I was at a migrant defense demonstration Thursday evening in Elizabeth, a small city in northern New Jersey. The man pictured below spoke to the crowd; unfortunately I didn’t catch his name.* He told the story of how he was detained by ICE for four years, shuttled around detention facilities and jails in Essex and Bergen Counties. His “crime”? Being undocumented. No country recognizes his existence or identity, and none will take him in.

For this offense, ICE regarded itself as empowered to hold him indefinitely, shuttling him for years from one prison to the next. When he protested his detention, he was beaten and put into solitary confinement. Eventually, a migrant defense group stepped in, provided him with legal representation, and got him out. He was adamant that he wasn’t the only one in those prisons being treated this way. Others, too, were being held for years under much the same conditions, just a stone’s throw from sleepy, treesy, affluent suburbs where nothing much is thought to happen, and for the most part, nothing does. 

The essential feature of this story is not that one man was detained for years, or beaten, or put into solitary confinement. It’s that all this has been happening to countless people for years, and that the only thing standing between these forgotten, reviled detainees and an anonymous death in prison is the zeal and work of the mostly unsung activist community dedicated to righting the wrongs involved. No one can pretend that the recent rash of deportations began with Trump, or would end if only the noble Democrats were back in charge. A recent detention four years long mostly likely cut across both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

In any case, the people who beat this man and put him in solitary weren’t hired yesterday by Donald Trump. I invited a bunch of them–a bunch of ICE agents, that is–to speak to my criminal law students at Felician University way back in 2018. I wanted my students to hear the case for “removal” directly from the people doing the removing. And they did. The agents did their best to sugarcoat the work they did, but even sugarcoating was candor enough to figure out what they were up to. Murky rules, overwhelming force, a minimum of scruples, and the total absence of empathy: as a detergent removes stains from clothing, so ICE removes people from the land. 

Those very agents had been doing “removal” work for years before I’d invited them to speak, and have doggedly been doing it since then. So I’m not talking about newbies or greenhorns in this line of work. I’m talking about career-long veterans. But career-long veterans aren’t created in a few weeks, or even a few years. You need decades of experience to become one–which is to say, decades of detentions, decades of beatings, decades of solitary confinements, and decades of deportations. Practice makes perfect.

Forget mere classroom discussions: ICE felt free to recruit on my campus back in the day, with the eager acquiescence of the university administration, and the eager enthusiasm of many job-seeking students. This was at a “Hispanic Serving Institution,” where many students and their families were undocumented. Hispanic-serving or not, undocumented or not, the university had no problem with ICE’s being a knock and a friendly chat away from access to the offices of the registrar, the bursar, and the controller. A knock and a chat is all it would have taken to gain access, and for all I know, all it ever did take. 

A friend of mine whose spouse works for the Graduate School of a major university tells me that ICE makes requests, even demands, for personal information from the Graduate School’s admnistrative offices every other day. And they’ve been doing this for years. But how hard do they have to work, ultimately? Suppose they run into some truculent university bureaucrat somewhere who refuses to cooperate. Well, more than a year ago, the Change Health hack put 190 million persons’ personal data into the Cloud–names, addresses, phone numbers, personal health information, financial information, insurance information, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, places of birth…It’s all there for the searching, which is to say, for the taking. 

In truth, the whole infrastructure of detention and “removal” has been in place since the nineteenth century, when it was used to expel the Native Americans, the First Undocumenteds, from their homes: the same policies, the same rationale, even the same word. Detention, incarceration, expropriation, expulsion, deportation: none of this is new. It’s what the United States was literally built on. Subtract it from our history, and there is no history, just a fairy-tale masquerading as one. 

We’re rightly horrified (at least those of who are) by the treatment of Khalil Mahmoud, Badar Khan Suri, Mapheze Saleh, Ranjani Srinivasan, Momodou Taal, Rasha Alawieh, Helyeh Doutagi, and Rumesa Ozturk. But they’re only the tip of a long-submerged iceberg. It’s just that–as the captain of the Titanic so memorably put it–the tip of an iceberg makes for a “most disagreeable sight.” You have to crash into it to realize how big it is. 

It would violate 18 US Code 373 for me to describe what I regard as the optimal solution to this problem, so I won’t. Suffice it to say that no problem of this nature has ever worked itself out in the peaceful, “civil” way familiar to us from civics textbooks or Sunday School homilies. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, then, to devise an optimal solution to the immigration problem that avoids a collision with the law as currently written, and satisfies the strictures of textbook “civility.” I’m a little skeptical. Best of luck.    

*I’ve since come to learn that his name is Ernest Francois, and that he has a rather complicated backstory, which I’ll comment on in a future post. Thanks to Ulla Berg for the information.