everyday, we continue business as usual and allow ICE to take our neighbors away in the middle of the night; it’s our moral failure that inches us towards authoritarianism.

It’s time for us to lead with humanity and aloha. All of us have a choice. We can choose to allow this moral stain to bleed deeper into the soul of our nation, or come together to fight for aloha.

Meanwhile, Señor Trumpanzee was, once again, on the warpath against due process yesterday:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sigh. As I always say, Republicans have no sense of irony. Even his surname is rife with irony and he doesn't get it.

Just look at this total assclown. He's right out of central casting for playing some dumbfuck wehrmacht Sergeant in a 1943 war movie. That he would go on the FOX propaganda channel and say what he said is totally predictable and only increases the irony; the irony that Republicans miss. Maybe if Hollywood ever does a new version of Hogan's Heroes, he can play Col. Klink and Tucker Carlson can play his "personal aide" who dances around a pole in his office while filing papers wearing only his bowtie.

"Only following orders"! I have only one word for you Sergeant Dumbfuck: Nuremberg.

Time To Ice ICE!

On Wednesday evening we talked about Randy Bryce’s powerful platform on immigration issues. One was a very controversial call to abolish ICE… something the DCCC advises its candidates to stay away from. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created just 15 years ago,” wrote the Bryce campaign, “and it is now time to rethink whether it is achieving its intended purpose. Rather than deporting immigrants who pose a risk to the nation’s security, ICE has grown power hungry, sucking up more and more federal resources and directing them towards the deportation of children and families, who are otherwise completely law-abiding. In 2017, the detention of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled. Accordingly, Randy believes that ICE should be abolished, and Congress should explore which existing agency could best house immigration and customs enforcement, so that only those who pose a true threat to our country’s security face deportation.” This kind of bold, progressive leadership drives the DCCC institutionally insane. The DCCC doesn’t want independent-minded leaders like Bryce in Congress upsetting their tepid applecart.

Today, Alexandria Ocasio, the primary opponent of Joe Crowley, corrupt Queens County machine boss and one of the House Democrats leaders, went after ICE the same way Bryce did. She started by reprinting this letter from a donor who had grown disenchanted with the Democratic Party after then-DNC chair, Wasserman Schultz, was caught rigging the 2016 Democratic parimaries against Bernie:

“Let’s talk about this issue a little more,” continued Ocasio. “ICE was only established in 2003, in the same suite of legislation as the Patriot Act, the AUMF (authorizing war without Congressional approval), and the Iraq War. ICE was established as an enforcement agency ¨outside of the purview of the Justice Department”-- removing due process from our immigration proceedings. As such, ICE essentially operates without rigorous accountability

. “Across the country, ICE has established for-profit detention centers and their forces are invading our courtrooms, our buses, our local businesses, our homes, and our schools. They have thrown people into indefinite detention without due process.

“In a troubling development last week, the Trump administration ended a policy that exempted pregnant immigrant women from being detained in unregulated ICE facilities. That means ICE, which operates without oversight from the Justice Department, can now keep pregnant women in dangerous, unregulated, for-profit facilities.

“Our community, New York 14, is half immigrant. I take ICE issues very seriously because they seriously impact families in NY-14. ICE doesn’t belong in Corona. ICE doesn’t belong in Parkchester. ICE doesn’t belong in Jackson Heights. ICE doesn’t belong in New York. ICE doesn’t belong in any town or city in America, breaking up families without due process, accountability, or oversight. We must abolish ICE. And with your help, our campaign can win the Democratic primary in NY-14 and be the voice we need in Congress to end ICE’s impunity.”

Many Democrats who are starting to talk up about abolishing ICE were inspired by Sean McElwee’s column in The Nation last month, It’s Time to Abolish ICE. He point: “A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights.” He features three of Blue America’s strongest endorsees: Ocasio, Dan Canon (IN) and Kaniela Ing (HI).

Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indiana’s ninth district this year. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually became the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges, and he proudly wore a Notorious RBG shirt under his suit to the Supreme Court. He is currently representing individuals suing Donald Trump for inciting violence at his rallies.

Canon has also defended clients swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and fought a Kafkaesque deportation system that, at one point, wouldn’t even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon believes ICE should be abolished entirely.

