Today, Explained - Abolish ICE?

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

#AbolishICE has gone from an online murmur to a national movement, but a lot of Americans are confused about what exactly Immigration and Customs Enforcement does. Vox’s Dara Lind explains the short history of the controversial agency and what it might mean to see it dissolved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Johnny, I heard yesterday from some people that were disappointed by the drama of your Quip experience, where you went to getquip.com, slash explain, you had this brush, you finally took it to Hong Kong, you used it, and then we set up this thrilling turn, and it was just that you lost it. Yeah, which is a big deal. I thought it was a big deal. I lost it, and that's a big deal. I mean, the drama continues, but... Oh, does it? Oh, it does.

It definitely continues. So these people who haven't yet been sated by your trauma, there might be something in store for them. Yeah, this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg. Darylind, immigration reporter here at Vox. Abolish ICE used to just be a hashtag I'd see online, and now it's become a rallying cry at protests. There were marches all over the country this weekend. Politicians are calling for it.

Even 19 ICE agents just sort of joined this movement a few days ago. But a lot of people still seem confused about what exactly ICE, what exactly Immigration and Customs Enforcement does, even our own politicians, even Mitch McConnell. Yeah. So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was complaining to Politico about the leftward drift of the Democratic Party and said, We even had a credible potential candidate for president in 2020 suggest we get rid of ICE, the border enforcement agency.

And then you called them out on Twitter. Yes. This is all caps, but I'm not going to scream it because I appreciate your eardrums. Thank you. ICE is not the Border Enforcement Agency. The Border Enforcement Agency is CBP, Customs and Border Protection, the agency that has border in the name. Okay, let's do Senator McConnell a solid here and break all of this down. I know ICE comes into existence after 9-11, but it's not like that's when we started enforcing immigration laws, right? Right. Before 9-11, there was just one agency that was supposed to deal with immigration

into the U.S. It was called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and it was under the Department of Justice. This is INS. Yep. Okay. They're responsible for approving people's applications to come to the U.S., to become citizens. That's the agency that oversaw U.S. Border Patrol. And they're responsible for deporting people who are in the U.S. who shouldn't be. They weren't doing a ton of the third one. Things started to change with the Immigration Reform Bill of 96. The changes this law makes send a clear message. We will address the problem of illegal immigration, protecting the integrity of the legal immigration process and our public

safety. The bill made it a lot easier for both legal immigrants and unauthorized immigrants to get deported as a matter of legal standards. We are increasing border controls by 50 percent. We are increasing inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants. And tonight, I announce I will sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to businesses that hire All right, so Clinton overhauls immigration policies in 1996, and then George W. Bush overhauls it again several years later. So the Department of Homeland Security gets created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. With my signature, this act of Congress will create a new Department of Homeland Security gets created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. With my signature, this act of Congress will create a new Department of Homeland Security, ensuring that our efforts to defend this country are comprehensive and united.

The idea was to move all the immigration stuff into the Department of Homeland Security. The new department will analyze threats, will guard our borders and airports, protect our critical infrastructure. So DHS, Department of Homeland Security, becomes the parent organization of all immigration stuff? One of the problems of security that led to the 9-11 attacks was that the attackers were often on expired visas or visas that they had violated the terms of. Yeah. And that hadn't been caught. So they did finally split INS into USCIS, which kind of does the welcoming stuff, the like monitoring the legal immigration system. USCIS is rocking the paperwork, giving people visas, making people citizens, the American

history tests, the ceremonies. Right. And, you know, like that's also, you know, visa denials and all of that. But they're the ones who are adjudicating kind of legal immigration claims. And then there's Customs and Border Protection. That's the one Senator McConnell thought was the same as ICE, but it's not. Customs and Border Protection is responsible for the border and the 100 miles within the border for enforcement there. That includes U.S. Border Patrol, which is responsible for literally patrolling between

ports of entry in that area. And then there's ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is responsible for enforcement inside that 100-mile area, as well as some of the investigative stuff. And does this mean INS is no more? There is no such thing as INS anymore. Okay, so INS is gone. Yep.

