ICE to Receive Expanded Powers in Drug Offenses

IT’S TRUE THAT MOST IMMIGRATION ACTIVISTS have been feeling that changes in immigration law were imminent; certainly it’s been a hope. And who better to hope with than President Obama. I’ve gotta say, though…I don’t think this is the change people have been anticipating. Call it a hunch.

In an expansion of its crackdown on drug cartels, the Obama administration plans to announce Thursday that it will give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the authority to investigate drug crimes. Justice Department officials refused to divulge details of their plans, saying they did not want to pre-empt the news conference. But officials familiar with the plan said it would settle a long-running turf battle between the immigration agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration that has seriously undermined the efforts of both. The decision came amid drug-related violence that left more than 6,000 people dead in Mexico last year. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called the Justice Department’s decision “welcome news,” saying, “The cartels that smuggle drugs and illegal immigrants have integrated their activities, and now the federal agencies will have a better integrated response.”

—Immigration Agents to Get Expanded Powers, NY Times

Yes, it’s true—we do love that word, Cartels. Mexidata.info, though, make clear that calling the families and outfits that make their living (and that’s some 500,000 people, currently estimated by Mexican Secretary of National Defense) off the drug trade Cartels is a misuse of the term, and that “misunderstanding drug gangs as highly structured organizations is to be ignorant of the reality of the Mexican drug trade.” But then that makes sense because in the dark is where our government prefers to keep us on most things Latin America.

And “expansion of its crackdown on drug cartels”? Really? I think I missed something because I’m having a hard time coming up with even one thing the White House has done that might be classified as a “crackdown on drug cartels.” We’re not talking about the Mérida Initiative, are we? No, I’d not say Obama gets the blame for that one, that’s all Bush/Calderón.

So how is giving ICE the DEA’s turf expanding any offensive against these illusory monoliths of “Cartels”? What am I missing?

This move effects another conflation of Criminal with Latinos/Mexican. Are ICE only trained and instructed to go after Mexicans? Is that their job and mission? No. So explaining this department-wide move as a response to what “Mexican Cartels” are doing is interesting. If about 45% of immigrations violations are overstayed visas, then how is involving ICE in the world of drug investigations so helpful to half of their work?

Am I just viewing ICE the wrong way? That is possible. Perhaps ICE of HOMELAND SECURITY is a sort of do-all federal SWAT team whose prime directive is to manually insure the full capacity of the growing clusters of detention centers to the degree that DHS has projected earlier in the year. (This year 400,000 arrests are projected by ICE). And in that light, the more power they have, the better.

Anyway, we’ll see how it plays out. It sure changes a lot, it seems to me. I’m tired and I feel like I need to think on all the implications here. (Beyond Do we need to think about changing the “ICE” acronym? Should it be DICE now? Or CIDE? ) Off the bat, it seems a strange idea fraught with bad potential. Then again, I am used to being disappointed by the ineffectual and ultimately damaging punitive approach to immigration these past years.