Depressing Roundup of ICE Roundups, This Post Will Be Led Away At Gunpoint, Probably

Fuck ICE.

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

So we’ve moved past the “papers, please” phase and are now in the “arbitrary arrests and disappearing people” phase of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I know what you’re going to say, we’ve already been there! And you would be totally right to say that! But kids, listen, these people are trying their best to destroy global democracy so they can pick over its carcass, and it’s ramping up in really frightening ways and no one is coming to save us — except ourselves.

Anyway, here’s a roundup of ICE roundups in the last week or so.

Mobile Detention Facilities

This morning I woke up, looked at the news (a terrible mistake that I make every day) and discovered that ICE is once again talking about "mobile detention facilities,” at least in Pennsylvania. They want to pack vulnerable people seeking asylum into trains and ship them off to camps. That’s great, because every time refugees have been sent to camps it’s worked out really well for them and indeed for the whole country that it happens in, and there are never any long-lasting effects on populations at large!

This shift to “mobile” facilities has come after massive protests against those awful warehouse facilities that the federal government, sick monsters that they are, have been putting injured people, ill people, elderly people, and children in, people who have committed no crime at all.

Sidenote: No, really, did you know it’s not a crime to be undocumented? It’s a civil violation or a misdemeanor at most, referred to as “improper entry” in the codes, not “illegal entry.” It can become an actual crime if there are other things attached to it, but simply being in the USA without documentation is on par with rolling a stop sign, legally speaking, and a lot less dangerous. Folks here without papers aren’t even criminals, they are just trying to stay alive, and they came to the United States because we promised the entire world the American Dream. And it was a massive fucking lie.

Anyway, at least the warehouse centers are a failure, thanks to protests and lawsuits and watchdog groups and the part where they’re fucking building places to “concentrate” people in “camps.” ICE appears to be backing off those — at least for now.

Thousands Of Names Disappear From Online Portal

ICE is disappearing people. The government has now hidden the location of thousands and thousands of people with “final removal orders” from the United States, an unannounced change that has families, friends, and attorneys frantic as they try to find out where their loved ones or clients are being held — or where they have been sent, as the US government now sends people all over the world based on deals with other corrupt governments, which used to be called “human trafficking” before all the American news organizations lost their collective fucking spines.

Sure, a federal appeals court said that wasn’t lawful last week, but since when does the Trump administration give a shit about legality when there are so many crimes against humanity they are falling all over themselves to commit? And how would anybody know where people are being sent, if there is no record of where they are being sent? But I guess that’s the idea.

Moving on to a hideous story out of Texas:

ICE Monsters Shot And Partially Paralyzed A Young Father

A young father from Venezuela, Wilber Garcés Pérez, was making a DoorDash delivery in Austin, because he’s supporting his family — which includes a child with disabilities. And of course the dipshit untrained amateur who rammed his car then shot him “just happened” to not be wearing a body camera. It’s crazy how that happens, right?

And not that it should fucking matter, but he was going about things “the right way,” which means he emigrated to the United States using CBP One with all the proper paperwork. (We should add that despite his formal status, Trumpworld insists that CBP One was cheating, so everyone who used it is “illegal.”) But Wilber missed a hearing notice because the absolute fucking dopes in the federal government did what the federal government has been doing to people this entire time and sent it to the wrong address.

Please note that I am being charitable by calling them “dopes,” because the real explanation is, as usual, eugenics.

Garcés Pérez was working — again, legally, not that Trumpers recognize it — when they shot him. He was contributing to the national economy and being an honest person, he was trying his best and going about things the right way, and now he’s partially paralyzed in a detention center with a bullet lodged in his back because … why? Because someone wanted to shoot somebody that day.

USA-Born Guy Arrested Three Times Despite Having His REAL ID, Which Is Just Absolute Bullshit

Out in Alabama, where the cops are apparently even dumber and worse than they are in Texas, somehow, a man named Leo Garcia Venegas keeps getting arrested for being undocumented. Only there’s a catch! He isn’t undocumented! He’s a born-and-bred American citizen! But it doesn’t matter anymore — they can apparently just tell you that your REAL ID is “fake” before arresting you!

Well guess what, I am now not going to bother waiting in line at the DMV to get that shitty invasive ID update, because what’s the fucking point if some anus-faced creep can just laugh and tell you it’s fake?

Anyway, law enforcement out in Alabama has detained him THREE TIMES in the last year and a half! These losers were raiding private construction sites, where Americans — some of whom might have been undocumented — were doing an honest day’s work, and the cops decided to just go ahead and beat the shit out of them and arrest them anyway.

The Institute for Justice has taken up Garcia Venegas’s lawsuit against DHS, and this week, a judge ordered immigration officers to stop warrantless raids at construction sites and to stop harassing people who have already shown them proof of citizenship, instead of following them home like creepy stalkers to try to confront them further like immigration agents did to this poor guy!

If you’re arresting people for not being citizens, even though not being a citizen is not a crime, and they’re citizens anyway, doesn’t that mean immigration isn’t your actual focus? Haha, rhetorical question, we all know what ICE is by now!

This is all being done with our public funding, our tax dollars, money that could be used to, idk, feed hungry people, or subsidize high gas prices, or help small businesses, but instead it is all getting poured into supporting white nationalist bullshit like this.

Rant

But you’d never know it from most of the national coverage these days. Feels like the new crop of mainstream journalists covering immigration doesn’t do shit except for normalize these hideous actions. It’s all just a fucking concept on a map to them, instead of the way so many of us are forced to live, and then the “objectivity” nonsense just helps them sanitize the racism of it all, which is what it was created to do.

Now it’s just all like “hArDLiNe iMmIgRaTioN pOLicIeS please don’t send the TikTok dipshits after us, Bad Daddy Trump” which is pretty much this administration’s stated goal, remember? To get everyone to start changing the language they use to describe this behavior, in an attempt to normalize it? That was what “RESIST!” was originally about, REMEMBER? Fun fact: Did you know that journalism’s role in a democracy is to call out and spotlight its ills, such as fascism, before they become systemic, not to normalize fascistic behavior?

Way to fall down on the job, you fucking asshole losers. You absolute worthless dipshits. I was right about all of you all along.

Back in the day, before I turned to debunking and became too much of my unhinged true self to talk to normal people anymore, I was a border reporter who covered immigration policy and I made certain to call things exactly what they were. I got into a lot of trouble for it at the time too, in at least two countries! I got death threats, and creepy texts and phone calls, and people following me around, and driving by my house, and all sorts of shit, simply for saying what I saw out on the field. It was exhausting, and often terrifying, and sometimes I would question whether there was a point to it all.

But I always felt, and still feel to the marrow of my bones something that these normalizing fucks will never understand: The truth is always worth it.

Wonkette is supported 100% by reader donations. So hey, help out if you can!