US Citizens In ICE Detention Centers Is The New Normal In Trump’s America

from the MAGA’s-replacement-theory dept

Behold this utter bullshit, uttered by the Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan:

White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”

Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”

“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”

This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.

Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.

If you keep arresting the same person over and over, sooner or later what’s left of the safety net will fail and that citizen will be expelled from the country. That’s what one US citizen is hoping to prevent with his lawsuit against the government, which is being handled by the Institute for Justice. On multiple occasions, federal officers have decided this US citizen is deserving of deportation, as Isabela Dias reports for Mother Jones:

In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.

Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented.

One time might be an aberration. Repeated occurrences are something else entirely.

This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship.

On one hand, repetition indicates that anti-migrant efforts under Trump are extremely sloppy, overseen by people who value quantity over quality. That’s almost certainly true, especially now that the DHS has lowered hiring and training standards for ICE. On top of that, there’s the casual racism of the policies, which — thanks to the Supreme Court — are pretty much legal because officers are allowed to infer from darker skin tones that someone might be in the country illegally.

On the other hand, there’s a chance Venegas is being targeted repeatedly for vindictive reasons. That seems less likely, at least in terms of what’s been detailed in his court filings. If it continues now that his lawsuit has been filed, that might suggest his arrests and detentions are no longer accidental.

Whatever the case, there’s going to be more of this happening, no matter what half-assed niceties Tom Homan might state during press conferences. The Trump administration is fighting to end birthright citizenship in this nation. If it does make this happen, it won’t be retroactive. But that’s hardly going to matter to the DHS and its underling agencies, which have repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of existing laws, when not violating direct orders from federal courts.

And this administration is going even further, seeking to “denaturalize” certain US citizens in order to deport them:

The Trump administration on Friday announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.

The Justice Department unveiled denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against roughly a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.

At first glance, this might look like the sort of thing the US government should be doing. This takes serious criminals off our books (so to speak) and sends problematic naturalized citizens back to their home countries to be their problem.

But we already know how this is going to work. The “worst of the worst” lie has been uttered repeatedly to defend the administration’s aggressive/transgressive tactics. But the facts have repeatedly shown the administration just wants non-whites gone. It doesn’t really care about any relevant criminal activity.

The same thing is happening here. The administration is making it clear this is just more bigotry, rather than an actual effort to root out the “worst of the worst” for the safety of the nation.

The group of naturalized U.S. citizens whose citizenship the Justice Department is now seeking to revoke includes immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan.

While this group does include some accused of molesting a child and a supposed terrorist sympathizer, it also includes these people:

The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.

These are far less serious crimes, which don’t lend themselves to the “worst of the worst” narrative the administration deploys when its actions are questioned.

The lack of diversity (in other words, no white people or those with ties to Western European countries) in those selected to be first up for denaturalization is a leading indicator of further unlawful detentions of US citizens. As the government goes after more non-white US citizens under this pretense, DHS agencies will respond by rounding up more non-white US citizens, turning Homan’s false assurances into the lie it was always meant to be.

The administration actually wants to deport certain US citizens. That these agencies are far too willing to oblige, even without the necessary facts in hand, will definitely increase the number of citizens being held by ICE and correspondingly increase the number of those deported despite still being citizens of this nation.

Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, donald trump, florida, ice, leonardo garcia venegas, mass deportation, rights violations, texas, tom homan, trump administration