More than 55,000 armed law enforcement officers operate inside of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the foot soldiers of the mass deportation system. They work as you would expect any police force to operate but without even the semblance of oversight.
With an annual budget line item of $18bn solely for immigration enforcement the federal government spends more on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (BPE) than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Yet the systems to monitor the vast network of field directors, detention officers and arresting officers under its purview are either non-existent or wracked with the same corruption they’re intended to prevent.
When Terrence Kullom was killed at his doorstep in Detroit, it was an ICE agent serving a warrant that pulled the trigger. In immigration detention centers, over 150 people have died since 2003. A recent report highlighted not just a lack of transparency at the agency, but ICE’s outright refusal to cooperate or answer questions related to the deaths. CBS News reported that CBP agents allegedly sexually assaulted women or children immigrant detainees at least 35 times between 2012 and 2014, taking advantage of what an ousted CBP official characterized as a “culture of impunity”.
Each agent claims blanket authority to police, arrest, search, seize property, detain and yes, shoot to kill almost anyone, and they often act as judge and jury – with few limitations from immigration courts. DHS remains one of the nation’s largest jailers, holding up to 34,000 noncitizens on any given day in private and public detention centers.
Consistent with the experiences of communities facing police misconduct, credible reports are rarely investigated, and third-party investigations are nearly impossible to complete when DHS agents are involved in abuse, assault and deaths. Neither CBP nor ICE can or will police itself.
Only two offices carry responsibility for DHS monitoring and oversight in the sprawling agencies: the independently run Office of Inspector General and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Last year, in a withering exposé, the Washington Post revealed that the head of the inspector general’s office interfered with critical findings and altered official reports to Congress. Several months later, a special agent-in-charge was convicted of conspiring to falsify government documents to impede an internal inspection in Texas. To this day, the office has written a mere handful of reports investigating acts of violence or abuse by immigration agents.
At Border Patrol there are an estimated 218 internal affairs investigators for a workforce of nearly 60,000 employees, compared to the New York police department’s 550 internal affairs officers for its 34,500-person force.
Meanwhile, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the agency within DHS authorized to investigate civil rights violations, can only make internal recommendations, which are non-binding and routinely ignored.
In one very recent example, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reviewed internal emails between the head of that office and ICE Director Sarah Saldaña, where the former emphatically recommended the release of two Louisiana workers arrested by local police in a well-documented instance of ethnic profiling. Saldaña ignored the findings and deported one of the workers. When asked her rationale, she disregarded the head of the civil rights office and instead, in meetings with advocates, blamed the media for “getting the story wrong”.
This 20 November will mark one year since Barack Obama announced reforms to immigration policy that included partial relief from removal for some and retooled the mechanisms of enforcement for others. As the administration attempts to sell its enforcement as “smarter” and “more precise”, the argument relies on a check and balance system that simply does not exist at DHS. Post his executive action, local police and ICE agents are still working hand-in-hand in a system designed to incarcerate, criminalize and dispose of millions.
Whether it is policing the streets of our cities, maintaining its sprawling detention system or investigating itself, the largest law enforcement agency in the country is doing so without accountability and with a track record of dangerous violations. Dismantling abusive immigration enforcement and holding ICE and DHS accountable has yet to be – but must be – placed firmly on the national agenda.
