Impossible choices

The contradictions within people acting as immigration agents are intensifying. The Department of Homeland Security has launched an effort to recruit thousands of new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

This effort comes in the midst of growing numbers of people who are quitting ICE for moral reasons. A recent article in The Atlantic reported on the conflicts some agents are experiencing as the administration emphasizes deporting a million people. 

Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

One veteran agent explained that the emphasis on arresting large numbers of people has resulted in a shift in priorities.  “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The agent is “thinking about quitting rather than having to continue arresting gardeners.”

People like this man joined ICE because they believed it was an honorable way to serve the public. Now they face ethical conflicts.

For example, Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney, resigned from ICE’s legal department because he felt “the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller.”

The inhuman, brutal and foolish images of masked ICE officers armed to the teeth in tactical gear, arresting mothers, people trying to make a living, children on field trips, and sports fans out to support their favorite teams are not only causing a major backlash among the vast majority of Americans, but they are raising conflicts for those individuals who are behind the masks. 

These conflicts need to be sharpened as the Federal government attempts to expand ICE. 

No young person should see ICE as a possible choice for their future.  ICE is not only terrorizing our families, friends, and neighbors. ICE agents are also members of our families, our friends, and our neighbors. Every one of them is committing crimes against humanity. They need to be encouraged to quit ICE now. They are acting in ways that reflect the worst of the human experience.  There is no excuse for working for ICE.

Recognizing this growing feeling, the administration is pumping up its recruitment package. The current budget makes ICE the largest law enforcement unit in the country. Offering $50,000 sign in bonuses, student debt forgiveness, and unlimited overtime, the administration is hoping to provide enough money to buy the souls of people. 

In spite of this financial effort, the administration knows that more ICE agents are not sufficient for their plans to create a new national police state. Under the guise of getting the “worst of the worst off the streets, the “the administration is preparing a plan to assign military personnel to help with enforcement work,” the Atlantic reports.  Additionally, ICE is hiring private contractors who will make millions of dollars trafficking in human suffering.

This should be unacceptable to all of us. ICE is not a job. Trafficking in human suffering is a paid criminal behavior. 

We need to resist the recruitment of our young people into such work, to withdraw our dollars from any company that engages in supportive work with ICE, and to make clear that ICE work is morally corrupt. We need to use every tactic we can think of to make ICE work an impossible choice.