Department of Homeland Security set up. It's got three kids. One is USCIS, which is like, welcome to America. Here's a visa, here's citizenship or not. Then you've got Customs and Border Protection, which a part of that is Border Patrol. And then you've got Immigration and Custom Customs Enforcement, a.k.a. ICE. Exactly. Which is patrolling, policing immigration within the country, the interior.

Right. Generally, the kind of stories that you hear about people's homes getting raided and them getting taken or like raids on workplaces, or for that matter, the kind of sanctuary cities fight that's going on with how much access immigration agents can have to jails. Those are ICE. So was ICE always deporting lots of people? Did they start that right away? Starting with 2003, 2004, as ICE really gets established, you see deportations start to rise. And they rise pretty steadily up through the Bush administration. We've intensified security at the borders and ports of entry, posted more than 50,000 newly trained federal screeners in airports.

You're going from about 175,000 a year to, by the end of the Bush administration, we're damn close to 400,000 a year. Part of that is because around the midpoint of the Bush administration, they make a decision that people who are caught by Border Patrol as a general rule coming into the country shouldn't be just turned around by Border Patrol. They should be given to ICE and formally deported because that carries legal consequences that make it harder to come back in the U.S.,

but it's also people getting deported from the interior of the U.S. Okay, the United States is deporting hundreds of thousands of people through ICE during the Bush years after 9-11. I imagine these aren't hundreds of thousands of potential terrorists. Yeah, I mean, there aren't that many potential terrorists in the U.S. So is this agency that's created in the wake of 9-11 to sort of beef up security used for a different kind of security? I think it depends a lot on what you think the intent of ICE was. Because it is a misdemeanor to come into the U.S. without papers, because deportation is a civil punishment for anyone who's in the U.S. without status, like, there definitely was a sense that these laws should be more fully enforced.

So ICE is a realization of that. It's really a matter of whether you consider people being in the U.S. without immigration status to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the country or not. By that logic, immigration is absolutely a matter of national security, even if the people you're deporting are a bunch of, you know, employees at a poultry plant, as was the case in the biggest raid of the Bush era in Postville, Iowa. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Postville's largest employer, a food processing plant on the edge of town.

389 illegal immigrants were arrested. Hundreds more fled in fear. The best way to think about this is a metaphor that the Migration Policy Institute has. There's a deportation machine. Under Bush, that machine gets built up. It like assembles the parts. You know, it starts running on a lot more fuel, the money it's getting from Congress. And then under Obama, it becomes clear that with that machine running at full strength, it can just scoop up, you know, massive numbers of people who never would have been deported before. People who are unauthorized immigrants who are pulled over for having a broken taillight, booked into they make it through immigration court, which often takes a while, then they get deported. Like, that's never been something that has been possible on that scale before.

At this point, I mean, I remember people started calling President Obama the deporter-in-chief, right? People who opposed his immigration policies. Obama is the high-water mark for immigration enforcement in the United States so far. During his first several years in office, he was deporting 400,000 people a year, which is more than any president before or since. Part of that is a matter of capacity. Part of it is because under Bush, they changed the way that people were processed

when they were arrested at the border, which meant that more people were getting formally deported who previously would have just been returned. And part of it was that despite the fact that Obama rhetorically said that they weren't deporting, say, parents of U.S. citizens or weren't deporting students, for most of his presidency, the administration was doing just that. Does Obama's approach to ICE and deportations

change at all over the course of his presidency? He issued a memo that spelled out explicitly, here is your first priority for deportation, here is your second priority for deportation, here is your third priority for deportation. In the last years of the Obama administration, 2014 and particularly 2015-2016, you see the number of interior deportations go way down. That didn't necessarily get felt by the community itself. Like, when there were big enforcement actions, like ICE did a big raid at the beginning of 2016 to target Central American families who hadn't shown up for their asylum hearings. They chanted outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, office on Broad Street,

demanding the feds back off of targeting and deporting immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They say the raids have struck fear during and after the holidays. Even though they were very clear with the public about here are the circumstances in which you would be on our list to get targeted, everybody freaked out. Which I think more or less brings us to now. People freaking out seems like almost an understatement now. Is President Trump deporting more people or is it just getting more attention? Trump is increasing enforcement across the board from kind of where he found it. But by any quantitative measure, if we look at what Trump's done so far, we're getting back to like 2011, 2012 levels of enforcement.

