ICE Keeps Showing Us That No One Is Safe
“What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out”
After nearly a month in ICE detention, Maryland-born mom Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales is finally free and reunited with her loved ones.
The Washington Post reports that Díaz Morales was released from custody on Jan. 7, a full 25 days after she went to grab a bite at a fast food restaurant only to be targeted and swept up by mass deportation agents. While Díaz Morales tried to tell officers that she was a U.S. citizen, her claim was ignored. According to her attorney, Victoria Slatton, federal immigration officials accused her of faking her Maryland birth certificate and refused to release her from custody.
“Four days after her arrest, a Maryland District Court judge barred the government from deporting Diaz Morales while the court considered a petition from her lawyers challenging the detention,” The Post reported. But rather than free this wrongfully detained American, “Diaz Morales was transferred often and held in five detention centers in Maryland, Louisiana, Texas and, finally, New Jersey. Her lawyers were only able to speak to her twice during her detention, Slatton said.”
“Díaz Morales said she lived in Mexico starting at age seven and returned to the US more than a year and a half ago,” The Guardian reported. “She believes confusion arose because she used her mother’s last name while living in Mexico, whereas US records list both her father’s and mother’s last names.”
Whatever the confusion about last names, her Maryland birth certificate and immunization record from Anne Arundel County should have been enough to confirm her citizenship status. Instead, as we’ve seen in one instance after another since last year, her very identity as an American was put into doubt. Diaz Morales would end up missing the winter holidays with her son and loved ones. After nearly a month in custody, she was finally released.
“On Wednesday evening, Diaz Morales was being driven home to Maryland by her lawyers. She said she was looking forward to seeing her 5-year-old son and the rest of her family,” The Post continued. “Now that I am free, I feel much better, but while I was detained, the lows were really low and I felt very sad, but I thank God now it’s over,” she said. “I want to hug my son first and then my family.”
Her reunification with her family and friends comes as the nation has been outraged over ICE’s brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed American citizen, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Over the weekend, some 1,000 events across the country demanded justice for this award-winning poet, wife and mom of three. “I’m standing up for my neighbors,” said one attendee in Tempe, Arizona. “I am not happy with what happened in Minneapolis.”
But the federal government’s reaction hasn’t been to announce a thorough probe into the officer’s use of deadly force, but instead to shockingly push an investigation into Good’s widow Becca Good (in fact, six prosecutors resigned rather than take part in this despicable targeting) and make all Minnesotans less safe by deploying even more mass deportation agents into the state. We already knew that the Big, Ugly Budget funneled billions upon billions to ICE. What’s also true is that the federal government’s mass deportation fixation is endangering all of us by prioritizing mass deportation over bringing to justice drug traffickers, domestic extremists, and child predators.
“FBI agents reassigned to round up immigrants have had to walk away from investigations into violent predators who target and exploit children online,” MSNBC reported in September, with data revealing that the federal government pulled more than 2,800 agents from crime-fighting investigations in order to help carry out mass deportations and the “Kavanaugh stops” that have resulted in the unjust detention of Americans like Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales.
But other federal law enforcement agencies that have been working to combat actual threats to our safety have also been stretched thin as well. Roughly 50% of DEA agents have been reassigned from targeting drug cartels and fentanyl traffickers in order to help ramp up deportation numbers. Over at the ATF, 80% of the agency’s 2,500 agents have been pulled into targeting hardworking immigrant moms and dads, stretching resources thin and diverting focus from investigating gun trafficking, bombings, and arson.
And at HSI – the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security – the agency’s 7,000 agents have been reassigned to mass deportation at the expense of investigating terrorism, child exploitation, and human trafficking.
The federal government is also making an already-deadly ICE even more dangerous by hiring individuals that are unqualified for any type federal law enforcement position, period. That includes “using white nationalist imagery and language to recruit new employees and arrest immigrants,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said in August. “In some cases, the images and language appear to come directly from antisemitic and neo-Nazi publications and a white Christian nationalist website.”
“What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out,” Slate’s Laura Jedeed wrote this week. She revealed that she recently applied at the agency in order to find out more about the hiring process. But to Jedeed’s shock, ICE offered her a job despite the fact that she never submitted any paperwork, never completed a background check, and likely failed a drug test. “To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position.”
“How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other people’s homes?” Jedeed continued. “How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle, regardless of immigration status? How many rapists and pedophiles are working in ICE detention centers with direct and unsupervised access to a population that will be neither believed nor missed? How are we to trust ICE’s allegedly thorough investigations of the people they detain and deport when they can’t even keep their HR paperwork straight?”
It’s a question that should worry any American who cherishes their personal freedoms, their neighbors, and their very ability to live in peace and safety. The costs to our daily lives are rapidly rising, as other headlines from this past week alone show us. “Fed agent permanently blinds, fractures skull of anti-ICE protester,” the New Republic reported. “Woman dragged from car by ICE agents yells ‘I’m disabled’ in chaotic scene in Minneapolis,” The Independent said. “You guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian b—— is dead,” one agent reportedly told an observer, referring to Renee Nicole Good, MPR News reported. The outlet said one observer was “asked to provide the names of people he knows that are undocumented or the names of protest organizers in exchange for money or legal protection.”
And while Díaz Morales is now free, her nightmare is nowhere close to over. “Slatton said the case against Diaz Morales has not yet been dismissed by the government and she could still face deportation proceedings,” The Post continued. “But Slatton is confident her client’s claim to citizenship has been established.”
“She is a U.S. citizen. She was born here. I think that we’ve presented more than enough evidence, but we will continue to fight it until every single court accepts and acknowledges it,” she said.
“When thousands of over-militarized immigration agents descend on American communities akin to an invading military force, it seeks to terrorize us, actively harms public safety and raises the likelihood of violence,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “Meanwhile, the mass deportation agenda is diverting money, manpower, investigative attention and resources away from real threats – like child exploitation, drug trafficking investigations and FEMA disaster preparedness funding – all for the purpose of becoming foot soldiers in Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant crusade.”