It has been widely agreed on that our country is waging a war on immigrations. The sick part of this is that according to ICE, they are detaining people that LOOK like an immigrant and based upon that, are arresting American citizens. A clear violation of the 4th Amendment. I feel like no one is irate enough about this.

On January 5th, 2018 the Trump administration asked congress for $18 billion dollars to build 700 miles of new and replacement barriers on the Southern border between the United States and Mexico. By 2027, the Trump administration wants 970 miles of the 2,000 mile border covered, already having 654 miles of the border barricaded. Spending $33 billion over 10 years for new border security, including $5.7 billion for towers, surveillance equipment unmanned aerial vehicles over a 5 year span, $1 billion for road construction and maintenance over 5 years, and $8.5 billion for 5,000 new border patrol agents and other personnel over a 77 year span.

So many new changes on types of people that at some point described our own families as we are all immigrants unless we are Indigenous People. I can’t help but cringe at this hypocrisy, however, I am willing and able to see these changes analytically.

And so, NPR wrote a piece in which numbers from the US Department of Homeland Security indicates that from December 5, 2018, “from the start of the Trump administration through the end of September, the number of immigrants seized in the interior of the country rather than at the border – many of them wrenched from their families and communities – increased by 42 percent compared to the same time period in 2016. Immigration arrests of people with no criminal convictions nearly tripled compared to approximately the same time period in 2016.” Children being ripped away from their families, stuck in a new country all by themselves, the country against them.

It’s the phrase “arrests of people with no criminal convictions nearly tripled” that, again, makes me cringe. This phrase are the ICE stories we see of a non-police branch of our country assuming guilty until proven innocent, and even then I’m not convinced innocent people get to go free.

In violation of the 4th Amendment, ICE’s Secure Communities (“S-Comm”) program  requires that “the fingerprints of every person arrested by the police are shared with ICE at the moment they are booked into police custody.”

This is a huge problem that america cannot ignore any longer. Deportation is not a joke and it is not something we should be proud of, we are all human beings, and so we should treat each other that way.