I get it. The word “fascist” is fraught. It is a contested term, and most people see it as deeply rooted in a very specific history. It has long been used solely as an epithet, making it harder to deploy as an analytic term.
And yet, when I read things like the following from the Michigan Advance, that is certainly where my mind goes: ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’.
The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”
This is wrong on a number of levels. The most obvious being that no, we should not want squads of trucks rounding up and deporting people. This smacks of a police state, not the rule of law. This is especially frightening in the context of the federal government shipping people to El Salvador to be imprisoned indefinitely without due process of law. Add in that the White House Press Secretary acknowledged that the White House is exploring ways to do the same to American citizens, and we have a recipe for some truly awful things happening.
Allow me to underscore, also, no, this is NOT something that should be run like a business.
Law enforcement is not a business.
But there’s more.
Several speakers, including [Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”], told the military industrial complex representatives in the crowd that the Trump administration is depending on the private sector to implement its mass deportation agenda.
“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” Homan told the crowd in his keynote speech, which kicked off the expo.
“Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out,” he said.
It may seem like a small thing, but when law enforcement representatives speak about their role in glib terms like “badge and gun stuff,” it makes me uncomfortable. It is a red flag when people with the power to arrest and use violence in their jobs act like they are in an action movie or playing a video game.
Act like a professional, not a child.
But Homan always makes me uncomfortable. Trump likes his appointees out of central casting, and Homan is well cast as the thuggish fascist asshole* in charge of a law enforcement agency in movie about law enforcement abuse.
Homan defended the controversial use of the Alien Enemies Act, the 1798 law that was last used during World War II to intern Japanese Americans.
“That is a law enacted by Congress, and we are using that,” Homan said, adding that it “bothers him” when judges or politicians attempt to prevent him from using it. Shortly before Homan spoke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can use it for now.
He also said that family detention is still “on the table” as a policy, claiming that it is about ensuring that “families are families” and preventing human smuggling.
Nothing fascistic about any of that, no sir. Those mean courts won’t let him do his badge and gun stuff the way he wants!
Back to Lyon.
Lyons said that he hopes that they can infuse artificial intelligence into the process to “free up bed space” and “fill up airplanes” taking immigrants back to their home countries at a faster rate.
Much like Homan, Lyons also shared that he supports the use of the Alien Enemies Act, calling it “amazing” to be able to speed up the process of deportations. He also said that he has been working with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency to get social security numbers to look for “voter fraud.”
What could go wrong using AI to decide who to send to prison in El Salvador? (And I will leave alone the non sequitur about voter fraud, as this post already is making my blood pressure go up).
*I know I have been getting increasingly less academic in some of my language of late, although usually I am trying to do so more in comments than in posts. But I try to use the most useful and descriptive language that I can when I write and this is just the most honest and accurate description that I’ve got.
