Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is wrecking havoc on the streets of ordinary Americans. As part of a broader Department of Homeland Security (DHS) project, ICE is acting like a paramilitary force hell bent on a project of enforced ethnonationalism. While engaged in nominally in enforcement of immigration laws, the agency is also expanding the government’s surveillance state, routinely ignoring court orders
Some are now arguing what ICE is doing our inheritance from the war on terror. With ICE’s uses of detention centers as quasi-black sites, the creation of extra-legal justification and more, the argument is that what ICE is doing cannot be understood without realizing it’s the U.S. War on Terror brought home.
My conversation today is with Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security author and journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. He shared in the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism for Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks to The Guardian.
In this interview, we discuss the depths of the core thesis, the racialzed component of ICE’s mission, why the agency cannot be reformed, how the media should cover this moment and more.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:57 Reaction to ICE’s escalating operations
03:53 The War of Terror as a governing to paradigm explained
07:24 Was War of Terror tactics borne of desire to create parallel system?
09:44 ‘Demand’ for the war in Iraq
13:07 Was there 9/11 Response that wouldn’t have created the War on Terror?
17:20 Did the War on Terror create or merely enable Trumpism?
20:24 ICE’s evil just Stephen Miller or the Trumpist project?
23:46 Does ‘boomerang theory’ explain ICE?
27:09 ICE operates from a place of legal exception
31:32 How America’s response to Timothy McVeigh explains how we prosecute state violence
35:26 How does race factor into the War on Terror and ICE?
41:00 The absence of “Don’t Tread On Me’ acolytes amidst ICE terror
43:20 Confederate social forces becoming ‘authentic’ American identity
47:58 Spencer Ackerman on his newsletter
48:41 Why ICE cannot be reformed
54:02 Understanding the Democratic party’s role in the War on Terror
58:30 What the media gets wrong about ICE coverage
