ICE

An executive order was signed today stopping the official policy of stealing the children of asylum seekers at the border. Make no mistake, this is a victory but we should not think that this means our president has a soul or that he doesn't actively want all that and more to happen to the non-white people in this country.

Think of the recent policy (enacted in May, no matter what the right-wing news suggests about it being an Obama era policy) as a testbed of sorts. There was, I imagine, very little expectation that it would be accepted without reservation by the American public, but this was a relatively low-cost experiment to see just how mad it would make people, and see what they can officially get away with.

Personally I don't think we came out of this looking as good as we should have, obviously our political masters showed themselves to be unwaveringly corrupt, but the public outcry was not as large as it should have been given that it was in response to literal concentration camps full of the children of people who had not committed a crime, and make no mistake, presenting yourself at the border and asking for asylum is not a crime., I am not speaking figuratively of morally here, I mean quite literally under US law it is not a crime. Even if it was what happened would still be unconscionable, but it wasn't.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a couple uses of the word "official" in the preceding paragraphs. This was intentional and one of the reasons we should not be relaxing. Anyone who thinks that this stuff and more isn't going on "off the books" is deluding themselves, as a recent discovery of a mass gravesite in Texas suggests. I imagine a real investigation into that, which will likely not happen anytime soon, will lead to government, probably ICE, officials and a whole lot of local rednecks, as well as many more bodies.

As a quick sidenote, where are all the assholes who jerk off to the second amendment and need a stockpile of firearms to fight the government in case it became a tyrannical regime? Because people, it fucking happened, we put kids in concentration camps as a deliberate ploy to scare people. If you ever needed more evidence that these people are deluded and morally bankrupt here we are. The truth is they wanted their guns so they can do exactly what the government is doing now, and couldn't be happier.

So anyway, ICE is quickly becoming a bogeyman the likes of which America has rarely created for itself. An enormous body with little true oversight and a ...flexible mandate, whose recruiting policies have been carefully targeted to pick up the most racist power hungry fascists that can be found among the veteran and law enforcement community. Currently they have limited powers outside of the border zones of the country, but they try not to let that stop them. They are, almost to a man, brownshirts and collaborators. Even more so than normal law enforcement, the fact that there is an arm of the government that literally has the mandate of choosing who gets to come in to the country, and who gets to stay, should be chilling to anyway. Remember it's Immigration and CUSTOMS Enforcement, and Customs has more than one definition. How long before they start using that?

This isn't being alarmist, this isn't coming out of left-field, this was warned of back in 2016 during the election and probably earlier, back when ICE was first formed in the second Bush administration. There are those who saw this coming, the rise in officially tolerated fascism, and they were silenced, called out for being too combative, "Not everyone you disagree with is a Nazi" well, we created a government agency that specifically targets people for being different, and now that very same agency is taking children from their parents and putting them in camps, and they aren't documenting where those parents are, they have no plans for how to reunite them, or for finding those kids homes now that they officially can't do that anymore. People, real people, families, are separated and disappeared without any due process, documentation, or explanation.

You know the saying "First they came for the___, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't___"? We are there now, this is America. We have to speak up more, we have to care about people, even if they aren't "Americans" because this is how it starts.

But I don't know how to convince you that you should care for other people. I don't even know why I should have to convince you.