Everyday Erinyes #118

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

These days you can hardly throw a stone without hitting a story of how someone (immigrant or not, actually) is getting harassed, physically abused, locked up, or whatnot, and many people are questioning whether ICE should even exist. (Don’t look at me – I’m not convinced it should exist at all, and certainly, under the current regime it’s more of a liability than an asset. But more about that later.)

For one thing, it duplicates other agencies’ work, and apparently that’s a feature, not a bug. The full name of ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Everyone probably knows it comes under the Department of Homeland Security – now. It was established March 1, 2003. But didn’t we have people working on Customs before ICE? Didn’t Nathaniel Hawthorne start out working in customs? Well, yes, he did, and yes, we did.

The U.S. Border Patrol was founded on May 28, 1924, under the Department of Labor (“They’re taking our jobs!” is nothing new, apparently. Oh, and booze. Prohibition resulted in a lot of alcohol being brought in from Canada in the twenties.)

Then there was the INS, formed by FDR in 1933 by combining the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization, which was also under the Department of Labor, but was moved to the Department of Justice in 1940, where it stayed until 2003, when it was replaced by ICE, and the Border Patrol was also moved to DHS, but still includes “Customs” in its name and its missions. I might parenthetically comment that in moving from “Naturalization” to “Customs,” and at the same time from “Service” to “Enforcement,” we were NOT moving in the direction of greater humanity. Whether that was something government was imposing from above, or more of a recognition that more people in the US felt less human under Republicans, I can’t say.

But, in any case, we now have both ICE and the Border Patrol. You might say the Border Patrol is trying to keep people out who are already out, and ICE is trying to throw people out who are already in (after, of course, keeping them locked up in private prisons to reward billionaires.) The Border Patrol is the one which is criminalizing citizens with hearts who are putting water and other necessities out into the deserts so people won’t die – people who the Border Patrol wants dead.

ICE has national authority, but the Border Patrol doesn’t JUST work the border. They have a zone of 100 miles from the border within which they retain all authority they have at the border. Some people refer to this as the “Constitution-free zone.” And two out of every three Americans live in it. (You can click HERE for a larger, more legible image.)

It includes several entire states. My first glance told me it includes the entire state of Florida, but that’s not all. Besides the obvious Hawai’i, it also includes the entire states of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Michigan. And most of Vermont. And anywhere in it Border Patrol agents can, and do – well, as Yes! magazine says –

In Hartford, Vermont, last year, U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound bus as it arrived from Boston, asking passengers about their citizenship and checking the IDs of people of color or those with accents. In January, they stopped a man in Indio, California, as he was boarding a Los Angeles-bound bus. In questioning him about his immigration status, they told him his “shoes looked suspicious,” like those of someone who had recently crossed the border….

In Florida, a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups in February issued a Travel Advisory warning people to “reconsider traveling to the state because of the increased likelihood of racial profiling and abuse of civil liberties.” One of those groups, the Florida Immigration Coalition, whose members shared videos that went viral of January border patrol raids, has begun an online petition asking Greyhound to stop allowing the agents onto its buses.

The videos of officers removing from a Greyhound bus a Jamaican grandmother who had been visiting her granddaughter and later of a Trinidadian man being led away in handcuffs got nearly 1 billion combined views, said Melissa Taveras, spokeswoman for FLIC, which advocated on behalf of the passengers.

ACLU is in the process of a campaign to get Greyhound to require that anyone who wants to question one of their passengers must have a warrant. If you click through to Yes! magazine, you can read much more about that. We’ll see how that works out.

But I don’t want to leave out ICE. ICE is the one who is deporting everyone it can get its claws into, including military veterans, and even active duty military, as I have previously asked the Furies to look into (and they keep reminding me that they aren’t citizens themselves so can’t vote, and Republicans must be voted out first of all.) Just in the first three months of their fiscal year, ICE has deported 56,710 people. Theoretically, the goal of their campaign is to deport convicted criminals, but 46% of those deported have never been convicted of any crime (and I have no data on how many of those actually convicted have bogus convictions, but you know there are plenty.)

But there’s one person they will not deport. And that is Jakiw Palij. It has been fourteen years since a court ordered him to be deported. He is the last Nazi war criminal living in the United States. And he will not be deported. Why?

While innocent people are being deported by the thousands, Palij is living out his last days in the United States because the State Department hasn’t made him a priority and no other country wants to take him. Nazi war criminals cannot be prosecuted in the United States, and while Germany has, even recently, done a good job prosecuting Nazi’s [sic] found on German soil, they have not complied with the U.S. government’s requests to take Palij.

The U.S. cannot just drop an individual into a sovereign nation which isn’t willing to accept him, and so Palij will probably live as a free man in his New York City home until the day he dies.

I do understand why no other country wants him, and I have two possible suggestions. Since the US is so cozy now with Israel, maybe someone could get them to take him. I’m sure the Israelis would know how to deal with him. They have experience. But if that doesn’t work – with Bibi under investigation and all – Agent Orange and his senior staff all have many, many great and good friends in Russia. Let’s send him there. And get him out of here! Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone, you have persuasive powers second to none (even if not as pleasant as some.) Please use them.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.