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Amid heavy scrutiny and calls for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, and its zero-tolerance policy which has led to the separation of young migrant children from their parents at the border, U.S. President Donald Trump, addressing a rally in Montana, proclaimed: "We protect ICE ... They protect us and we protect them," referring to the law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
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On Friday, the U.S. Vice President also stressed "We are with you 100%, under President Trump, we will never abolish ICE."
Critics believe that with the upcoming mid-term elections in November, Trump's anti-immigration stance will play in perfectly with his voter base. "I think that Republicans are talking about Democrats abolishing ICE a lot more than Democrats are talking about abolishing ICE," said David Fitzgerald, co-director at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, according to the Guardian.
ICE's origins are rooted in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when structural changes to the Department of Homeland Security were initiated. ICE was initially charged with the interior enforcement, while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection was tasked with law enforcement along the U.S. borders.
ICE has strengthened and flourished under previous administrations, but Trump administration, by far, has taken it to a whole new level.
Under the Trump administration, the focal point for a majority of the arrests has been undocumented immigrants regardless of whether or not they had committed a serious crime.
ICE-led arrests surged by nearly 42 percent during the first nine months of Trump’s tenure, compared with the same period in 2016. The overall arrests in 2017, also, Trump’s first year in office, were 30 percent higher than the previous year.
Horrific accounts and revelations about the Trump immigration policy have been pouring in in news reports and media outlets.
According to a recent investigation led by Reveal News of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a major U.S. defense contractor quietly detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with dark windows, with no basic amenities such as a kitchen and only a few toilets for at least three weeks of the Trump administration’s family separation effort, as part of the "zero tolerance" policy.
The news surfaced when a neighbor, Lianna Dunlap, caught the workers on video pulling up in white vans and leading dazed children into the building. When she asked questions, she said the workers responded with silence or terse answers.
"There’s been times where I drive by and I just start crying because, you know, it’s right behind my house," said Dunlap, her voice wavering. "I don’t know and I think that’s the worst part – not knowing what’s actually going on in there and just hoping that they’re OK."
The building was leased in March by MVM, a Virginia-based defense contractor that has received contracts worth up to US$248 million to transport immigrant children since 2014, records reveal.
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The company, which once provided guards for CIA facilities in Iraq, was founded by three former Secret Service agents. One of its vice presidents is a former CIA special agent and former acting director of the U.S. Marshals Service, the Reveal News reported.
Also, on Thursday immigration advocates slammed Trump administration's plan to conduct genetic testing on nearly 3,000 detained migrant children and parents separated as a result of its "zero tolerance" policy, pointing out that the invasive move violates human rights and the government's use of the biological data.
The move to collect DNA samples raises serious concerns about consent of the children involved, Jennifer Falcon, communications director for the immigrants' rights group RAICES, told the NBC News.
"They’re essentially solving one civil rights issue with another — it’s a gross violation of human rights," she said. "These are minors with no legal guardian to be able to advise on their legal right, not to mention they’re so young how can they consent to their personal information being used in this way?"
In the past, DNA tests have been used to help determine biological relationships when identifying documents are not available, but following the practice at a mass level is not common, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an associate professor at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law who writes about criminal and immigration law, told the NBC News.
"They themselves have said they know where all the parents and children are so I think that’s bogus," Falcon pointed out. "When people are detained they are fingerprinted already so why do they need DNA swabs if these people went through the proper intake process when they were detained?"
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