Protestors urged the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) to stop collaborating with ICE outside of the Nassau County Executive Building, as Fios1 News reported last week.
Ever since the widespread anger at family separation erupted in recent weeks, many have now begun to call for the abolition of ICE, formally known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder has previously called the partnership between NCPD and ICE as a “cohesive relationship.” Previous operations such as ICE’s “Operation Matador” have demonstrated a reckless, dragnet-style approach to policing that undermines trust in Long Island’s immigrant communities in flailing attempts to crack down on gangs.
“We don’t think there should be an organization in the United States that goes around picking people out of their homes and deporting them, that is a crime against humanity,” protestor Nate Peters told Fios1.
ICE has now become an arm of the deportation machine for Donald Trump and the anti-immigrant agenda. Even a former official from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which oversees ICE — has given serious credence to the thought that it is time to dismantle the agency.
Former DHS official Moira Whelan, who worked on a congressional committee overseeing ICE, said that the call to abolish ICE is a “recognition that they aren’t doing what we built them to do.”
“The progressive call to ‘abolish ICE’ is not just a knee-jerk anger at cops,” Whelan said.
The bloated agency’s budget has swelled since 2009, when Congress began funding ICE detention centers based on their numbers of beds. This essentially led to quotas of immigrants for ICE agents to arrest and detain, Quartz reported. As their $7.1 billion budget stands now, $4.1 billion is directed toward detention and deportation.
The Long Island protest emerged in tandem with growing calls for Nassau County Executive Laura Curran to end the county’s cooperation with ICE. After six months in office, she has still not yet taken a stand against the deportation machine. Reach out to her office at 516-571-3131 to tell her to end the cozy relationship Nassau County maintains with ICE.
