Save the Children…From ICE!

ICE currently detains hundreds of migrant children, many for over 20 days, and if you thought Kristi Noem’s deserved firing from the Department of Homeland Security would improve things for these kids, well, think again. Her departure has not been accompanied by any mass exodus of the under-12 set from federal detention. In fact, expect her successor, Markwayne Mullin, to continue the same barbaric policies she put in place.

According to the Marshall Project, over 3800 children have been detained in the past year, in unsanitary, poor conditions that include bugs, mold and crappy food, while the average stay in custody has stretched out to almost six months. Meanwhile it’s well known that parental separation and detention have profoundly awful impacts on kids, including anxiety, developmental delays and PTSD.

Back in February, the story of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, detained in Minnesota by ICE, then held in Texas, made headlines when a judge ordered them released. The government claimed “the boy’s father entered the U.S. illegally from Ecuador in December 2020,” reported PBS February 1. “The family’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the U.S….Images of the boy wearing a blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack and surrounded by immigration officers drew outrage about the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis…Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as ‘bait’ by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has called that…an ‘abject lie.’”

The New York Times reported February 13 on a 7-year-old in Oregon, a 5-year-old in Chicago and a teenager, all of whom ended up confined with a parent in Texas. Nearly all of the hundreds of detained children pass “through one place: a sprawling detention center in Dilley, Texas, that is a jumble of trailers and soft-sided tents in a desolate expanse about 70 miles south of San Antonio.” What this brings to mind are the Nazi civilian internment camps, which held “enemy aliens,” citizens of countries at war with Germany. The conditions in those camps were somewhat tolerable, and many prisoners survived till the end of the war. This is the closest analogue in recent history that I could find to what the Trump administration is doing with its ethnic cleansing of Hispanic migrants.

Don’t expect that ethnic cleansing to change when Mullin takes the helm at DHS at the end of March. It is and remains Trump regime policy. Mullin, after all, has been called a “MAGA warrior,” and such warriors believe in making America white again. Announcing the change, Trump said Mullin “would work to keep the border secure and root out immigrants who crossed the border illegally,” according to the New York Times March 5. “Mr. Mullin praised Mr. Trump’s border policies and said he looked forward to supporting the president’s mission to defend the homeland.”

The Times also reported that “Mullin has been a staunch defender of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign…He has criticized democratic-run cities and states for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials. He has voiced support for building the border wall and passing legislation that would require Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote.” He also called the ICE agents who murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis “patriots.” So yeah, with Mullin you can expect Kristi Noem on steroids.

The policy to root out the nonwhite “other” will continue. With 68 million Hispanics in the U.S., it’s a good bet the Trump regime would like to deport them all. That’s a lot of people. And that’s before you even begin counting the Haitians, Somalis and other groups from Global South nations marked by ICE for deportation. Hispanics constitute roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population, so it’s the largest ethnic minority in the U.S. and is mainly Mexican. Sadly for America Firsters, Hispanics are the main driver of U.S. population growth, without them we’d likely be in demographic decline, while the Hispanic labor force is over 35 million. Predictions are that the number of Hispanics in the U.S. could more than double by 2050. So I’m sure the feeling over at ICE is that Mullin better get crackin’ to reduce the size of this nonwhite cohort. Because that’s the Trump regime goal. It may not be stated in so many words, but it’s stated pretty darn close.

Meanwhile, children and their parents at Dilley have deportation, voluntary or not, to look forward to. The white house suggests migrant families avoid confinement “by voluntarily leaving the country,” the Times reported February 13. ‘“Being in detention is a choice,’ the Department of Homeland Security said…adding that the administration was offering $2600 and a free flight to people who leave voluntarily.” Not surprisingly, lots of folks want to stay. They have jobs and lives here and often fear returning to danger in their native land.

Granted, under president Genocide Joe Biden, over 448,000 immigrant children were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services custody between 2021 and 2024. That’s a lot of detained kids. The Trump regime may not beat those numbers, but what they lack there they make up for with callous zeal. In Minnesota, after Liam’s case got attention, one father, Luis Zuna, told CBS that his 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was detained with her mother January 6. “They are circling our schools,” the superintendent said after ICE detained Liam. Lots of people volunteered to keep Liam, the superintendent told CBS January 23, but “they weren’t allowed to do that. And instead, he was pretty quickly, within hours, flown to Texas to a detention center.”

What kind of government puts children, with or without their parents, in detention? The kind of government that regards and entire minority, in this case 68 million Hispanics, as criminal or potentially criminal. Why? Because they’re un-Amurican. They weren’t born here, and they’re nonwhite. We have a whole Gestapo called ICE suffused with this thinking, and this Gestapo, surprise!, lacks respect for the constitution, its agents are quite comfortable with shooting citizens in the face for not moving their cars out of the way fast enough. If that’s how they treat citizens, what do you think is in store for migrant noncitizens, long term? Nothing good. Unlike citizens, migrants lack rights – though their rights didn’t help Renee Good or Alex Pretti very much – they are an utterly vulnerable population and one the current regime has demagogically demonized as criminal. History has some very harsh lessons about minorities without rights under right-wing rule and when those minorities are stateless to boot? Well, just open your history book to Axis Europe during World War II, you’ll find a pretty clear template for current U.S. policies.

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