People thrown in the back of vans by men with masks and guns, people herded like swine onto planes sending them to who knows where, Innocent men and women thrown into makeshift detention centers by people who don’t even identify themselves.That sounds like a dystopian future, right. Nope, that’s all brought to you courtesy of the president’s new favorite private army, also known as Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE). God, even the name screams of atrocities in the night and sends a chill down your spine.
Recently a new spending bill made ICE one of the most funded federal agencies in the country. Let that sink in, ICE’s new budget at 28 Billion dollars, is nearly twice the budget of the FBI and fourteen times more than the entire LAPD.
Many wonder, what do they spend that exorbitant amount of money on. They spend it on deporting a poor working class father of three shopping at a Home Depot. All in the name of public safety but what is that safety really. Immigrants aren’t hurting anyone no matter what the president says. They’re human, they’re someone’s father, mother, son, or daughter. All too many people forget that. It’s not immigrants that are a danger to public safety, it’s ICE. Breading fear and terror.
In the streets of Los Angeles, they’re conducting military style raids, with agents in body armor and unmarked vehicles. They deployed military style tactics on immigrants who’ve done nothing more than believe in the American Dream. They wear no badges, carry machine guns, break down doors and round up anyone who looks even close to an immigrant.
The people ICE keep rounding up have done nothing but illegally immigrate instead of spending the little money they had just to wait years for a chance to maybe get a hearing to enter a country that would probably send them away again. To those who say it’s still breaking the law, I ask if you’ve ever gotten a speeding ticket. Because a speeding ticket is a civil offense just like illegally immigrating and I would hate to see the day where a speeding ticket got me arrested and thrown in a detention facility by men with guns who didn’t identify themselves.
Consistently ICE has violated the rights of all people living in America. By detaining and deporting people with no probable cause or even a trial, they violate the constitutional rights of immigrants. All this is under order of the president of the United States.
The fear of ICE and their reign of terror has even spread to students at our school.
“ICE is bad, they don’t do background checks, they always deport Mexicans whether they’re legal or not,” freshman Alberto Zarate says, a Mexican American student.
The fact that high school students know and care about what ICE does speaks volumes about what they’ve been doing.
Time and time again history has taught us that when we ignore people who violate the constitution and ignore the rule of law while in power, it’s always a recipe for disaster. It’s our job as Americans to keep our government in check before we can’t anymore.
