On ICE: The Cruelty Is The Point, And The Problem

ICE and CBP have always had a cruelty problem.

As can only be expected.

The kind of person who is attracted to that kind of job can be expected to be cruel.

Especially if they get a spiffy, dramatic uniform.

Add in the United States’ tendency to over-arm and over-immunize its police, and you have a job that will attract every high school bully in the country.

So, yeah, that’d be quite a filtering problem.

Which the U.S. solved by ignoring it, happily filling the ranks of its immigration police with the kind of petty, power-hungry man-children who had previously only been able to find jobs in mall security.

Seriously, these are the guys that even the regular police forces wouldn’t take.

They were already scraping the very bottom of the barrel before Stephen Miller got involved. Bovino had been in the Border Patrol for almost 30 years before he was promoted to the top spot, after all.

But a country does need a border patrol of some kind, and a police force that removes folks who sneak past it.

Being able to choose who to let in to your community is a fundamental part of being an actual country, after all.

And the State exists to run the rules-based order that is Law. That is, in fact, what the State is for.

But there’s no excuse for the cruelty.

The cruelty is neither necessary, nor actually useful, in the job of maintaining a State border and dealing with people who’ve made it past that border illegally. It’s very much not part of that job.

That job is merely an excuse for the cruelty that these people would be after regardless.

The cruelty is why the agents took that job, and it’s what their leaders have always wanted to do with the power of the State. Illegal immigration is merely the excuse they’ve chosen for normalizing this treatment of the population by the agents of the State.