Fear of ICE arrests is spreading across the United States, reaching beyond migrants and political activists to include everyday citizens. This growing anxiety stems from intensified immigration enforcement, with frequent raids and deportations unsettling communities. The emotional toll is palpable—individuals live with constant uncertainty, while society grapples with the broader implications. Many people wonder whether it’s safe to leave the U.S. on vacation. We are a nation at a crossroads, wrestling with issues of identity, rights, and government overreach.
Fear of ICE Grips Migrants, Activists, and Citizens
3 Comments. Leave new
Well, Ted, let’s go attack the Dems, then and call it a holiday.
People chatter about the outrageous El Salvadoran prisons for exiles, and meanwhile Guantanamo continues grinding away the lives of innocents. One would think there is some natural immunity to cognitive dissonance.
As is often the problem, the issue is the lack of context.
How much bandwidth has been devoted to covering the procedural defects of the U.S. immigration policy? The whole system is like something out of the 1940s. It can take decades to get through it, and simple errors at multiple points along the way can completely ruin an application.
How much bandwidth has been devoted to comparing the U.S. system to other countries’ systems of immigration? Canada? I couldn’t get into Canada. Most of Europe? Ditto. These places do not make it easy for you to get in. Anyone want to rattle off the requirements of Norway, the Czech Republic, Canada, and the United States?
How much bandwidth has been devoted to simply pointing out that immigration in the United States has NEVER — at ANY POINT — been about any high-falutin’ moral purpose. Sure, asylum seekers are admitted on occasion, that’s PR 101. Jefferson’s slaves had very nice quarters. Stop by the Potemkin village gift shop on your way out. My only complaint about immigration is that I cannot buy red ink.
Why are people being deported? “The Boondocks” covered it almost 20 years ago in about 50 words:
Ed Wuncler: I admire entrepreneurship in young people.
Huey Freeman: You mean like them 12-year-old girls that work in your sweatshops in Indonesia?
Ed Wuncler: That’s right, every morning I wake up and put one foot on the ground and the other up the ass of a 12-year-old Indonesian girl.
The Wunclers no longer require factories in New Jersey or northern Massachusetts. Thanks to cheap oil, globalization, instantaneous telecommunication, etc., all the hongs are scrupulously concealed by the graceful distance of miles. And, yes, just like in Emerson’s day, there is complicity. So let’s keep haggling over the incidentals. Let’s stay distracted.