CBS News interviewed three recently fired immigration judges. All were dismissed in three-sentence emails that did not state a reason, but all three claim they were told, while sitting at the federal bench, to dismiss cases involving documented immigrants. This, they explain, was designed to facilitate arrest, detention, and deportation of non-citizen residents. In other words: “Cut short the legal due process and let’s get these people out of the United States.”
All over the country, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are seizing perfectly decent, hard-working, and law-abiding residents, pushing them into prolonged detention, denying them any further due process, and transporting them out of the country.
Welcome to the New ICE Age!
His name is Ayman Soliman. Until recently, he was the chaplain at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital. He came to the United States as a refugee and obtained work permits and other appropriate documents. But the Trump administration tagged him as an “Egyptian national flagged on the FBI terror watchlist.” In fact, he was a journalist writing during the Arab Spring, and this incurred the wrath of the Egyptian authorities. Now, he has run afoul of the American authorities. His offense? A speeding ticket in 2019! He is set for deportation.
When two other chaplains spoke publicly in support of Soliman, they were fired. Thus, yet another institution capitulates to the Trump Regime, joining DC law firms, NYC universities, and CBS News (among others).
Welcome to the New ICE Age!
All over the country, men and women dressed in black with their faces covered to hide their identity and bullet proof vests weighed down with weapons are converging on unsuspecting people (including women and children) and, without saying a word or showing either personal identity or proper warrants, are “detaining” legal and law-abiding people and whisking them away to crowded and dangerous detention centers.
Not since the Jim Crow Era in the American South have Americans witnessed such blatant disregard for law and justice in favor of that illusive ideal of White Christian America.
Welcome to the New Ice Age!
Just weeks ago, the Republican-controlled Congress, with their little Baptist boy from Louisiana quoting scripture to celebrate, passed the Big Beautiful Bill to cut services to people in need in order to build prisons for people on the deportation list. Billions of new dollars are now flowing into recruitment and training of ICE agents. Squads of these wicked lackies are coming to a corner near you, perhaps to the home of your friends or the office of your colleagues.
Detained people are being pushed into overcrowded facilities, some like the infamous Allegator Alcatraz in southern Florida, and kept in conditions that we would normally describe as “cruel and unusual punishment” (per the eighth amendment to the U. S. Constitution).
Welcome to the New Ice Age!
As yet, most Americans are not personally impacted by this reign of terror. But with each passing week, the detentions and deportations edge closer to home, closer to the building where you work and the street where you live.
Already, millions are living in fear of an ICE attack. And this: how can we measure, now or later, the emotional trauma coursing through the soul of thousands of these ICE agents as they conduct these surprise attacks on women and children, professionals and parents, neighbors and colleagues, and thousands of others who secured entry into the United States to escape poverty, danger, and death.
What goes through the mind of an ICE agent listening to the moans of a mother begging to see her small child one last time before being shipped to some cold, cold bunk on her way to who-knows-where?
In every detail, this new ICE Age is a contradiction of both American and Christian values. Yes, we know it is done in pursuit of that pernicious goal of White Christian America. Yes, we know it is justified by appeal to the “mandate” of the voters to remove the criminals that have wormed their way into our great country. Both of these are lies in the deepest and most desperate sense of every word.
Welcome to the New ICE Age. It cometh, and it will be a long, dark winter.
CBS News interviewed three recently fired immigration judges. All were dismissed in three-sentence emails that did not state a reason, but all three claim they were told, while sitting at the federal bench, to dismiss cases involving documented immigrants. This, they explain, was designed to facilitate arrest, detention, and deportation of non-citizen residents. In other words: “Cut short the legal due process and let’s get these people out of the United States.”
All over the country, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are seizing perfectly decent, hard-working, and law-abiding residents, pushing them into prolonged detention, denying them any further due process, and transporting them out of the country.
Welcome to the New ICE Age!
His name is Ayman Soliman. Until recently, he was the chaplain at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital. He came to the United States as a refugee and obtained work permits and other appropriate documents. But the Trump administration tagged him as an “Egyptian national flagged on the FBI terror watchlist.” In fact, he was a journalist writing during the Arab Spring, and this incurred the wrath of the Egyptian authorities. Now, he has run afoul of the American authorities. His offense? A speeding ticket in 2019! He is set for deportation.
When two other chaplains spoke publicly in support of Soliman, they were fired. Thus, yet another institution capitulates to the Trump Regime, joining DC law firms, NYC universities, and CBS News (among others).
Welcome to the New ICE Age!
All over the country, men and women dressed in black with their faces covered to hide their identity and bullet proof vests weighed down with weapons are converging on unsuspecting people (including women and children) and, without saying a word or showing either personal identity or proper warrants, are “detaining” legal and law-abiding people and whisking them away to crowded and dangerous detention centers.
Not since the Jim Crow Era in the American South have Americans witnessed such blatant disregard for law and justice in favor of that illusive ideal of White Christian America.
Welcome to the New Ice Age!
Just weeks ago, the Republican-controlled Congress, with their little Baptist boy from Louisiana quoting scripture to celebrate, passed the Big Beautiful Bill to cut services to people in need in order to build prisons for people on the deportation list. Billions of new dollars are now flowing into recruitment and training of ICE agents. Squads of these wicked lackies are coming to a corner near you, perhaps to the home of your friends or the office of your colleagues.
Detained people are being pushed into overcrowded facilities, some like the infamous Allegator Alcatraz in southern Florida, and kept in conditions that we would normally describe as “cruel and unusual punishment” (per the eighth amendment to the U. S. Constitution).
Welcome to the New Ice Age!
As yet, most Americans are not personally impacted by this reign of terror. But with each passing week, the detentions and deportations edge closer to home, closer to the building where you work and the street where you live.
Already, millions are living in fear of an ICE attack. And this: how can we measure, now or later, the emotional trauma coursing through the soul of thousands of these ICE agents as they conduct these surprise attacks on women and children, professionals and parents, neighbors and colleagues, and thousands of others who secured entry into the United States to escape poverty, danger, and death.
What goes through the mind of an ICE agent listening to the moans of a mother begging to see her small child one last time before being shipped to some cold, cold bunk on her way to who-knows-where?
In every detail, this new ICE Age is a contradiction of both American and Christian values. Yes, we know it is done in pursuit of that pernicious goal of White Christian America. Yes, we know it is justified by appeal to the “mandate” of the voters to remove the criminals that have wormed their way into our great country. Both of these are lies in the deepest and most desperate sense of every word.
Welcome to the New ICE Age. It cometh, and it will be a long, dark winter.
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