ICE has been out of control over the past few months, and particularly since the beginning of this year.
Over the three decades I’ve been practicing immigration law, I’ve never seen the level of chaos and division, fomented by the rhetoric of Donald Trump’s DHS and front woman Kristi Noem and the Dark Prince of DC, Stephen Miller.
The lies about “domestic terrorists” like Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse. It should repel everyone who saw the videos of his murder.
They shot him while he was facedown, immobile, likely taking his last breaths.
If you are capable of justifying that, you should skip over the rest of my column because I write in a language you don’t understand.
Yes, he had a gun, with a license to carry.
Foolish of him to bring it to a volatile situation, one where other people also had guns and the legal authority to use them.
And there is another video of him engaging with ICE agents in a violent manner, attacking their vehicles and screaming expletives.
That bit of phone camera verite shows us that he was not a martyr. He was not an angel.
He was far from perfect, and clearly a man with anger issues. The people who leaked that video have the same sort of agenda as the activists who film ICE, hoping to catch them in these moments of unrest.
Everyone has their motives, and don’t be fooled by the folks who turn these anti-ICE stalkers into patriots.
They are people exercising a constitutional right to place their philosophical enemies in a bad light. This talk of transparency and “keeping them honest” is cover for people who, in their homes use expletives that rhyme with “Duck? Nice!”
I am someone who has been very busy these past months, heading to court to represent clients who, by every metric, deserve to be granted asylum but who, because of Trump’s manipulation of due process, are being ordered deported.
Under Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton and even in some cases Trump 1, they had a chance to avoid the hell they’d fled.
I have represented women who have had their private parts butchered out of tribal custom, who have been shot at by their husbands, children who have been sexually abused by their grandfathers, young evangelical preachers who were threatened with death by gangs, young Catholic women beaten into a miscarriage by their boyfriends, angered that they would not get an abortion.
I have represented young gay men, brutalized by the police, political dissidents from Albania, Muslim men who built schools for girls and were shot at by the Taliban.
I have represented Lebanese police officers tortured by Syrians, Iranian dissidents, victims of torture in Guinea, and so many others they blend together in a fog of anguish before my eyes. These are the ones who won asylum, before Noem and Miller and Bondi and the judges started shutting the gates.
I write this so you know that I am not the sort of person who thinks Alex Pretti caused his own death, or that Renee Goode aimed for Agent Ross. I write this as someone who watches in horror as people paid to pick up the criminals instead target little children with backpacks while their fathers run in justifiable fear.
I write this as someone who taught herself how to file habeas petitions at the ripe old age of 64 after years of never having to, because immigration judges used to follow the law.
Now, they make it up and higher authorities need to correct their tragic errors.
But I also write this as someone who is tired of the canonization of people who deliberately insert themselves into law enforcement operations.
Alex Pretti and the women he was defending frustrated Border Patrol agents who were trying to apprehend a man credibly accused of domestic violence and allowed that criminal to escape. And this is not an isolated incident.
I have had to thread my way through protesters to accompany clients into ICE check-ins. These protests do nothing to calm the fears of people who are trying to comply with the law.
The singers, and the women and men with arms linked and whistling may think they are like the brave men and women who crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge, but they are not.
Bruce Springsteen with his insipid song of protest might think he’s Joan Baez during Vietnam, but he’s not.
They can protest. That is their constitutional right.
But obstruction, trespass, threats, kicking the tail lights of cars, and other narcissistic expressions of protagonism add to the climate of fear already ginned up by the bigots in the White House.
It is simply the same form of hostility displayed by incompetent Noem and arrogant Miller, just directed at different targets.
Alex Pretti was a human being who was murdered. Full stop. He did not deserve to die.
But the hatred that many of these so called righteous activists are spewing against ICE might just end up increasing the body count.
ICE needs to stop terrorizing immigrant communities with their raids and their lack of professionalism.
These are not the agents I have known and respected for decades. These are untrained amateurs playing with their shiny toys and the power they’ve been given to the tune of billions of dollars.
But the people who hate ICE need a reality check: They’re not as righteous as they’ve been told they are by CNN.
This article originally appeared in the Delco Times.
