Confronting Immigration Enforcement under Trump: A Reign of Terror for Immigrant Communities.

AuthorGreene, Judith
PositionReport

When Donald J. Trump first announced his candidacy for the presidency, he instigated a national moral panic by broadly denouncing US immigration policy with rhetoric designed to criminalize all immigrants--be they naturalized, documented, or undocumented. His public pronouncements on this topic throughout his campaign set a firestorm of public fear and resentment ablaze, greatly aiding his effort to amass enough votes to win victory in the electoral college. One of his first acts as president was to issue executive orders designed to broaden and strengthen the immigration enforcement dragnet across the nation.

This article examines the recent surge of anti-immigrant fervor in the United States and argues that immigrants and their allies struggling to survive the federal zero tolerance campaign need all the protection and support our citizenry can muster.

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THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE MARCHED FROM THE SOUTH SIDE OF Milwaukee to the county courthouse on May 1, 2017, to protest Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. and President Donald J. Trump's plans for a massive crackdown on immigrants. Marchers organized by Voces de la Frontera, a grassroots organization that advocates for racial, civil, and workers' rights, were joined by teachers, students, and residents from more than 11 cities across the state of Wisconsin.

Clarke had applied to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to become the first sheriff in his state to be granted 287(g) powers, which would allow his deputies to enforce the nation's tough immigration laws. He asked DHS to train county jail personnel to identify and detain people suspected to be deportable by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He also wanted ICE to empower his detectives to arrest such people on the streets as part of their regular duties (Bice 2017).

Sheriff Clarke boasted that he favored criminal prosecution for the mayors of so-called sanctuary cities. He had boosted his national profile as a conservative hard-liner in 2016 by campaigning for candidate Trump at rallies across the country. Back in Milwaukee, he was also known for the cruel treatment of people housed in his jail. In April 2016, Terrill Thomas, a man with mental health problems, had been placed in solitary confinement for punishment in the Milwaukee County Jail. Jail deputies turned the water off in his cell for a week and the man died of dehydration (Ford 2017).

Clarke had been a featured speaker at the 2016 Republican Convention. After Trump's election, there were rumors (perhaps spread by Clarke himself) that he would be appointed secretary of homeland security. But in May 2017, a grand jury called for indictment of two jail supervisors and five deputies in connection with Thomas's death (Associated Press 2017). By August, Clarke had not landed any position in the new administration, and he resigned his job as Milwaukee County sheriff.

Perhaps Clarke had been trying to emulate Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona. Arpaio had won fame a decade ago for being "America's toughest sheriff," but Arpaio's ultimate disgrace should have served as a warning to Clarke that he was no role model.

Arpaio's international profile as a tough lawman had begun to rise after he signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE. Sheriff Joe, as he was known, flamboyantly deployed his new powers to conduct random street raids across Maricopa County, locking up arrestees without probable cause.

In April 2008, he unleashed his troops in Guadalupe, a town of 5,500 founded more than a century ago by Yaqui Native Americans. Fanning out from a military-style command post set up in a Family Dollar parking lot, squadrons of Arpaio's deputies--some on horseback--made traffic stops for such offenses as improper use of a horn. They halted pedestrians--Latino and Yaqui alike--who were simply walking along city sidewalks in order to question them about their immigration status.

When Guadalupe's mayor, Rebecca Jimenez, showed up to confront Sheriff Arpaio, demanding that he cease the operation and withdraw his troops from the town, Arpaio complied, but he vowed they would be back the following day. Upon resumption of Arpaio's sweeps in Guadalupe, Phoenix's mayor, Phil Gordon, fired off a letter to the US Department of Justice demanding an investigation of the 287(g) activities of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MSCO) (Lemons 2008).

In October 2008, Arpaio sent 30 deputies and 30 volunteers armed with semiautomatic weapons to raid both the city hall and the public library in Mesa, Arizona. The operation targeted undocumented janitors. After The New York Times published an editorial about the Mesa sweeps, (1) Governor Janet Napolitano stripped the MCSO of $1.6 million in state funds that had previously been dedicated to its 287(g) operations.

A lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2012 ended with a verdict that the MCSO had engaged in racial profiling and unlawful detentions. After four years of defiance, Arpaio was found in civil contempt in 2016 for repeated violations of the order to cease these practices by "committing multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty, and bad faith." (2) Subsequently charged with criminal contempt (Cassidy 2016) in November 2016, Arpaio was defeated in his bid for a seventh consecutive term in office.

Finally, on July 31, 2017, Federal Judge Susan Bolton found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt. His sentencing was set for early October, but in August, President Donald Trump stirred outrage among national civil rights advocates and both of Arizona's Republican senators alike by pardoning him (Liptak 2018).

Sheriff Clarke's application for 287(g) powers was in response to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on January 25, 2017, in which he instructed the secretary of homeland security to engage with state and local law enforcement officials to prepare to enter into new 287(g) agreements allowing them to perform the functions of immigration officers in regard to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States. (3) On January 20, 2017, the day of Trump's inauguration, there were 37 287(g) agreements with law enforcement agencies spread across 21 states (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2017). By May 2018, there were 78 agreements across 20 states. More than 70 percent of these were located within the 11 states of the former Confederacy (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2018).

Expanding 287(g) agreements is, however, just one of the Trump administration's steps toward unleashing a reign of terror against people suspected of being present in the United States without authorization not seen since President Eisenhower's Operation Wetback. Trump has signed executive orders intended to expand his promised deportation force with 10,000 new ICE agents and 5,000 new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, who will be charged with tracking down immigrants who are eligible for removal from the United States. The DHS may speed up the hiring process by dropping requirements for polygraph and fitness tests (Yee 2017).

President Trump's anti-immigrant campaign was built upon an already robust immigration enforcement platform that had been put in place under President George W. Bush and expanded during the Obama administration. In 2014, Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza...

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