The Shock-and-Awe Deportations Will Get Worse
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Brutality Upon Brutality
by Andrew Egger
Within hours of Narciso Barranco’s arrest on Saturday, the video had gone viral. Masked ICE agents had surrounded and tackled the Orange County, California landscaper, allegedly an illegal immigrant. In the video, his weed whacker lies discarded while they pin him to the ground and beat him around the head and neck.
The more details came out, the worse the story got. Barranco’s son Alejandro told local news his father had been pepper sprayed and suffered a dislocated shoulder; in more than 24 hours since entering ICE custody, Alejandro said, his father had not received food, water, or medical care.
Alejandro and his two brothers, Emanuel and José Luis, are U.S. citizens. They also happen to be U.S. Marines.
Barranco’s arrest may have prompted the largest recent outpouring of indignation, but his is an increasingly common story—one that represents a stain on our collective consciousness and a black mark in our nation’s history.
As they chase ever more stringent immigrant detention quotas—whipped along by mass-deportation ideologues like Stephen Miller—federal agents are increasingly abandoning the slightest concern for optics or basic human decency. Instead, they are bringing the hammer down on any migrant they can find. These are just some of the stories that we’ve seen in the last few weeks:
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In New Haven, Connecticut, masked ICE agents wearing no identification boxed in an immigrant woman’s car as she left home to drive her kids to school, arresting her and leaving them sobbing on the sidewalk with their grandmother, who had rushed out of the house as the arrest proceeded.
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In Houston, Texas, plainclothes officers detained and then deported the undocumented wife of an active-duty Army sergeant after misrepresenting themselves as “public safety officers” and telling her that her car had been in an accident in the parking lot outside her work. The woman, Shirly Guardado, had been brought to America as a child more than a decade ago.
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In New Orleans, Louisiana, ICE agents detained the wife of a Marine veteran who was in green-card proceedings because her mother had missed an immigration hearing years before, triggering removal orders against the entire family.
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Also in New Orleans, federal agents arrested at least 15 workers in a raid on a construction site for a major and long-delayed flood control project. New Orleans, as a reminder, is prone to disastrous flooding.
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In Nashville, Tennessee, an undocumented woman who was detained by ICE while pregnant suffered a stillbirth after allegedly being denied adequate medical care in ICE custody.
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In Atlanta, Georgia, an undocumented migrant who entered the country in 2004 and has gained a large following as a reporter covering ICE raids was arrested while reporting on a “No Kings” protest earlier this month. ICE promptly detained him and began deportation proceedings.
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In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a two-year-old girl, who happens to be a U.S. citizen, was deported along with her undocumented parents to Brazil, where she is now the undocumented one. “She has no right to routine pediatric checkups in Brazil’s public healthcare system,” the Washington Post reported . “She cannot easily enroll in a Brazilian school or day care. And she’s living on a temporary tourism visa that’s set to expire in weeks.”
If anything, we should expect stories like these to multiply in the days ahead. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a remarkable assist in its efforts not merely to detain illegal immigrants, but to short-circuit their due process in order to quickly deport them. In an unsigned and unexplained ruling, the court’s conservative majority paused a ruling from a lower judge who had blocked the administration from deporting migrants to countries with which they had no connection without giving them a hearing to make the case they could face torture there.
The immediate effect of the ruling was to give the White House clearance to move forward with deporting a clutch of convicted criminal aliens to South Sudan. Their deportations had been paused last month.
But the ruling also seemed to cut in a different direction from other SCOTUS decisions this year, which have forced the White House to stop ignoring migrants’ rights to due process as they seek to deport as many as possible as quickly as possible.
That’s all good news for the White House. The president and his aides have responded to every story of injustice in immigration enforcement with insistence that the media is either misrepresenting the story or ignoring other cases in which actual, hardened criminals are being taken off the streets. Now, they don’t need to pause all that long to differentiate between the immigrants they’re going after—if they were ever pausing in the first place. In fact, they seem poised to accelerate a deportation strategy of moving the maximum number of bodies allowed by law, no matter the individual circumstances of the migrants in question or the public reaction.
“DHS can now execute its lawful authority and remove illegal aliens to a country willing to accept them,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement yesterday. “Fire up the deportation planes.”
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They cant find enough criminals to meet their quotas.
So much for the idea Trump spreads that the country is flooded with escapees from foreign prisons and insane asylums.
News flash, they are all criminals if they are here illegally.