Operation Keep Safe - More ICE Theater

Police escort 23-YO Juan Vega to an ICE facility in
Los Angeles during sweeps in January [Photo - Getty]  

As a former resident of Los Angeles, I still keep in touch with local news impacting California by listening to public radio station KCRW online during the week.

On Wednesday morning I heard a KCRW news report that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement once again engaged in targeted sweeps of undocumented immigrants.

This time in parts of Northern California including Oakland, San Francisco and Napa Valley.


Just over a month ago agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21 immigrants in predawn sweeps targeting 98 different 7-Eleven stores in the LA area in southern California.

In a blog posted back on Friday January 19th, I called those raids "Anti-immigration Theater" - not just because it was more show than actual substantive policy.

But also because of the absurdity of federal agents expending resources and man hours rounding up a handful of the millions of immigrants who are working here in the U.S. as you read these words.

The latests reports I've read online were that approximately 232 people had been arrested and detained between Sunday and Wednesday.

The KCRW radio report on Wednesday said that when some people arrived for work early Tuesday morning, ICE agents were actually inside their place of employment and quickly began asking those they suspected of being undocumented to produce identification papers.

Before, presumably, being hauled off to one of the increasingly-filled detention facilities around the U.S. where undocumented detainees are currently being held before either being deported, or facing a hearing in court to determine their immigration status.

MTC-run Willacy County Correctional Facility in Texas

As Madison Pauly reported in an article for Mother Jones last February, within the first weeks of assuming office in January, 2017, top immigration policy advisers from the Trump administration were already instructing top officials from the Department of Homeland Security to instruct ICE to drastically increase the number of undocumented detainees that it keeps incarcerated on a daily basis to 80,000.


Sadly, some of those detainees were and are being held in privately owned for-profit detention facilities like the Willacy County Correctional Facility outside Raymondville, Texas (pictured above).

Built in 2006 by the troubled Management and Training Corporation, the facility basically consisted of a series of large kevlar tents which housed 200 inmates each - as you can see from the photo above there are no windows to let in natural light.

Inside there are no walls to separate bathroom facilities including showers and toilets, and the lights remained on for 24 hours a day - try and imagine living with 200 people like that for even a week.

According to a 2017 PRI article by Reynaldo Leanos, allegations at Willacy included lack of medical treatment, widespread sexual abuse and unsanitary living conditions including vermin infestation - those are allegations that have been leveled at other facilities run by MTC.

Check out George Lavender's 2014 In These Times article about the East Mississippi Correctional Facility run by MTC - take a look at some of the photos of the conditions inmates were living in.

MTC's Willacy County Correctional Facility was one of the largest immigration detention centers in the U.S. at one point, and not surprisingly a riot broke out in February 2015 after years of complaints about the management of the facility and the conduct of the personnel and their treatment of the detainees scheduled to be deported.

It was closed after a fire set during the riots destroyed most of it, but remarkably officials are trying to reopen it.

Now according to Madison Pauly's Mother Jones article referenced above, in November, 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidential election with the aid of a massive Republican voter suppression effort and interference by the Russian government:

A flooded cell in East Mississippi Correctional
Facility run by MTC - described as "barbaric"

"a whopping 65 percent of ICE detainees were held in facilities run by private prison companies, which typically earn a fee per detainee per night and whose business model depends upon minimizing costs to return profits to shareholders. 

Since Trump's election, private prison stocks have soared, and two new, for-profit detention centers are opening in Georgia and Texas."  


When you take these ICE raids in California into consideration, along with the aggressive push by the Department of Justice (under the direction of this White House) to drastically ramp up taxpayer funds going to the for-profit prison industry, in my view it is disturbing evidence that Trump and his equally-xenophobic Attorney General Jeff Sessions are determined to turn the home of the Statue of Liberty into some kind of authoritarian landscape.

It's kind of an obscene marriage between the divisive right-wing ideology of the Trump administration, which vilifies and scapegoats non-white people, and the kind of rampant vampire capitalism that the current Republican Party has pimped itself out to - and worships like a deity.

(Case in point: Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's announcement on Tuesday that the Senate will pursue passage of a "banking reform bill" rather than tackling the gun reform legislation that a majority of Americans are now demanding in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.)

The result is that the convergence of rigid ideology and unchecked greed now serves as some kind of ideological club (wielded by ICE) for right-leaning conservatives to attack states like California, which have rejected the Trump agenda in favor of more moderate and inclusive policies.

As Hamed Aleaziz reported in an article for SFGate.com early Wednesday morning, the most recent raids, deemed Operation Keep Safe, have heightened tensions between ICE and local California municipalities like Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles - where local leaders have pledged to protect the status of their communities as "sanctuary cities" so that members of the immigrant community are not afraid to report crimes to the police, or call emergency services.

ICE agents conduct a raid at a home in Georgia

The High-Chair President's response is the targeted deployment of federal agents using Gestapo-like tactics to round people up.

And in effect, place them into camps.

Of course, ICE painting these most recent raids with an intentionally melodramatic description like "Operation Keep Safe", helps to frame these actions in a context aligned with the Trump administration's ceaseless demonizing of undocumented immigrants.

An extension of Trump's attempts to project his own bigotry onto those he deems as some kind of monolithic dark-skinned menace.

It's intended to play to Trump's hyper-conservative base of support, many of whom are easily swayed to project their personal economic insecurities onto "others"

And use anti-immigrant hysteria to voice their frustration with an economic recovery that's further enriched the wealthiest 1%, but left average Americans stifled by stagnant wages on the sidelines watching progress and opportunity pass them by.

As Jenna Lyons and Hamed Aleaziz reported in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle earlier today, one of those people swept up in "Operation Keep Safe" was 55-year-old Jesus Manzo Ceja.

Jesus Manzo Ceja's daughter Brenda and wife 
Guadalupe at their home in Napa Valley, CA  

An undocumented immigrant who came to California 30 years ago with his family, Ceja walked outside of his home early Wednesday morning to move his truck and discovered ICE agents outside lying in wait with a warrant for his arrest.

While ICE agents (supposedly) cannot force their way into someone's home to detain someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant, nothing prevents them from simply waiting outside of someone's place of work, home or a court house.


According to the Chronicle, Ceja's 27-year-old daughter Brenda (pictured above), a U.S. citizen by birth, told reporters, "When they took my dad, they asked for my mom, but she was too scared to come out of the house."

The man who worked construction jobs to provide for his family and drove his wife and 15-year-old son to their weekly physician's appointments is now in custody in a facility in Stockton, CA awaiting deportation back to Mexico.

Ostensibly, he was arrested for having spent three weeks in jail for a DUI 14 years ago and also having been stopped for driving without a license.

But Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions have made it abundantly clear why 232 different people were arrested over a four day period in Northern California between Sunday and Wednesday.

Granted, some were people with criminal records, but many, like Jesus Manzo Ceja were simply people with non-violent administrative offenses on their record - is deporting them really keeping Americans safe?

People caught up in a theater of extremist anti-immigrant ideology - arrested for being who they are in a nation of immigrants.