ICE and other federal officers break a car window as they begin the process of removing a woman from her vehicle in Minneapolis on Jan. 13.OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/Getty Images
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
To say that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital, was killed by ICE agents this weekend feels like a deflection. It feels like an inadequate way to describe this latest instance of state violence, and why it was so utterly shocking, so horrific – so ominous.
It looked like a public execution. It feels like we have crossed the Rubicon.
The threshold of legitimate and illegitimate state violence has always been contested. Other armed agents of the state – the police and the military – are notoriously difficult to hold accountable for violating the constitutional rights of citizens and their own operational protocols. It should be the opposite; those tasked with protecting the citizenry and upholding the rule of law should be held to high standards precisely because they can legally exercise social control through coercion, containment, repression and violence.
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So it is with growing alarm that ICE seems to hurtle America into the unknown, marked by an exceedingly dangerous threshold of what can be considered acceptable state violence in a democratic society. Each time they push the envelope, Americans think surely, this tragedy – this terrorizing of ordinary people, this captured child in a blue bunny hat, this unprovoked killing of a citizen – will be the point of no return. Yet each new traumatic watershed arrives with its own horror, only to recede and leave behind a hollow echo of democratic principles and a deeper despair for what soon may follow.
ICE now operates in a space of exception, where the actions of its agents are untethered from the constitutional constraints, legal protections and basic human rights that are in place for everyone. The immediate abuses are horrific, but the larger danger is the disintegration of the limits on state violence, and with it, the rising certainty that Mr. Pretti will not be the last person to die just for bearing witness to this state-sanctioned enmity.
There are some clear signs that we have reached uncharted territory. The first is the unpredictability of ICE agents, who do not seem to act according to any established rules of engagement. The agency is employing white-nationalist messaging in its recruitment campaigns because it wants to attract men (and they do seem to be mostly men) who are as defiant, belligerent and reckless as the President who commands them. Scores of videos show agents misrepresenting their administrative warrants and demanding to be let into people’s homes.
Explainer: What to know about ICE, the U.S. federal immigration agency
An internal Department of Homeland Security memo now claims that agents can enter houses without a judicial warrant – a move that many legal advocates are calling blatantly unconstitutional. Agents are detaining children on their way home from school. In the case of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old detained by ICE last week, school officials on the scene claim he was used as bait to capture his father, an asylum-seeker from Ecuador who entered the U.S. legally. ICE has also “mistakenly” detained American citizens in its careless and immense dragnet.
A deeper issue is the utter lack of accountability, transparency and oversight in ICE operations. People are being disappeared. Car windows are being smashed and engines left running as ICE agents haul targets into unmarked cars and speed away. Families and lawyers often have no idea where detained individuals are taken and to which facilities in the vast country they have been transferred. Sometimes individuals are deported to countries to which they have no prior connection, without explanation or recourse.
Democratic accountability requires a paper trail. ICE agents won’t even show their faces, though they seem eager to draw their guns.
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The violence committed against protesters, citizens and observers suggests that ICE agents know that they can act with impunity. A federal judge in Chicago ruled that agents needed to stop using excessive force and riot control weapons, but ICE shows no signs of understanding the necessity of forbearance – the idea that authority must be exercised cautiously, proportionately and within established limits. Instead, its violence appears malicious and intentional, backed by state propaganda.
The Trump administration wants fear to replace the rule of law. But amid the uncertainty and intimidation, ordinary people continue to observe, record and dispel the denial. It is dangerous to do so: Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Mr. Pretti are testaments that no one is immune from the White House’s antagonizing wrath. But continue they must, because only the overwhelming evidence of witnesses can outmanoeuvre the lies of the administration.
As Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, recently said, the fundamental civic unit is the neighbour. We keep us safe – and in doing so, we keep democracy alive.