Tag Archives: ICE

Democrats: Framing is Everything.

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I am concerned that the language being used by some Democrats to advocate for reform of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Homeland Security is only going to undermine party unity and messaging in the 2018 election cycle.

We’ve done this before and it did not serve us well.  We allowed the other side to brand themselves “Right to Life” while branding us as “Pro-Abortion.”  The far more accurate descriptor, “Pro-choice,” fell by the wayside in the war of words and we continue to allow them to represent us as baby killers, while we defend our moral high ground with perfectly sound arguments about individual liberty and responsibility that get drowned out by the simple poisonous messaging that the Right does so much better than we, who place a high premium on truth and tolerance.

Now, in the understandable outrage felt by decent folks in the face of Donald Trump’s grotesque reign of incompetence and baby-snatching, we are once again in danger of losing the messaging war by reaching for a bigger and more empathetically distant target than we should be immediately addressing.

Yes, ICE is a badly flawed remnant of post 9/11 planning panic that was allowed to fester and grow its mission even under Obama.  It has created self-justifying enforcement redundancies,  and even un-American over-reach practices that should be dismantled in short order.

But we have to regain some control in Congress to have any hope of affecting beneficial change; and loudly calling for the “elimination of ICE” is unlikely to help us get there.

It’s a negative message that allows unprincipled Republicans to cynically charge that Democrats want to foster lawlessness.  

Whenever we rest on a negative message without providing the positive policy alternative, the Republicans are only too happy to leap into the breach and define a sinister significance  to the Democrats’ position.

T250px-Statue_of_Liberty_7his will never do.

Democrats must insist that their leaders get a better grip on messaging and use more constructive language.  Don’t say “Abolish ICE” and let them finish the sentence.  Talk about “reforming” the institution and remodeling the Homeland Security mission as a whole into something that more closely reflects our traditional American values concerning immigrants, who have been the lifeblood of our young and upwardly mobile nation.

By all means, keep elimination of ICE in mind as the ultimate goal, but don’t use that as your stand alone message.

We have much better immigration messages available, and we need look no further than the Statue of Liberty for the right language.

 

This is not the mission statement*

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nestpastrumpipe
Adapted from “The Treachery of Images” Rene Magritte

Due to sheer volume — call it a flood, deluge, tsunami, or a simple fire hose flow of “news” — it’s a challenge to even focus on the less splashy  yet highly damaging transgressions  of the Trump administration. But it is slowly emerging that government agencies under Trump are now not only less vigilant at enforcement (well, except for ICE), but have “adjusted” their agencies’ mission statements, references, and associated language to reflect their political agendas in the new  “reality.”

Steve Benen, a producer and blogger at The Rachel MaddowShow,  has managed to spot and document this disturbing trend. First and foremost the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under acting head Mick Mulvaney (a vociferous opponent of the CFPB) announced in January that the agency will be “less focused” on protecting consumers. That announcement puts the agency’s mission directly at odds with the “reality” of the bureau’s mandated task and what of course the name should imply (in a normal world).

Benen notes other reality-challenging adjustments: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [is] changing its mission statement, eliminating the phrase “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.” Then it was the Department of Housing and Urban Development mission statement, which will apparently no longer reference “free from discrimination,” “quality homes,” or “inclusive communities.”

The Interior Department’s mission statement no longer references native Americans or providing “scientific and other information.” The State Department’s mission statement no longer prioritizes the goal of a “just and democratic world.”

And then there’s FEMA and its new strategic plan. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal government’s first responder to floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters, has eliminated references to climate change from its strategic planning document for the next four years.*

[*Clearly our own Governor Phil Scott’s administration is on board with that agenda and is using the same tactic in a recent editing out of climate change from a Vermont State planning document.]

That document, released by FEMA on Thursday, outlines plans for building preparedness and reducing the complexity of the agency.

FEMA’s strategic plan mentions expected cost increases “due to rising natural hazard risk,” but makes no mention of the global crisis that contributes to those risks.

This effort to spin reality (should I even bother mentioning it is right out of Orwell’s 1984?) may be expedited by Trump’s so called  “beachhead teams”— almost 600 hires quietly installed early on throughout government bureaucracies. The teams included dozens of industry lobbyists, political cronies (many from far-right media) and can be found here in a  problubica.org’s searchable database.

Who knows which Trumpist or GOP lackey made these changes? But given that President Trump has openly bragged about lying and making up “facts” in a meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada, it’s obvious where the deception and lies start. So it won’t be a surprise that in terms of deceptive practices this fish — the Trump administration — is continuing to rot from the head first.