We haven't yet hit the level that Obama hit during his first years in office, 2009, 2010. Trump is still trying to get back to the kind of fully operational system that Obama had. In a minute, the movement to abolish ICE gets serious. This is Today Explained. All right, Johnny, tip of the iceberg. What happened after you lost your Quip electric toothbrush? So I get home and I'm like, I need to get a new toothbrush. And I'm talking to my wife about this and she's like, no, no, no, you're not going to go buy a new toothbrush. You just bought one and you didn't going to go buy a new toothbrush. You just bought one and you didn't buy me or the kids the toothbrush. We're going to get one before you do.

So what you're saying is the Quip electric toothbrush and the loss of your Quip electric toothbrush is now tearing your family apart. It's getting pretty bad. Yeah. It's getting to the point where I very well just may go buy them their toothbrushes in order to kind of salvage the relationship. At getquip.com slash exploit. Yeah, hopefully I'll get some free stuff too. Those refills. Yeah, those refills will probably help manage this tension.

I'm rooting for you, Johnny. Thank you. Abolish ICE! No more ICE! Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE. It's a growing call from Democrats. I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build something that actually works. We are here to say abolish ICE, and we cannot say anything less. Shame on you! There, this Abolish ICE movement has been gaining all sorts of momentum under President Trump. What's he doing differently when it comes to ICE?

Trump, you know, made a big deal out of it. I'm going to unshackle the ICE agents. You know, they've had the handcuffs put on them. I'm going to let them do their jobs. Your officers and agents haven't been allowed to properly do their jobs. Your officers and agents haven't been allowed to properly do their jobs. And he, you know, signed an executive order the first week he was in office that said, it's basically your guy's call, go for it. Videos of individual people getting taken by ICE agents started going viral.

You Trump supporters happy? And my nine-year-old niece getting her father taken away from her. ICE officials, when they were, say, going out on raids, didn't have to only target the person who they actually had the warrant for. They could ask everybody else in the apartment whether they had papers or not. There's also kind of a bunch of other really tactical aggressive moves that straddle the line between effective immigration enforcement and symbolic things to make clear to immigrants that they are not safe, you know, like showing up outside and even in some cases inside courtrooms. And is ICE expanding as this is happening or is it just as Trump says sort of this unshackling? It's not that ICE is super expanded. There have been a lot more arrests,

especially of immigrants without criminal records outside of jails. In terms of ICE's activity in the community, it is absolutely more active than it was during the last years of Obama, but we're still at like 2011 levels. Then how does a progressive backlash to increased activity turn into what seems like a whole movement that's gaining actual political momentum? Abolishing a federal agency isn't something that Democrats call for terribly often. Kamala Harris back in February, I think, was asked by Chris Hayes about ICE abolition and her, you know, she said, should ICE exist? Well, certainly when we're talking about people who have committed serious and violent crimes, you know, I mean, Chris, you know, my background,

I'm a prosecutor. I believe that there needs to be serious, severe and swift consequence when people commit serious and violent crimes. And certainly if they are undocumented, they should be deported if they commit those serious and violent offenses. Harris has now made noises about, you know, we need to look and start over. Listen, I think there's no question that we've got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch. Kristen Gillibrand has said that the agency isn't fulfilling its function, you know, as the kind of young progressive side of the

Democratic Party has gained visibility and momentum, culminating in the election last week of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat Joe Crowley, who was the number four Democrat in the House in a primary, and who ran on a platform of, among other things, abolish ICE. We are committing human rights abuses on this border and separating children from their families. That, you know, is part of the structure of the agency. We can replace it. Mark Pocan came back from a, you know, trip down to Texas

to see some of the conditions in which people were being held in immigration detention, saying, all right, I'm going to introduce a resolution on the House floor to abolish ICE. Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan is not alone either. He co-chairs the House Progressive Caucus, and he joins us now to explain. Well, unfortunately, you know, the president's created this situation where ICE isn't doing what it was created to do. It's being used as his own personal police force. There is a lot more momentum to abolish ICE, to kind of hold protests in ICE field offices. A few ICE field

