Keeping the Public Eye on ICE

Voices from the grassroots show resolute commitment for radical change.

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A broad coalition of immigrant rights groups is putting a spotlight on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—the rogue federal agency that has wreaked havoc in immigrant communities.

Over the past two months, thirty Eyes on ICE: Truth and Accountability Forums were held across the United States and in Mexico. They featured 150 immigrants and activists describing how ICE agents have instilled fear as they separated families in order to feed the deportation machine.

Under Biden, deportations have continued, despite his call for a 100-day moratorium. And ICE’s detention population edged upward to 16,721 in early May.

“We will continue with the struggle for what we are asking for and have a right to,” said Ayde, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, at the April 23 forum. “We deserve to live with dignity.”

Ayde described how her partner, Juan, was detained by ICE for fourteen months, her oldest son was deported, and her youngest son was traumatized by Juan’s absence. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area, Ayde spoke with a bold determination typical of many of the witnesses testifying at the forums. 

Almost all of these events were virtual and featured immigrants helped by local host organizations. In Ayde’s case, it was the Sacred Heart Community Service in San Jose, California.

Mijente, a Latinx rights group, is spearheading the Eyes on ICE forums, which are part of the We Are Home Campaign. No one doubted that taking on ICE—a bloated bureaucracy with an $8 billion annual budget and more than 20,000 employees—would be a formidable but necessary task.

“What we are dealing with is a kind of octopus monster,” says Jacinta González, senior campaign organizer for Mijente. “Cutting off one arm doesn’t mean the octopus doesn’t exist. But we know this limits the amount of contact and control that they can have over our communities.”

Eyes on ICE has six demands, including an end to immigration detention and deportation, with an overall goal of citizenship for the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. 

Addressing the April 3 forum hosted by the Adelante Alabama Worker Center, Iris, who is from Honduras, told how in 2019 her son, Jorge, was arrested for speeding. She went to the county jail in Birmingham to pick him up but was told to come back the next day, which she did.

“To my surprise, he wasn’t there anymore,” said Iris. “ICE had stopped by and taken him.”

Undocumented, Jorge spent about seven months at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, before his release for a future immigration court hearing.

Stopping collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement is not only an Eyes on ICE goal but also an objective of the New Way Forward Act that Congressional Democrats introduced in January, with thirty-nine co-sponsors.

“It is time that we disentangle local law enforcement from federal law enforcement,” said Representative Jesús “Chuy” García, Democrat of Illinois, at the March 30 forum. 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has yet to spell out how ICE will connect with local law enforcement in the future. But at a recent UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy conference, Mayorkas defended the state criminal justice system’s handing over an immigrant who had served time for a felony offense to ICE for deportation. 

Under Biden, deportations have continued, despite his call for a 100-day moratorium. And ICE’s detention population edged upward to 16,721 in early May.

Not even Ana’s impassioned plea at the early April Alabama forum stopped her partner, Isrrael, from being put on a plane later that month to Mexico. “I am really asking from the bottom of my heart to be able to get him out,” says Ana, who is suffering from cancer.

Isrrael, who was undocumented, faced deportation following a driving under the influence arrest. Ana tells The Progressive that Isrrael unknowingly signed papers authorizing his “voluntary departure.”

These forums, involving seventy-eight organizations, came as Mayorkas is finalizing new ICE guidelines, expected to be completed later in May. Interim guidelines were issued February 18 and have been criticized at forums for being too open-ended, though ICE arrests have dropped.

Eyes on ICE organizers unsuccessfully tried to get Mayorkas to appear at a forum but, according to Mijente, he recently committed to attending a public meeting with community members directly impacted by immigration enforcement in the near future. And there’s good reason to question how ICE agents will follow any guidance.

Binsar Siahaan, an Indonesian seeking asylum, told a mid-March forum in Washington, D.C. how he feared ICE detention of him would “happen again.” 

Last September, ICE agents showed up on the grounds of the Glenmont United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, where Siahaan and his family live and work as caretakers. Such enforcement on church grounds is considered off-limits by ICE’s own guidelines.

Siahaan tells The Progressive that one of the four agents who appeared at his home at seven in the morning said: “I have to check your ankle monitor, there is something wrong with it.” But that was just a pretext to enter his house and detain Siahaan.

ICE’s handling of this case drew sharp criticism from a federal judge, who held that Siahaan has a right to be in the United States so long as he has an appeal pending.

Mistreatment in ICE detention was a recurring theme at the forums.

“They were comparing us to cockroaches,” said Andrea Manrique at the April 28 South Speaks Up! forum. She spoke about how ICE agents mistreated her and other detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia.

Manrique, who is from Colombia, had teamed up with other women in detention there to make a video a year ago that publicized the abuses of women and dangerous conditions at the facility.

In December, a federal lawsuit was filed alleging mistreatment of women by a doctor working at the Irwin center. ICE, according to Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South, has now stopped using Irwin for holding undocumented women. But she said women detainees are now being sent to the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia—the site of eight deaths since May 2017.

At the first forum, in Atlanta on March 1, Irvin Pineda, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, described how his trouble with ICE dates back to 2012, when a sheriff’s deputy, in a patrol car in Hall County, Georgia, made eye contact with Pineda as he drove by.

“I told my wife, ‘He’s going to stop me,’” recalled Pineda. “About one second later, he put his lights on. And from there, everything began.” The forum was hosted by the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights.

HalI County was one of 141 localities that, as of last June, had agreements—known as 287(g)—permitting their officers to perform immigration enforcement duties.

But two newly elected Georgia sheriffs in Cobb and Gwinnett counties recently terminated such agreements.

Biden’s choice to head ICE, Harris County (Texas) Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, who has been a critic of ICE, also withdrew from these agreements to let cops perform immigration roles. Gonzalez, who is based in Houston, has allowed undocumented immigrants in his jail to be detained beyond their release dates so that ICE agents could take them. 

Tamillia Valenzuela, a community organizer with Living United for Change in Arizona, expressed the determination shared by many activists not to let the new guidelines be the final word about how the nation treats immigrants.

“We deny them a life that every human deserves,” she said at a mid-April forum. “How dare you not listen to the cries of our community.”