Officers including HSI and ICE agents take people into custody at an immigration court in Phoenix. REUTERS/Caitlin O’Hara
People who are here legally have had their lives “shattered” by ICE, too, according to interviews conducted by an analyst with the New York Times.
Sarah Wildman, a staff writer and editor in Opinion for the NYT, spoke “to a half-dozen people and their families who have been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.” According to Wildman, “Each was re-entering, or was already in the country legally. No one was smuggled across the border.”
“None of the people we spoke to had a recent criminal record. (Three had minor nonviolent brushes with the law, all in the distant past; one received a pardon.) All were treated like suspected violent criminals, forced into tiny cells, dressed in prison uniforms, manacled for transfer. Those we spoke to were held for anywhere from 10 days to over 70 days. The experience shattered their equilibrium,” the analyst wrote. “Immigration and Border Patrol officers have long held extremely broad discretionary powers to welcome or reject noncitizens arriving in the United States. And this is far from the first wave of xenophobia to hit America. But something different is happening now in the breadth and ferocity of efforts to change the makeup of this country.”
Wildman went further in calling attention to viral videos of brutal ICE operations.
“The videos circulating on social media are brutal and terrifying — the often violent arrests, people pulled screaming from their cars, out of day care centers, away from their children and their spouses. What should give Americans equal pause is the inhumanity happening beyond the cameras, away from the view of judges and lawyers and the media. Due process is not a constitutional right afforded only to citizens; legal restrictions on unlawful detention apply to all people on U.S. soil,” she wrote. “The stories we were told call into question both the constitutionality and the morality of how the Trump administration is directing immigration policy. That immorality, once unleashed, may ultimately be aimed at others in this country, regardless of immigration status. If a woman returning from vacation with her young children can be suddenly removed from her family and her life, how can we believe that any of us will remain safe?”
According to Wildman, “There was a disquieting sameness to the horror that was described to us.”
“Those we interviewed despaired at how the detention centers were kept purposefully, horrendously cold, forcing some of them to huddle up against strangers. They spoke of lights left on 24 hours a day and of interstate transfers that came without notice. They described food that was inadequately distributed and made them unwell,” she wrote. “Of being forced to urinate and defecate in front of fellow detainees and guards. Of being humiliated and mocked by officers. All referred to a destabilizing lack of information, the dreadful understanding that they could be held for weeks or months without anyone informing them why they were being held at all.”
