Who built this awful deportation machine

Our country has reached a new low. Last week, Pablo Villavicencio, the husband of a U.S. citizen and father of two U.S.-citizen daughters, was detained and placed on a fast-track to deportation while delivering pizza to a military base in Brooklyn.

This occurred when one member of this U.S. military base took active and unnecessary steps to collude with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with traumatic results for Pablo, his wife, his daughters and our city.

Immigration enforcement is terrorizing our communities, and the apparatus that is engaging in this terror is poised to engulf us if we don’t take concrete steps to curb its most devastating impulses.

But in order to do so, we need to understand its origin story. President Trump didn’t build this machine; he has simply weaponized it, with the help of willing partners in Congress and elsewhere.

It began in 1996 with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (also known as IIRAIRA). Ironically, this law was passed in response to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, an act committed by a U.S.-born, right-wing extremist, Timothy McVeigh.

IIRAIRA — yes, I know it’s not a nice acronym — created the ability to fast-track deportations, allowing for arbitrary and long-term detention. It expanded the grounds for mandatory detention and deportation, and removed important defenses against removal, which has had a devastating impact on long-term immigrants, including legal permanent residents.

This, combined with a littleknown federal law from 2009 called the Detention Bed Mandate — a quota which requires DHS to fill a minimum of 34,000 immigration detention beds each night — is fueling most of our country’s immigration detention frenzy. Of the 200 detention centers throughout the country, a little over 60% are managed by for-profit companies.

The two largest for-profit companies, GEO and Core Civica, experienced a boom in their bottom lines since the quota was implemented.

According to Grassroots Leadership, GEO saw an increase in their profits from $41 million in 2007 to $143 million in 2014, a 244% increase.

Core Civica, the larger of the two companies, saw its profits grow from $133 million in 2007 to $195 million in 2014. Over the last 15 years, Core Civica and GEO have spent over $32 million lobbying the federal government, which includes lobbying Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees federal contracts for immigration detention centers.

This toxic brew contributed to the detention and deportation from the United States of over 2 million human beings from 2009 to the present. Some say that this is the largest forced displacement of human beings since the transatlantic slave trade.

Fast forward to the election of Trump, whose advisers in his campaign and now at the White House are the most extreme anti-immigrant activists our country has seen in almost a century.

Under the guidance of these advisers, Trump signed the executive order “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” on Jan. 25, 2017. In addition to directing ICE to hire 10,000 immigration enforcement officers, more than doubling the already 8,000 officers that exist, this order broadly and dangerously expands immigration enforcement officers’ discretion in deciding whom to arrest and detain. The hateful tenor from the top toward immigrants, combined with Trump’s order and the laws mentioned above, has empowered individuals to trigger a chain of events that can lead to the kidnapping of a New Yorker in the middle of working to provide for his family, like Villavicencio.

And the final net effect is the emotional and economic devastation of his U.S.-citizen wife, his U.S.-citizen children and our community.

This is not an isolated case. I deal with dozens upon dozens of such human tragedies every month.

Immigrants’ rights organizations in New York City, including the organization that I run, have devised and implemented local policy recommendations that throw sand in the gears of this detention and deportation machine.

But without consistent pressure at the federal level, and change led by Congress, we will lose more New Yorkers — more fathers, mothers, friends and community members.

What kind of a country are we?