Opinion | Is This Who Trump Meant by the ‘Worst of the Worst’?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is clearly and technically an immigration enforcement agency. But when you look at what’s happening in Minnesota and across the country, it’s not like immigration enforcement. “Can I check your pulse?” “This is a school.” Immigration enforcement is largely an administrative matter. So why are these paramilitaries picking up children on the streets and using them as bait to capture their parents? That’s essentially what happened in Columbia Heights, Minn.; where 5-year-old pre-kindergarten student Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were taken and sent to a detention facility in Texas. They are legal immigrants. They have a valid asylum claim, but that doesn’t matter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Why, in fact, is the status of the individuals in question irrelevant to ICE agents, and why is the architect of these policies, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, so obsessed with the number of removals? “At least 3,000 arrests every day for ICE.” If you think, as many Americans do when they vote for Trump in 2024, that immigration enforcement is primarily meant to remove people who have committed some kind of crime, then you will never get to 3,000 people a day. “I am a US citizen.” “I was born and raised here.” The only way to get to 3,000 people a day is to pull people out of their communities. “We will be back for your entire family.” “These are children. What’s wrong with you?” “Where is your command?” You are recruiting individuals who are lawfully present or have valid requests to be here. If you are destroying communities, if you are trying to eradicate everyone who looks at you wrong. “Were you born here?” We know that ICE uses people’s race, ethnicity, and language to determine whether they will be detained. This is thanks in part to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion allowing such behavior. “The reason I was attacked that day was because of the color of my skin.” “CBP officers yelled at me: Get him. He’s Mexican.” Essentially, we define this as an acceptable cost of immigration enforcement. Thank you, Judge Kavanaugh. In any case, this obsession with numbers and arresting as many people as possible literally makes communities less safe. You don’t feel safe as armed, masked men wander the streets looking for people to detain. And the focus is on potential criminals who may need to be removed from the country. The answer to all of this is that what ICE is doing, what the administration is pushing, is not immigration enforcement. It has much more in common with ethnic cleansing than trying to change the overall ethnic and racial mix of the country. There are indiscriminate mass deportation campaigns that target anyone who authorities believe does not belong, and their belief that they do not belong is based on a racist idea of ​​what an American is. “We just take people [EXPLETIVE] countries.” “We are under occupation from within” “So we are taking people from Somalia. Why can’t we get some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few.” And if that doesn’t convince you of what’s really happening here, imagine it’s happening in another country and somewhere else other than the United States. Imagine seeing political leaders in another country talking like our president, talking like Stephen Miller, sending masked armed paramilitaries into the streets and going door to door looking for various ethnic and racial minorities. So you call this ethnic cleansing? I think you can. We need to defend this culture and rediscover the spirit that brought the West out of the depths of the Dark Ages. Why do they take people with legal status? Naturalized citizens, people who are citizens by birth, and they are being treated as if they could potentially be deported to where? I don’t know because these are, again, citizens and legal residents. And you don’t have to take my word for it here. Listen to the president of the United States saying that many different groups of immigrants cannot actually be Americans, Dirty, dirty. It’s disgusting. It’s full of crime. Is there anyone among us from Somalia? Integral. Please raise your hand. These are people with low IQ. How do they get into Minnesota and steal this much money? So in Somalia, Somalis, you know what they’re good at, the only thing they’re good at is they’re good at pirating I Fox ships. I don’t know. it. Yes! Oh, you’re hurting your community. You are an orphan. get