Job No. 1 for a Democratic Congress: Investigate ICE

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19674952/trump-immigration-ice-military-at-border/

Job No. 1 for a Democratic Congress: Investigate ICE
It's become the most brutal kind of national police force.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 3, 2018

snip//

Meanwhile, on this side of the border, the horror of our present immigration policy grows steadily more grotesque. From a great piece in New York by Hannah Dreier, we learn about Henry, who fled to this country to escape his involvement in MS-13, a gang that sprang up in El Salvador when a number of Salvadorans were sent back there from Los Angeles, and which the president* likes to cite as an occupying power in some American cities. MS-13 is indeed a particularly vicious bunch of cutthroats and, once he got to Long Island, Henry went to the FBI and became a vital source at rolling up the gang on Long Island.

Henry’s cooperation was a coup for law enforcement. MS-13 was in the midst of a convulsion of violence that claimed 25 lives in Long Island over the past two years. President Trump had seized on MS-13 as a symbol of the dangers of immigration, referring to parts of Long Island as “bloodstained killing fields.” Police were desperately looking for informants who could help them crack how the gang worked and make arrests. Henry gave them a way in. Under normal circumstances, Henry’s choice would have been his salvation. By working with the police, he could have escaped the gang and started fresh. But not in the dawning of the Trump era, when every immigrant has become a target and local police in towns like Brentwood have become willing agents in a nationwide campaign of detention and deportation. Without knowing it, Henry had picked the wrong moment to help the authorities

.

Nice to see you again, Mr. Kafka. Your usual table?

Now that he had helped the police, Henry assumed his witness-protection papers would be coming through any day. When he turned 18, he started telling friends and teachers he trusted that he would soon disappear to California. Then one morning in August, as Henry was making lunch for his shift at the toilet-paper factory, the federales finally came for him. But they weren’t from the FBI or the witness-protection program. They were from ICE. The same unit that Henry had helped to arrest members of MS-13 was now pursuing a deportation case against him, using the information he had provided as evidence… He watched the Long Island streets he knew disappear, replaced by the high-rises of downtown Manhattan, then darkness as the bus was swallowed by a tunnel to New Jersey. He was headed to an ICE detention center full of young men suspected of being MS-13 members — the very same ones he had snitched on.

Good God.

snip//

Job One, if the Congress changes hands in the elections next fall, is an intensive investigation of ICE, which has turned into the most brutal kind of national police force. Help the FBI, get locked up with the guys you gave up. Complain about being brutalized while in ICE’s custody, get sent back to the one place in the world you most do not want to go. This kind of activity is positively Soviet in its bureaucratic brainlessness. We only learn from the best.

And, in the face of this, the president* is prepared to dance all over the Posse Comitatus Act and send the military to police the border until his stupid wall is finished, which will be never. He can get around posse comitatus by using National Guard units, but an open-ended deployment of the Guard until the wall that never will be built gets finished would just be another layer of madness, and we should be used to that by now.

[AZ8theist]

1. I STRONGLY disagree...

JOB #1 is to investigate the Russian stooge occupying the Oval Office.

Until we remove this shitstain, everything else is secondary.