*A word about the famous pipe image

“How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!” — René Magritte

Thus, ‘this is not a mission statement’ and the Trumpists can stuff it.

ICE out time in Vermont

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The non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica is asking for help through crowd-sourcing: enlisting members of the public in keeping an eye out for ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

VTICEout

 

Specifically, ProPublica is looking for people to report where ICE and the CBP are seen to be  operating, especially those places that might be considered sensitive: Officially, both U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection say they “generally” avoid arrests, interviews or surveillance related to immigration enforcement at “sensitive locations,” which include places of worship, hospitals, schools, weddings, funerals and public demonstrations.

But there are some pretty large exceptions to the policy: Courthouses and workplaces do not have any special protection from immigration enforcement activities. Ambulances pass through immigration checkpoints in border cities. And while certain buildings are considered off limits, nothing keeps agents from intercepting people as they leave. Immigration agents are also allowed to conduct enforcement actions at sensitive locations with approval from a supervisor, or in “exigent circumstances.”

We have seen that immigration sweeps have grown more frequent nationally since Trump has been in office. An ICE raid in Vermont and the arrest of 14 construction workers in Colchester this January brought home to us in Vermont the immigration enforcement crack-down.

ICE says arrests at sensitive locations are “exceedingly rare,” yet Trump’s enforcement agencies don’t keep track of how, or how often, “exigent circumstances” occur.

To document if these enforcement location exceptions are actually rare or not ProPublica has teamed up with Univison News (the American Spanish language news organization) to offer a mechanism for people to confidentially report where, when and how these operations are taking place, and how the sweeps or raids are affecting them.

Has an immigration enforcement action impacted you or someone you know? Have you changed a habit or stopped going somewhere because of ICE or CBP activities? Tell us  [the ProPublica website asks in an online reporting form].  A note about our commitment to your privacy: ProPublica and Univision News are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and will not voluntarily share your information with third parties without your express permission.

Vermonters might want to help: after all it is mud season in Vermont, and tradition dictates we watch for when ICE is out.

Immigration Control & Enforcement gets massive license plate tracking data access

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Immigration Control and Enforcement (aka ICE) has contracted with Vigilant Solutions, a private for-profit business that handles license plate reading and facial recognition data. License plate readers gather images of vehicles and identify the individual license plate number, and record the time and place the image was taken. This data having been harvested and stored by Vigilant Solutions outside public accountability gives ICE access to billions of license plate records and the ability for real-time location tracking.  dhslpr2

According to Verge.com: Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars.

[They offer free access to their analytics services and no-charge data migration to eligible law enforcement agencies and so called “fusion centers”– such as the one we have in Williston, Vermont.]

The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

Just another powerful surveillance tool in its expanding tool box but ICE, the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement arm must be thrilled at the acquisition.

Make no mistake: if you want to control people and enforce immigration law (regardless of constitutionality), or even raid an immigrant sanctuary city – this is just the tool to strike fear into targeted people and their allies. ICE agents would be able to query that database in two ways. A historical search would turn up every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years, a detailed record of the target’s movements. That data could be used to find a given subject’s residence or even identify associates if a given car is regularly spotted in a specific parking lot. verge.com [added emphasis]

The ACLU maintains LPR data can have some legitimate uses but worries about privacy implications as gathering and use of the data has become widespread. Jay Stanley, who studies license plate readers with the ACLU: “Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?”

And here in Vermont what happens to the data police collect from their license plate readers – the dozens supplied through various DHS and federal law enforcement grants?

The Vermont legislature imposed some restrictions of the length of time police can store data they collect. LPR data can be retained for 18 month with 90 day extensions allowed and available by request through Superior Court.

 In 2016 VPR reported: Police collected 8.66 million snapshots of license plates across Vermont in the 18 months leading up to Dec. 31, 2015. Each entry includes the time and location where each license plate was spotted by an Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system.vt-alpr-data-vpr-ealfinj-20160216_0

[…] Police keep a trove of the millions of license plate scans under tight control at the Vermont Intelligence Center in Waterbury.  Law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to access the state’s central database directly, but must request information using a form that is reviewed by VIC staff, who can search the data if they deem the query to be legitimate. There’s no information about how officers use the data they get through the database’s search results and no information about the number of cases – if any – the information was relevant to.

Trump’s enforcer at ICE, Director Tom Homan, last year offered this blunt advice to undocumented immigrants: “You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” At some point we all better start to worry and look over our own shoulders.  Rule # 1: believe what authoritarians say. Rule # 1a: buy stock in jackboot suppliers.