This week, the nonprofit news outlet The City published an analysis of federal court records from 430 ICE street arrests in the greater New York metro area concluding that more than 93% of them targeted Latinos. The investigation also found that many of the arrests were more indiscriminate than targeted, made as agents were either looking for someone else or just trolling for potential suspects.
The operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in New York have not been as intense and visible as they have in other cities and states. But the records, from habeas petitions filed by detainees seeking release, showed that ICE agents here have been more stealthily engaged in a ramp-up of detentions with little rhyme or reason beyond the demographic characteristics of their targeting.
Let me talk here a bit about something I’ve touched on many times before, which is that people like Stephen Miller, the senior White House aide and chief architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, correctly understand this to be in substantial part an optics battle. That is, it’s a struggle in which their objectives may be accomplished not just through direct enforcement but by creating a specter of indiscriminate punishment.
What I mean is that, even if we assume that the 430 street arrests identified by The City are a significant undercount — other data suggest it could be twice as high, or more – then we are still talking about a tiny percentage of the estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants in New York City, Long Island and northern New Jersey. If ICE arrests reached 2,000 street arrests, that would represent about 0.2% of the undocumented population.
I’m not trying to be dismissive of ICE’s impact. For each of these people, an arrest is a life-shattering circumstance, and we know from ICE’s own statistics that most of the people detained in Trump’s second term are longtime residents well integrated into their communities with no serious or violent convictions. Every one of these arrests has a ripple effect across communities well beyond the families of the detained, particularly given the sudden, indiscriminate and often violent nature of the arrests. What I’m conveying is that while any given person remains extraordinarily unlikely to be arrested on the street, many millions of people know that they or a family member could be. A measure of ICE’s success is how common it is for people to know someone who has been grabbed (or at least know someone who knows someone), and that prospect is terrifying.
So the revelations that agents are driving around the New York area and apparently grabbing people who look Latino, as they have wherever ICE has mounted large operations, are not just about racism or laziness or filling quotas, though they certainly are that, too. They reflect a policy engineered to create the perception that everyone is at some risk all the time, particularly those who don’t look or speak like the “ideal” American that people like Trump have in mind. That includes people with legal immigration status and even U.S. citizens who are of Latino or African or Asian descent. Creating fear is a tried-and-true strategy of the authoritarian. Some historians have argued that archival records show that the Stasi, the East German secret police, had up to one informant for every 6.5 citizens. This may be something of an exaggeration and the information they were gathering was in many cases complete garbage, but everyone felt like they were only a misstep away from some catastrophic consequence, even if for the vast majority of people the ax never dropped.
This is also what ICE’s attacks on protesters outside of the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark are about. That privately-operated detention facility reopened last year and has been dogged since by credible claims of mistreatment and deplorable conditions, ranging from lack of adequate food to overcrowding to poor medical care. ICE denies these claims, but they are very much in keeping with reports on ICE’s record as of late. The San Francisco Chronicle investigated the deaths of dozens of detainees over the course of Trump’s current term and found many linked to gross negligence and medical malpractice. Again, while these conditions are born out of greed, laziness and an indifference to the people affected, they also have a strategic objective. ICE has used these conditions to pressure people to accept deportation, even when they had solid potential grounds for claiming asylum or other relief.
This has prompted the detainees inside to embark on a hunger strike and drawn crowds of protesters to the site, including Gov. Mikie Sherrill, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and many other elected officials who have routinely been denied entry and often treated with contempt. On Monday, these included New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, who was hit when ICE agents deployed chemical munitions against the crowd. If there’s been another instance of federal law enforcement officials shooting a sitting senator with pepper spray, I can’t remember it. This all strikes me as public provocation. The administration is making a point of showing it can do whatever it wants: It can starve out detainees and mace senators and ignore court rulings. And if it can happen to Kim, why not you?
There’s been a similar undercurrent to much of what the administration has done on immigration, which I have long talked about as the tip of the spear for the wannabe authoritarian regime. It’s targeting a vulnerable population that the government can more easily get away with persecuting first, before moving its now battle-tested tactics on to the rest of the population. In its efforts to end birthright citizenship and now to limit who can receive green cards while residing here (see immigration lawyer Matt Cameron explain it a bit here), the idea is to not just change policy but to sow chaos and confusion and make people feel like they’re always looking over their shoulders, always waiting for a new shoe to drop.
The birthright citizenship order seems headed to a decisive defeat at the Supreme Court (which, despite its stunning deference to the Trump administration, may consider an open violation of a constitutional question settled more than a century ago to be a bridge too far) but that doesn’t mean there won’t be repercussions. A lot of U.S.-born people and their parents are now terrified that this most solid guarantee of safety from deportation might disappear, a prospect that will shift their behaviors even if it never comes to pass.
Even if Trump is currently blocked from enacting such changes, now that they’ve been put forward, they become possible tools that any president can use to try again. As we inch toward the midterms and whatever’s next, the conversation that should at least exist parallel to specific oversight and accountability for federal excess should be how to break these tools — perhaps dissolve Homeland Security, a department that sprang from post-9/11 paranoia. Perhaps provide real paths to legal status so that immigrants and their families are not subject to this kind of enforcement in the first place. Only that can engineer real safety.
