oh the ironies
While “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s latest warning to Democrats who criticize ICE that “there’s still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted” is nonsensical, it does highlight many of the ironies of the debate around ICE. First is the total contradiction between Dem words and Dem actions. What these cynical politicians say in public to score political points is the opposite of how they vote. Consistently and hypocritically they fund, expand, militarize, normalize, and leave unaccountable this rightfully hated agency.
Remember that only the reason this guy exists to torment us in the first place is that Barack Obama appointed him as head of ICE, and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his massive increase in deportations, and his brainstorm that the U.S. government should start separating immigrant families as a deliberate form of deterrent cruelty. The difference between the Dems and GOP on this issue is much smaller than advertised.
Tom Homan knows this. It’s all playacting to do Democrats a favor and make it seem like they are actually "resisting" when anyone who reads the papers know that they are not. The best today’s prominent Democratic Party leaders could come up with to “resist” ICE has been to propose increasing its funding to add bodycams to facilitate more extreme surveillance of targeted populations, and to complain that the violence that ICE is wreaking should in some cases be more properly be wrought by local and state police.
The purpose of statements like Homan’s is to shift the window of debate away from “Should ICE be allowed to exist when they are murdering people in the street?" to “Is it sometimes OK for ICE to murder certain specific people?” It’s the same when ICE admits publicly that they are arresting people without warrants and who pose no threat to them.
The reason the ruling class is deploying this guy and guys like him is because they know that Americans are overwhelmingly disgusted with ICE. The ruling class needs that energy turned from “ABOLISH ICE” to “Let’s find ways for elected officials to debate which people do actually deserve to be murdered in the street, and look into potential ways to reform the training of individual officers.”
Homan’s statement, while ludicrous, patronizing, and meant to short-circuit human brain function, does in fact conform to the recent realities of U.S. policing. When Americans turned out in record numbers in 2020 to protest police brutality, racism, militarization, overfunding, and unaccountability, the result was that lawmakers of both parties, from city to state to federal, gave the police more money and more weapons. As a result police murders have continued to go up ever since, no matter which party was in power.
Homan’s statement also reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that the true nature of ICE is not what has been stated by its Dem and GOP cheerleaders. It’s not about managing immigration, or even strengthening our borders. It’s a private army deployed by the ruling class against its own population as a form of political control.
ICE exists, as do the police and the military, to protect the profits and property of the super-rich. They do just enough to give the appearance of something more beneficial to society to trick gullible Dem and GOP voters into continuing to elect the clowns who fund these agencies.
To the extent that ICE has anything whatsoever to do with immigration, it’s not to remove all immigrants, as is advertised to gullible, impoverished white supremacists, but simply to scare our underpaid immigrant workforce, without whom our economy would crumble instantly, into not asking for a raise or more humane working conditions, lest they face “more bloodshed.”
The issue of ICE is inseparable from the issue of Israel on many levels. They share technology and training. Both rely heavily on A.I. weapons, including drones, surveillance, and targeting databases. Both rely on racism to justify their existence. Both exist only because the U.S. taxpayer has been tricked into voting for politicians whose campaigns were underwritten by the profiteers of violence who make a fortune every time there is “more bloodshed.” And both are hard right, fascist phenomena.
ICE exists as a critical piece of the fascist machinery. George Jackson taught us that when fascism is doing well and its imperial fantasies of global domination not particularly threatened, it puts people like Bill Clinton in power to project an image of niceness. This does not mean that Clinton himself is any less depraved than the meaner-looking counterparts from his class, the Epstein Class. When fascism does feel threatened, as it rightfully does now, it uses overt fear campaigns and naked violence to put people back in line.
The fascist movement is not having its big moment at a random time. Everyone knows global warming and economic collapse are about to wipe billions of people off the face of the Earth, and people need an excuse for why they should be the ones who get to survive. Things like white supremacy and Jewish supremacy provide that excuse. If you really want to fight white supremacy, Jewish supremacy, and fascism, calling them “deplorable” only plays into their hands. You have to change the condition that creates them, and that condition is capitalism.
What we are seeing now is historically what happens when the left has already won the argument. The public agrees with the left on ICE and any number of major issues. The ruling class then gives up on trying to persuade the public, and instead starts deploying some small fraction of their unlimited wealth and power on naked violence and self-protection. In our time, they’ve started using that wealth to build bunkers and spaceships and A.I. armies.
Only the liberals still fantasize that people like Homan, Trump or Netanyahu are actually trying to win over the public or trying convince you of anything. Liberals therefore obsessively argue their ludicrous statements on their merits, as if they were presented in good faith, giving the fascists free publicity and validation, and closing the window of debate to exclude what most of the public actually thinks, which is that, no, we should not be paying our taxes to fund ICE, nor any other unaccountable militarized agency that shoots innocent people in the street.
The right loves it when witless liberal commentators continue to give such ludicrous statements as Homan's the respect of treating them as good faith arguments. Meanwhile they've long since moved on to a strategy of ignoring, silencing, impoverishing, imprisoning, dispossessing, infecting, injuring, and killing the public, and using their wealth and power simply to protect their profits, their property, and themselves.
The ruling class loves when we argue over whether this or that victim of state violence was or was not an “angel.” They’re overjoyed when we quibble over whether it’s wimpy to wear a mask during chemical spills, forest fires, and pandemics. They’re satisfied as long as we fight over anything really, as long as we aren’t striking, boycotting, suing, organizing unions or electing socialists to office.
It’s often said that “It’s not left vs right but rich vs poor,” but I’m not sure I entirely agree with that. A big part of the right is the part that claims to be the left, but actually spends more energy trying to drive a wedge between itself and the actual left. They do this by pretending to criticize the right while simultaneously imitating, appeasing, compromising with, collaborating with it.
I define the right as a radical political movement that divides human beings into those deserving and undeserving of basic rights, whether we’re talking about immigrants, Jews, activists, or anyone else. This movement protects money and power at the expense of the worker. It justifies genocide, slavery, militarism, extreme levels of inequality, and enacting policies that are the opposite of what the public wants. In the U.S. the main institutions of the right are Democratic and Republican parties.