offices have been shut down as people have conducted sit-ins there. Nearly 600 people were arrested at a protest organized by Women's March in Washington, D.C. Demonstrators began marching outside of the Justice Department and a Senate building Thursday to oppose migrant family separations and U.S. immigration and customs enforcement. A lot of that is due to the perception that ICE is responsible for family separations. And that's only partially true. ICE is obviously involved in family separations. They're the ones who are responsible for detaining parents. And they're often the people who are making the decision to reunite families when parents accept an order of deportation and not before. in the U.S. getting split up by ICE, that the thing that's really caused the most sustained outrage is people getting split up upon entering the U.S., which means it's not ICE that's doing it.

Okay, ICE is involved in family separations, but it's not the one apprehending and separating families at the border, which makes it seem like a lot of Democrats speaking out and some of the protesters against ICE might be slightly misunderstanding what ICE does. I mean, is this reaction to ICE sort of confused or ill-founded sometimes? Yeah, but the ICE agents union endorsed Donald Trump and was extremely gung-ho about his immigration agenda, they very much encouraged the idea under Obama that any restriction on immigration enforcement was hurting their personal morale, that it was a problem for them as government employees, that they weren't being allowed to do their jobs, and that under Trump, all the opposite was true, and that

they were being allowed to do their jobs for the first time ever. I think it's also true that a lot of anger against ICE and the attitude that they were kind of, you know, Trump's brown shirts or whatever, was bubbling up occasionally over the first year of the Trump presidency when, you know, clips of particular raids or arrests would go viral. And so that's already been primed as the kind of front lines of the deportation regime. Were people protesting ICE under President Obama too? I mean, because he was deporting lots and lots of people.

Keep Families Together is a hashtag that existed way before the current family separation movement. There were people who were interrupting speeches by telling him to stop separating families. And most importantly, we will live up, most importantly, we will live up to our character as a nation. That's, that's, that's exactly why we're here. Stop deportation! Thank you. All right. Stop deportation! What I'd like to do... No, no, don't worry about it, guys. Stop deportation! Okay, let me finish.

It was mostly, though, within the immigrant rights movement. For us, this president has been the deporter-in-chief. And there was a certain tension among not just Democrats, but other progressives because there was a reluctance to criticize not just a Democratic president but a Democratic president who, in his rhetorical posture, seemed to make it very clear that he didn't want to be doing these things, that he really wanted to legalize immigrants.

But because Congress wouldn't do that, he simply didn't have a choice. So why is the protest, the Abolish ICE movement, really only catching on now? base doesn't see any reluctance whatsoever in actively pushing for, you know, the abolition of ICE or other things that in the past might have met with a certain amount of pushback from people who didn't want to call attention to the things that Obama was doing. Is abolishing ICE going to be a reality at any time soon? I think that this is going to be the kind of critical question of the next six months, because there hasn't even been a serious conversation about whether abolish ICE actually means get rid of the whole damn thing, or whether it just means, you know, legalize a bunch of people

so that people aren't getting deported as much. Like, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aside, even if Democrats somehow get control of Congress, they will not have veto-proof majorities for any kind of restriction on ICE. I think in politics, it's often expected that you kind of test how much enthusiasm there is for it before you figure out exactly what the parameters are. And I think that that's where the abolished ICE movement is right now. The question is, who's going to see whatever solution gets proposed as either overly radical

or, you know, selling out to the man? Darylind is one of the co-hosts of the Weeds podcast at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. We're not making a show tomorrow. We're taking the fourth off, but we'll be back with a banger on the fifth. Hi, my name is Sandra Castaneda. I live in California. You can go follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained. You know, we mentioned those refills in the middle of the show.

I wonder, do you still have refills coming for a toothbrush that you no longer own? Because they come like three weeks later. Yeah. Right? Yeah. In fact, there's a package at my house right now that I haven't opened. Just got back. From Quip?

Yeah. And I think they're the refills. And I don't know what to do with them that's so sad i know it's it's like it's like you have this these dreams of free refills and then it's almost like this just shows up just to taunt you and say look at your failure so that's a great place to leave it