ICE builds detention camps and ramps up arrests

What happened

The Trump administration accelerated efforts to build a network of massive ICE detention camps across the U.S. this week, even as lawmakers and human rights advocates detailed allegations of shocking conditions at overcrowded immigration jails in Florida. Detainees at three ICE facilities in the Miami area said they had to sleep on the floor in freezing, overcrowded cells. One detainee said they were chained with their hands behind them so they had to "bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs." Another said that when inmates demanded medical attention, officers disabled a surveillance camera and used stun grenades on them. With many existing detention facilities well over capacity, the Trump administration has awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build a tent camp at Texas' Fort Bliss that would hold 5,000 beds.

The Pentagon withdrew 700 Marines deployed to Los Angeles last month after anti-ICE protests. But following the shooting of an off-duty customs agent in Manhattan, allegedly by two undocumented men, border czar Tom Homan said he would send ICE agents to New York and other cities. "Sanctuary cities are now our priority," he said. "We're going to flood the zone." With crossings from Mexico at historic lows, the Border Patrol has begun deploying agents far from the southern border. Officers have detained day laborers at a Sacramento Home Depot and immigrants at court hearings in New York City. "Better get used to us now," said Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino "because this is going to be normal very soon."

What the editorials said

All this "wretched excess does not poll well," said the Toledo Blade. Trump squandered Americans' initial support for deportations by embracing an "un-American celebration of cruelty." Now the majority has turned against the whole project, especially Trump's "masked, marauding" ICE agents. One poll found that a mere 31% approve of the massive injection of cash— $170 billion—that ICE got in the recently passed budget bill; another that 78% support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no other crime. That would include many of the detainees in the Everglades tent prison the Trump administration gleefully calls "Alligator Alcatraz," said the Miami Herald. At least 250 of the 700-plus detainees there have "immigration violations but no criminal convictions or charges." Some of them are asylum seekers, others arrived here under legal humanitarian parole programs, and at least one was just 15. These revelations should be "chilling to Americans. Just how indiscriminate has the U.S. immigration system become?"

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What the columnists said

Across the country, ICE agents "are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses," said Farrah Hassen in Times of San Diego. Unofficial deportation czar Stephen Miller demands 3,000 arrests a day, so masked agents ignore due process and go for what appears to be "racial profiling." They have been snatching Latino-looking people "from churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces."

One of the detained, Javier Diaz Santana, was a deaf and mute man legally here under DACA, said Brittny Mejia in the Los Angeles Times. He was grabbed near L.A. by ICE agents who didn't know or care who he was. "I know you can tell I'm Mexican," Diaz recalled thinking, but he couldn't communicate with them. He languished for weeks in a Texas facility before being released.

Trump is arresting a lot of people, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, but he's actually deporting far fewer than President Obama did. This term, Trump has removed some 14,700 immigrants per month, compared with Obama's peak of 36,000 in 2013. That's because rather than following the "rules, laws, and norms" that allow government to work efficiently, he "has prioritized optics." He's not more effective than his predecessors, just "louder and meaner."

As for those who do get deported, where are they going? asked Jeff Crisp in The New York Times. The administration has sent thousands of people to poor and "often unstable third countries," places they aren't from and aren't safe in. Trump has been telling leaders of these countries that they must take in U.S. deportees if they hope to clinch U.S. commercial deals. Explicitly, horrifyingly, he is rewriting the international asylum and refugee system and making a new one "in which people are pawns."