Behind tinted windows, ICE is watching

This commentary is by Devon Thomas, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ.

On Monday, Oct. 5, I joined Vermont’s clergy in attending a funeral service at the doors of the Williston Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. This service of remembrance was to recognize 98 people who were killed by ICE or died in its custody, according to a bulletin given out at the service, and to highlight a system of cruelty our governing administration is using against our migrant neighbors and fellow citizens to win political power.

​In our time, we are seeing fellow human beings martyred in America’s culture war. The funeral service at the Williston surveillance center showed me how human atrocity can be permitted in a society such as our United States. It did not halt ICE activities, as it was made clear ICE was aware of and had prepared for our protest. Nor did it grant any meaningful sense of closure and comfort to the families and loved ones of victims.

This service demonstrated the eerie, callous strategy of fear ICE uses to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans and American migrant communities. Because as I stood looking over the shoulders of my esteemed clergy colleagues, hidden behind tinted windows, ICE was there.

As mourners laid down bricks etched with the victims’ names, ICE was there. As mourners wept on the streets, silently, ICE was there. As clergy nailed shut the coffin, ICE was there, apparently unremorseful. The system was ready to do its job. To burst from behind closed doors with crowbars and hammers to smash the painful memorial we put at their feet. They tore apart the coffin and threw the bricks bearing the names of the victims into the back of a pickup truck to be carted off as trash. That trash held the names of 98 people who died, directly or indirectly, because of ICE. The oldest was 85; the youngest was three.

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​This funeral was a symbol, and as a person of faith, I believe symbols have meaning. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is part of us, as a people. It was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because we, as a nation, were hurt and scared, and we wanted to protect ourselves. For a time, it seemed this fear brought us together, but it also, subtly, tore us apart. We turned a blind eye to how we treated those we saw as different and a threat. We treated people with different religions, skin tones and cultural backgrounds as dangerous to us, and we turned away when other Americans began to target and violate the sacred commandment to love those whom God loves, as described in Matthew 22:37-39. At first, the violence was open. ICE invaded cities such as Los Angeles and Minneapolis, but now the violence is behind tinted windows, and we become complacent.

​As I write, ICE is organizing surges into migrant communities across the United States. This surge is happening silently, avoiding headlines and the attention of American citizens. It is implementing new and cruel methods of deportation and detention, sending migrants to countries where they have no connections or resources to survive, or confining people far from home in underresourced detention facilities.

Many Vermonters have never had to fear what lies beyond tinted windows. We have trusted law enforcement to protect us. That sense of security was a privilege many of our neighbors were never afforded. Now it is being stealthily stolen from the rest of us.

Our migrant neighbors are being targeted first, and it is our moral responsibility to ensure this violence does not go unseen, so that we might avoid the fate of the German theologian Martin Niemöller, who said, “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Behind tinted windows, ICE is watching.