Supporting ICE and the immigrant purge: A statement of a Maryland county's values?
Washington County commissioners declare tribal-like support for Trump's crackdown. Citizen petition drive underway to stop detention center.
A petition asking five Republican commissioners in Maryland’s Washington County to reverse their endorsement of a massive ICE detention center there contains an incisive description of that decision: “This was not a neutral administrative action. It was a values statement.”
Indeed, after a year of Trump’s aggressive purge of undocumented immigrants, no endorsement of it can be seen as objective; it is, instead, a declaration of what a person (or a county) values — or, rather, what a person (or a county) does not value.
It means you do not value due process for people who are not citizens. It means you’re OK with racial and ethnic profiling.
It means you approve of ICE agents traumatizing people who, while in the U.S. without government authorization, have done no harm and have, in fact, been productive non-citizens.
Supporting the Trump regime means you endorse mass deportation, no matter its consequences on the economy or on the nation’s reputation.
Endorsing the use of an 825,000-square-foot warehouse for detention means you regard undocumented immigrants as criminals when, in fact, objective studies have found no link between a rise in border crossings and a rise in crime.
It means you’re willing to ignore facts to maintain tribal loyalty to Trump. He keeps harping on immigrant crimes as if they’re rampant when, in fact, there’s no evidence that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than citizens.
“A 2024 study funded by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes,” The Washington Post reports this week, “and at less than a quarter of the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”
Endorsing the purge means you’re unable or unwilling to see Trump — or his chief advisor on immigration, Miller — as a cynical pol who disregards facts to exploit fears.
The Washington County commissioners, elected to four-year terms four years ago, apparently accept all of this. Uncomfortable with protest, they quickly supported the use of the warehouse for detention. They also gave ICE and DHS ringing endorsements, claiming, incredibly, that those federal agencies are “safeguarding the integrity of our immigration system, and ensuring that all persons are treated with dignity and compassion .…”
Tribalism makes people blind.
On Monday, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown filed suit to stop the conversion of the Washington County warehouse into a detention center.
I signed the petition seeking reversal of the board’s approval of the warehouse because I can’t support Trump’s cynical and needlessly cruel immigrant purge.
I signed the petition because I oppose detention and mass deportation for immigrants who have not committed serious crimes. I favor a secure border, but find abhorrent the round-up of brown people by masked goons. It’s all for show; it’s performative law enforcement, part of Miller’s sinister plan to make the United States look as inhospitable as possible to people who yearn to come here.
If that represents your values, so be it.
It’s not what most Americans want, according to polls.
And a purge is not a practical solution.
Nearly 40 years ago, I knew Haitian immigrants who benefited from a Republican plan to offer immunity and a path to citizenship to undocumented people who had lived and worked in the country for years without committing a crime. The immigrants I knew, a husband and wife from Port-au-Prince, had lived in Florida for several years. They came to Baltimore to apply for the immunity offered by President Ronald Reagan. A few million other immigrants did the same.
That’s what we ought to be doing now: Securing the border while giving undocumented immigrants a chance to come out of the shadows and live without fear in the sunshine with the rest of us.
Thanks, Dan, for your always humane and ethical view. Personally, I would be willing to wager large that these commissioners are getting substantial kickbacks (our tax dollars offered as bribes), to do this evil- ugly, citizen-rejected deal. America needs to create a Department (once Trump is dead and gone) that does nothing but follow the money of every politician, and corporation that engages with bribery, with very painful sanctions and retribution.
Corruption is so blatant and in our faces now, that action is required.
Amen. Well said. Was shocked to read of the original blanket approval happening in our state but glad our AG is addressing it.