Radical Efforts to Hamstring Immigration Enforcement Intensify

FAIR Newsletter | Article 2 of 5 | October 2020 | Visit Our Newsletter Page | Full PDF Version 

America’s summer of discontent has seen demands by radicals to defund or abolish police departments across the country (and acquiescence on the part of some local politicians). But that doesn’t mean that they have forgotten about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – the first target of the anti-law radicals.

Abolish ICE is still a rallying cry for many of the same people who rioted on the streets of American cities this year. Now the anti-immigration enforcement radicals are opening a new front in their assault on U.S. immigration laws. In September, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a well-funded ally of the open borders radicals, spearheaded an effort to intimidate American corporations that do business with ICE and other immigration law enforcement agencies.

The ACLU’s targets in this effort are Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsivier, which produce legal research software that are indispensable tools for modern law enforcement departments. The ACLU and its allies are counting on corporate America’s willingness to appease boisterous radicals in the hope that they will harass someone else.

In announcing the ACLU’s decision to join the #NoTechForICE campaign, the group’s Northern California director Vasudha Talla explained, “Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier embody the burgeoning contradictions of technology companies that, in the same breath, claim to be in the business of public service, while they are enabling government agencies to engage in wildly unconstitutional tactics to arrest and incarcerate people in deadly conditions.”

Never mind that neither of these companies are “in the business of public service” – like all other companies, they’re in business to make profits for themselves and their shareholders – or that ICE’s mission is not only constitutional, but protects public safety and saves lives. The campaign to ‘cancel’ tech companies for conducting business with a federal law enforcement agency is disturbing and is part of a larger trend that has spread nationwide in recent years. In 2018, Amazon workers opposed the company’s ties with Palantir, a software firm that had a contract with ICE. That same year, protestors demanded that Salesforce, a cloud computing software company, end its ties with CBP due to its immigration policies.

While the ACLU was mounting a legal and public relations campaign to incapacitate ICE, street radicals who had turned their attention to defunding police departments, resumed their attacks on ICE. In mid- September, radicals mounted a series of violent protests (including some armed protesters who, thankfully, did not use them) in New York, causing damage to federal property in lower Manhattan and an Abolish ICE “protest” in Times Square that resulted in some 100 arrests. On the opposite coast, anti-ICE actions by radical activists also resumed, and turned violent.

What has become evident in the past few months is that long-running efforts to prevent enforcement of immigration laws, and sanctuary policies that accommodate the demands of anti-enforcement radicals, was not an end in itself, rather a starting point for a much wider assault on the rule of law in the United States.