U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came to the Island in May of last year, and they will return. Readers will recall that at the time ICE detained 20 Island residents. And then, this past May, ICE seized a father and son with Brazilian roots while they were fishing off Menemsha. As The Times reported, the Coast Guard stopped the father and son to examine their fishing licenses.
The guardsmen delivered them to ICE agents in Woods Hole after they looked at the father’s passport. Initially held in Burlington, the son was released, but the father is now back in Brazil. He was fortunate. ICE could have sent him to a detention center, where life is not only harrowing, but intolerable.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security oversees more than 200 detention centers in the country. Most are operated by private companies; only eight are run by the federal government. The conditions are dreadful, and they could be the future of the Island’s immigrant population.
National Public Radio reported that 57 people have died while held in ICE custody, 24 in this year alone. This does not count the horrid inhumane conditions in which they are forced to live, including a lack of medical care, punitive treatment, unhygienic conditions, spoiled food, physical abuse, dirty water, and exposure to extreme temperatures.
Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” the only state-run immigrant detention center in the country, closed in June after being open for over a year. The Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General concluded in a Sept. 11 report that detainees had often been held there in “small metal enclosures” measuring 18 square feet. Called “calming areas,” these cages held people anywhere from a few minutes to two hours. The report noted that “the use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment.”
In South Texas, conditions in the Dilley detention center are increasingly dreadful. In a Human Rights First report, life there is “unsafe and degrading, with inadequate access to food, water, personal hygiene, and basic care, particularly harming children.”
The report outlined these factors that detainees face: “Families are routinely threatened with or subjected to separation to coerce them into abandoning asylum claims. Detention regularly exceeds the 20-day legal limit, with many families held for months. Families face serious due-process violations, including limited access to legal counsel and information. Many are deported without a meaningful opportunity to seek protection, raising concerns under U.S. and international law. Detention worsens physical and mental health, interrupts medical treatment, and causes lasting trauma. Pregnant individuals face inadequate prenatal care and unsafe medical practices, putting them and their unborn babies at risk.”
To make matters worse, Homeland Security is reportedly spending $20 million to supply ICE agents with gloves that deliver painful electric shocks. An American Civil Liberties Union spokesperson noted that given the violent history of ICE agents, the gloves will never be used appropriately. ICE agents have shot at least 24 people since last year, including two U.S. citizens shot and killed by agents in Minneapolis in January of this year.
In July, agents killed a Mexican builder in Houston, and he wasn’t even the person they were looking for. He had been in the United States for over 30 years, building houses in the city. The same thing occurred in Biddeford, Maine, when an ICE agent killed a Columbian man who was not the person ICE sought. According to the Associated press, the agent “is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives said.”
On Sept. 20, ICE agents shot a Venezuelan immigrant in the back through the rear window of his car as he was delivering food for DoorDash. It is unclear whether the victim had an expired work permit or was even in the U.S. legally, and he may not have been the target of the agents’ surveillance.
Closer to home, in what a news report calls “a major operation,” ICE agents arrested eight people in New Bedford on Sept. 21. Thankfully, the agents did not shoot anyone. A local immigration attorney noted that the agents’ operation will not soon end: “I think it might carry on several days, so everyone is on high alert … We’re ready for it.”
These real-life scenarios may be the fate that awaits our own immigrant community, which is why the Brazilian father who returned to his home country was so lucky. There are indications that ICE agents may well target U.S. citizens. According to news reports, in Texas, “two U.S. citizen teenagers who were on their way to file enlistment papers to join the Marine Corps were violently attacked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.” They were detained for nearly eight hours before the agents released them. A video of the confrontation in Alamo shows “an agent repeatedly striking one teen, while the other says he was pepper-sprayed.”
If this can happen to two innocent teenagers, all Americans are at risk. The teens were fortunate — they were finally released — but they could have wound up in Dilley, Texas. And so could any of us.
Jack Fruchtman, who lives in Aquinnah, taught constitutional law and politics for over 40 years.
