The truth about Trump's ICE raids: Botched Mississippi operation is good optics
Source: Salon
The truth about Trump's ICE raids: Botched Mississippi operation is good optics
In the lead up to 2020, expect more images of devastated children. Their pain is Trump's political gain
SOPHIA TESFAYE
AUGUST 9, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)
The writer Adam Serwer surmised the driving sentiment of the Trump era when he famously noted: “The cruelty is the point.”
While this country was coping with the trauma caused by a trio of random mass shootings in one week, the Trump administration conducted the largest one-day workplace Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in history. More than 650 ICE agents descended upon several different meatpacking locations in Mississippi and snatched any employee who did not have proof of residency on them. 680 residents of Mississippi were detained and forcibly removed from their jobs and families. On the first day of school in many districts, children were stranded with one or two parents suddenly missing. Several babies and toddlers were left at childcare without anyone to pick them up. Images of their devastation and grief flooded social media.
At the same time, President Trump was in El Paso, ostensibly to console the surviving victims of a mass murderer who targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Texas Wal-Mart. None of the eight still hospitalized agreed to meet with him, however, but the surviving two-month-old son of two parents gunned down last Saturday attempting to protect him was returned to the hospital for a photo-op with the president.
These communities’ pain is Trump’s political gain.
Less than 24-hours after the massive Mississippi raid, nearly half of the detained were released. Presumably, as these were meatpacking facilities, hundreds of employees did not carry proper identification on them onto the work floor and were thus mistakenly rounded up. ICE agents apparently did not have a targeted list and look to have relied on a form of racial profiling. But ICE’s acting director Matthew Albence, who infamously compared border detention facilities to “summer camp," claimed the round-ups were “racially neutral.” ICE agents, however, even attempted to arrest at least one U.S. citizen. "In Canton, there was a young man who was working there that protested the arrests because he was an American citizen," according to immigrant rights activist Bill Chandler. "And they tased him, knocked him to the ground, and put handcuffs on him before they finally figured out that he was an American citizen." No longer papers, please, now it is arrest first, ask for papers later.
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Mississippi Lt. Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican who is locked in a tight battle for the governor’s seat, gleefully praised the raids. "Glad to see that ICE is working hard to enforce our immigration laws," Reeves said in a Wednesday tweet.
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Read more: https://www.salon.com/2019/08/09/the-truth-about-trumps-ice-raids-botched-mississippi-operation-was-good-optics/
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