We may never know every detail of what drove a young man to scribble “ANTI-ICE” on bullet casings and then shoot three people, one fatally, at the ICE facility in Dallas over a week ago. It is undeniable, though, that this ugly deed occurred against a backdrop of intense criticism and condemnation of ICE employees.
To date, 25 ICE agents have been killed in the line of duty.
Anti-ICE animus has been festering for years. A New York Times report from six years ago entitled, “People Actively Hate Us: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis,” recounted incidents of border patrol agents being called “kid killer.” That rings a bell with those of us of a certain vintage. It evokes painful memories of cruel slanders like “baby-killer!” being hurled at soldiers coming home from Vietnam over 50 years ago.
The abusive, hateful treatment of ICE agents is every bit as vicious and unfair as were the abuses to which some of our GIs were subjected in the Vietnam years. The men and women of ICE, like the Vietnam veterans of yesteryear, put themselves at risk in service to their country by performing difficult, dangerous work in carrying out controversial government policies. As during the Vietnam War, leftists, who should be focusing on striving for policy changes in Washington, are instead abusing and threatening innocent people far down the chain of command. Some ICE employees are actually being treated even worse than GIs coming home from Vietnam: Their children have been verbally assaulted and there have been death threats against their families.
Note the wording of this response to the Dallas shooting by several ranking members of Congress: “No one in America should be violently targeted, including our men and women in law enforcement who protect and serve our neighborhoods, and the immigrants who are too often the victims of dehumanizing rhetoric.”
While properly denouncing violence and dehumanizing rhetoric, these members of Congress chose to refer only to rhetoric directed toward illegal immigrants while conspicuously neglecting to denounce the very widespread use of dehumanizing language against ICE agents.
Many on the left, including politicians, have smeared people working for ICE with obscene, inflammatory terms like “Gestapo” or “Nazi.” I have read and heard leftists asserting that ICE is where “bad people go to do bad things.” Reflect, for a moment, on the horrific bigotry of that calumny. Saying that everyone who works for ICE is bad is as cruelly untrue as saying that every person of a certain color or race is bad. Whatever happened to judging the individual instead of the group? One tragic consequence of the widespread dehumanizing anti-ICE rhetoric is that, according to the Department of Homeland Security, there has been “a more than 1000% increase in assaults against” ICE employees.
As with the Vietnam War, the immigration issue is divisive and complex. I would submit, though, that there are clearer signs of positive achievements in the struggle to regain control of immigration than there were during the Vietnam War. Examples: Sex-trafficking of children is being curtailed and some children are being reunited with their families in their countries of origin.
Are all ICE agents saintly? Of course not, although there have been heartwarming reports of agents using their own money to buy gifts for detained children. On the occasions that agents are overcome by stress, frustration, and anger at some of the viler criminals they have detained, and lose their cool and behave improperly, they should be subject to discipline — just as happens to police officers when they experience burnout and cross that line. On the whole, however, ICE agents have conducted themselves professionally, with far more self-restraint than their self-righteous attackers have shown.
Do some people suffer unjustly when detained by ICE? Yes, but the men and women of ICE didn’t choose it to be that way. ICE detention centers often are over-crowded. The blame for that falls primarily on illegal immigrants; if fewer had entered our country illegally, then detention centers wouldn’t be so crowded. And does ICE sometimes detain innocent people? Sadly, yes, and we pray for such errors to be minimal. It would be ideal if there were zero such mistakes, but unlike the leftists who throw tantrums over the reality that we don’t live in a perfect world and things don’t always go the way they want, we acknowledge that mistakes will happen. Again, though, this problem stems from the sheer volume of illegal immigrants, a volume attributable to the lax immigration practices of previous presidents.
There needs to be more compassion and respect for border patrol agents. Just as was the case for many Vietnam veterans, many ICE agents have risked their lives, served in hellish conditions, and seen friends injured in the line of duty. To date, 25 ICE agents have been killed in the line of duty, but judging from the hostile rhetoric floating around, it appears that some malevolent actors are eager to increase that death toll.
Every American, of whatever political persuasion, needs to realize that although border patrol agents are in the middle of the immigrant detention problem, they are neither the cause of the problem nor in a position to fix it. Let us neither denounce nor mistreat them. Let’s not repeat the ugliness and unfairness of what was done to our GIs five decades ago.
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