Today, I held a demonstration of one.
I’ve been telling my friends lately that I feel bad for ICE agents. They’ve got some difficult bosses. They’re expected to meet arbitrary quotas. Strangers look at them suspiciously when they walk down the street and tell them they’re ruining the country.
I can actually kind of relate to that last one. It’s how I felt after 9/11.
The country is definitely divided now, but I’m not sure it’s really over immigration. My sense is that we have our first social-media era Influencer President and that immigration makes convenient enforcement theater. It’s one of many ways the current administration is trying to flex and show off how tough we are.
But it’s tough to watch those efforts hit basically random people. Immigration officials are arresting people who go in to work on their required paperwork. They’re getting grandmas who raised their kids here. They’re getting kids whose parents are here legally and just haven’t worked through the process for the kids yet.
I was telling my sister I wish that I could just sign up to get arrested by ICE once a month so that they could get some numbers to report in to their superiors. I wish they could stick my picture on some report, so they could look busy without needing to pick up people who are going about their lives, taking care of their families, and often doing hard jobs that keep this country going.
I don’t think they’re taking volunteers. But my sister went with me to the proposed new ICE facility in Salt Lake City to make a short video explaining my point of view. We took some footage I'll post in a little while.
I thought this was going to be a moment for me to make something I could share. Just a little reminder for the people I know that we as a community could dream bigger and do better.
I had not expected the experience to impact me. But actually being at the place where our government is planning to keep people hit me pretty hard. It’s a big shipping facility. Right now, there are all these doors designed for semi trucks. There are black vans in the parking lot already, guarding the place. We talked to the guy in one of them. He seemed nice. He’s just a guy doing his job.
I wish he had a better job, though. There are some many good things we could have a guy do. I worry that if we as a state go through with this plan, people in power are going to feel like they have to prove that big facility is worth having. There’s going to be pressure to fill it. And there aren’t enough dangerous deportable people for that. ICE employees are going to end up arresting ordinary people, even people who are working through the immigration process. A building—a big stage—is going to make the cycle of enforcement theater worse.
That's not what I want for anybody. Not for my brothers and sisters who happen to have been born somewhere else. And not for my brothers and sisters who needed a job and found one with ICE.