Despite a lack of media attention, the Trump administration has ordered for there to be an increased amount of arrests and detentions of undocumented immigrants on the grounds of suspicion of criminal offenses. But these are not offenses such as murder or rape that time after time undocumented immigrants are accused of. Instead, the majority of detainments are based on absurd infringements, such as loitering in a park after nightfall, selling DVDs on the street or walking through an open gate in the subway. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can even detain or arrest anyone they deem to pose a danger to public safety, even if they have never had a criminal offense.
These raids give our government the right to employ mass deportation under the mask of public safety and criminal offenses. Half of the immigrants arrested by ICE were convicted based on traffic violations or mere suspicion with no criminal record. The suspects are almost always people of color, especially Hispanic and Latinx.
This is all part of Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and his vilification of Latinxs. The ultimate goal of these raids is to deport these immigrants back to their home country, no matter how long they have lived in the United States. Trump has depicted undocumented immigrants as drug dealers and rapists, pouring over the border with the intention to steal American jobs. Instead of treating undocumented immigrants as human beings, the new administration has treated them like a disease infecting our country.
With the new massive influx of arrests, where will these immigrants go? The Trump administration wants to keep these immigrants detained for the entirety of the immigration process.
Many of them will go to a county or private prison, which means an increase in government funding and thus higher taxes to pay both county and private prisons for the increase in detainment.
At the moment there are about 40,000 people in detainment, but with the new raids, the Department of Homeland Security is planning on doubling that to 80,000 people. Already, Hispanics and African-Americans compromised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, Despite making up less than half of the United States’ population and with these new policies, we can expect the amount of Hispanic and Latinx arrests to increase.
More government funding is required for the prisons to function and that will be coming out of America’s taxpayer money. With the more raids, we will double the amount of money spent on immigration detention when we already spend over 2 billion dollars.
Through taxes, we will be paying to aid the massive deportation of undocumented immigrants. We will be aiding the private prisons that make a massive profit off immigrant detention. We will be helping these prison’s greed line up with Trump’s racist and white nationalist agenda. ICE breaks apart families and leaves orphaned children, while prisons gain more money in their pocket. This is a human rights crisis for some, but a money-making opportunity for some.
Comments are closed.