“I don’t think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they don’t really know what they do or what they’re about. If they did, they’d be appalled,” Canon told me. “ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like they’re animals. They scoop up people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from their spouses and children.”

The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, said, “Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is broken.” Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year.

Groups like Indivisible Project and the Center for Popular Democracy have also called for defunding ICE. Brand New Congress, a progressive PAC, has the proposal in its immigration platform.

“ICE is terrorizing American communities right now,” said Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project. “They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it.”

Though ICE abolition is spreading on the left, it quickly meets extreme skepticism elsewhere. In part, this is because the mainstream political discourse has a huge blind spot for the agency’s increasingly brutal policies. While elites have generally become concerned with rising authoritarianism, they have mainly ignored the purges ICE is conducting in immigrant communities. For example, in their recent book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky do not mention ICE at all. Centrist pundits like Jonathan Chait have dedicated thousands of words to the threat of “PC culture” on college campuses, but haven’t found time to question whether an opaque and racist deportation force might pose a larger threat to democracy than campus editorial pages.

…Obama, while he made pains to distinguish between “good” and “bad” immigrants, presided over aggressive deportation tactics in his first term in order to build support for a path to citizenship that never came.

The central assumption of ICE in 2018 is that any undocumented immigrant is inherently a threat. In that way, ICE’s tactics are philosophically aligned with racist thinkers like Richard Spencer and the writers at the white-supremacist journal VDare. ICE’s modus operandi under Trump bears a striking resemblance to the strategy proposed by white supremacist Jared Taylor in 2015:

The key, however, would be a few well publicized raids on non-criminal illegals. Television images of Mexican families dropped over the border with no more than they could carry would be very powerful. The vast majority of illegals would quickly decide to get their affairs in order and choose their own day of departure rather than wait for ICE to choose it for them. The main thing would be to convince illegals that ICE was serious about kicking them out. Ironically, the more ICE was prepared to do, the less it would have to do.

This is a near-perfect summary of ICE under acting director Thomas Homan, who has repeatedly made clear that all undocumented residents should be afraid of his agents. “You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried,” he boasted in his congressional testimony last year.

Homan does not apply any light touch when expressing his authoritarian tendencies. He has threatened to jail and prosecute local officials in so-called “sanctuary cities” that do not fully comply with ICE mandates. The agency has also clearly been targeting political opponents for deportations and has worked to deport individuals for speaking to media about ICE.

Homan’s authoritarian saber rattling has essentially been ignored in the mainstream political dialogue, but the candidates and activists I spoke with hear it loud and clear. So do the communities they represent.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is challenging Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which covers part of the Bronx and Queens, told me she believes that “After a long and protracted history of sexual assault and uninvestigated deaths in ICE’s detention facilities, as well as the corrosive impact ICE has had on our schools, courts, and communities, it’s time to reset course.

” New York’s 14th district is among the most diverse and immigrant-heavy in the country. Ocasio-Cortez not only supports defunding ICE, but also wants a full congressional inquiry into ICE enforcement and detention practices. She further argues for a “a truth and reconciliation process for victims of any potential sexual assault, neglect, and misconduct discovered as a result.”

Kaniela Ing, a member of the Hawaii State Legislature currently running for the House in the state’s first district, has also endorsed defunding ICE, tweeting this week that “When they say defund Planned Parenthood (and destroy millions of lives), we say defund ICE (and save millions of lives).”

There is increasing support for limiting or even ending cooperation with ICE at the state level, too. Abdul El-Sayed, a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, told me that he “will not waste a dime of state taxpayer money to enforce laws that would tear apart families-- and tear apart our economy.”

Jessica Ramos, who is running for a New York State Senate seat in Queens, has also endorsed defunding ICE. “Instead of making our communities safer, ICE has taught immigrants to fear and distrust law enforcement,” she said. “It’s absolutely time to defund the agency and start working on real, common-sense immigration reform.”

Ramos’s opponent in the primary, Jose Peralta, joined the Independent Democratic Caucus in the statehouse last year, which is a group of politicians who were elected as Democrats formed a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. He claimed this would position him to bring tuition benefits and protections to undocumented immigrants, but those benefits have not materialized, though he has gotten a nice pay raise thanks to the GOP.

The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.

White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing.