I.C.E. WANTS YOU (seriously)!
American communities are increasingly fighting back against ICE, and that’s to be expected. Being occupied by a paramilitary force of good-ole boys who terrorize your neighbors, make you prove your citizenship at will, and disrupt local commerce—it’s no way to live. It’s certainly not anyone’s definition of democracy.
But those of us with critical and materialist readings of history know something about ICE that’s sometimes hard to prove: What you allow to happen to others will eventually happen to you. Domestic repression always starts out with a limited scope—ICE is supposed to be about immigration, after all—but the scope of repression always expands.
And when you can show the receipts explaining precisely how allowing repression against anyone expands to everyone, you share widely and urgently. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Journalist Ken Klippenstein got leaked documents revealing 21 ICE programs whose pretext is anti-immigrant but whose scope of activity is mass domestic surveillance and repression of US citizens:
As a military intelligence source told me, the ICE crackdown isn’t just about immigration; it’s about gathering intelligence in support of Trump’s war on cartels — as well as on Antifa, on the radical left, and those who are “anti-American,” and anyone else they consider terrorists.
Read that again. ICE has become a beachhead for large-scale intelligence collection against Americans. And the purpose of that intelligence is not merely for purging immigrants from the US, nor even for prosecuting the Global War on Terror as we understood it back in the Bush years. Rather, under the auspices of ICE, the US security state is constructing a vast dragnet to ensnare your freedom. To prosecute you when the time suits.
We’re now living in the world of Patriot Act 2.0—more absurd and terrifying than the first, but also applicable to everyone, not just brown dudes with beards. And unlike the original dystopian Patriot Act, this one doesn’t even have the legitimizing veneer of legislation to support it; Patriot Act 2.0 is simply the will of someone acting as a monarch, because we refused to bridle the imperial presidency when we had the chance.
Maybe at some previous point you supported ICE tepidly. Or maybe you hate ICE, but you don’t think it really affects you because nobody’s tried to kidnap you from Whole Foods and you haven’t yet seen any secret police on your block. You can’t afford to think that way anymore. The MAGA ruling class wants you to believe that A) you’re powerless and B) the tyranny of the security state doesn’t concern you. That’s obviously fucking false.
An architecture of oppression is being set up in real-time to ensure that, if your personal convictions lead you to oppose the president or genocide or pick your issue, then you will be identified as an opp, labeled a domestic terrorist, and disappeared into a prison labor camp. And ICE’s reign of terror is making that possible.
When I came out for a massive (50,000-person) protest for Black Lives Matter in 2020, there was a sign in the crowd that stuck to my mind like flypaper. I took a picture of it, and have it framed on the wall in my office. It reads, “All Oppression is Connected”:
I’ve spent many, many hours contemplating how to understand the meaning of that phrase. I now take it as truth, one of my deepest convictions. But as a social scientist, it’s my job to uncover the how’s, why’s, and under what conditions for claims of any kind. And that’s why K-Klip’s uncovered leaks in this instance are so vital: They’re telling us quite explicitly how ICE’s oppression promises to ensnare you (and maybe me, too).
Good thing the demand to abolish ICE is genuinely popular:
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