As ICE Protests Sweep the Nation, Local Professor Provides His Thoughts.

    From the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidency, he promised to deport immigrants in unprecedented numbers, his goal being two million immigrants this term. Described as one of the largest immigration crackdowns in US history, it has been an unmitigated controversy that has even resulted inTrump losing popularity with some of his stalwart supporters. The brutal arrest of supposed illegal immigrants has resulted in some of the largest protests in US history.

    Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has only recently been scrutinized in the public eye, it has been a force against immigration since the 9/11 attacks. Often given the spiteful moniker the ‘deporter in chief,’ Barack Obama used ICE in his effort to deport some two million immigrants. To compare, Trump has promised to deport one million immigrants, but has forcibly deported a little more than 600 thousand in only one year, higher than Obama’s maximum deportation rate. 

    ICE Out protests, ignited by the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, have swept across the cities of Chicago and Minneapolis. Good, a 37-year old mother of three and poet, was shot in her car by ICE officers. Before she died, Good was driving on the way back from an ICE Out protest. Pretti was a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, who was shot by ICE agents with his own licensed revolver after attempting to aid an old lady in standing up. Pretti has been criticized for bringing that revolver to an ICE Out protest, despite not using it and having the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. Well-loved by his family and friends, he’s been described as a “kind and caring soul.” Both Good and Pretti were portrayed by Trump as “domestic terrorists” and a threat to public safety. The former has been repeated by Trump and his administration in interviews to justify both Alex Pretti and Renee Good’s death, according to Cornell University Associate Professor of Communication Drew Margolin, a questionable attempt. 

    “After Good was killed, [Trump] was quick to take the line fed to him by his subordinates, that she was a terrorist intent on killing an officer with her car,” said Margolin. He said the same for the death of Alex Pretti, saying that the Trump administration has tried to deescalate the situation by making the victim look like a public security threat. Professor Margolin went on to compare the Trump administration’s account of ICE raids to former President George W. Bush’s account of Hurricane Katrina. Similarly, that account of the storm insisted on a falsehood until further examination proved it to be untrue.

    The murders of Good and Pretti at the hands of ICE mirror, in many ways, those of George Floyd, Manuel Ellis, Andre Hill and many others at the hands of police. “In some ways they are quite comparable. Law enforcement officers are using excessive force and killing citizens. They are thus incidences of what is called ‘state violence’—excessive violence by the government against its people,” explained Margolin.

     That being said, Margolin stated further that the Black Lives Matter protests were a response to an enduring form of violence that has been going on for years, while the ICE Out protests are a response to a “new frontier” of state-sponsored violence.

     Civilians of cities across the country have begun to peacefully interfere with ICE by filming them, creating rapid response networks with whistles, and speaking out with all manner of posters, pins, and rallies. Over one thousand ICE Out protests were planned in response to Alex Pretti’s and Renée Good’s deaths; compare this to the protests in 140 different cities that emerged as a result of George Floyd’s death. The former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary, Kristi Noem, accused protesters of making things “more dangerous for ICE,” and ICE has been equipped with tear gas and other chemical weapons. The civilians of the city of Minneapolis aren’t the only ones tired of ICE’s violence. 

    At the Grammys, many of the award-winning artists included jabs at ICE in their speeches. Bad Bunny, in line with the demonstration of American diversity that would be his halftime show, was perhaps the heaviest hitter, cursing ICE before blessing God. Trump singled out Bad Bunny calling him “terrible,” and claiming that  “all they do is spread hate.” In addition to the publicity the issue has gotten at the Grammys, Bruce Springsteen released a protest song and music video in late January, titled “Streets of Minneapolis.” The song consists of protest poetry sung over both electric and acoustic guitar, drums, a choir, and sound effects of ICE protests. The song references the deaths of Pretti and Good with the lines, “And two dead, left to die on snow filled streets/Alex Pretti and Renée Good.” Trump has been well known to criticize Bruce Springsteen, and Springsteen has returned the favor, comparing ICE to the Gestapo. “In this case, Gestapo is a shorthand term, almost slang, but I think it fits if seen that way. ICE acts as a secret police whose job is to deport people—permanently remove them from where they live. They wear masks—so you don’t know who they are—they don’t use warrants or present papers—so they are just grabbing people based on their suspicion.” ICE can only legally detain US citizens if they have assaulted or threatened an officer, interfered in an arrest, or are suspected of being not a US citizen, but they have usually done none of these things in cases where ICE has detained or shot US citizens. 

    This is not the first time in American history that grappling with the problem of immigration has been so problematic. The Naturalization of Act of 1790, for example, limited naturalization to free white citizens. But this is a rare moment in history, one with the killings of civilians by federal agents, an immigration crisis, and a large response to federal violence by political opposition.“If we got together all of the people with reasonable views on immigration, and proposed and discussed policy ideas, we would never land on ‘rapidly hire and don’t really train masked men to grab large numbers of people on suspicion’ as a good idea,” said Professor Margolin.