Garrison Davis

asserting that the Trump administration is completely 100% unbounded by law, also ignores the fact that federal and immigration courts are still in active terrain of battle.

While the administration has repeatedly ignored courts and judges' orders, people have also been successfully released from ICE custody by filing habeas corpus petitions.

It's not that I believe in the personal integrity of ICE agents, far from it, but this concept of ICE as this vague fascist death squad that will go after any group the Trump administration hates turns ICE into this abstract idea rather than a single material agency with concrete motivations and limits that leaves a wake of destruction in the course of achieving their purpose.

ICE does raids where there's high concentrations of immigrant workers.

The targeting isn't actually random.

ICE is going after undocumented immigrant workers, sometimes using skin and language as a rough proxy to do document checks.

To assert the inevitability of ICE going after trans people, people invoke comparisons to the Nazis.

And as rhetorically useful as it is to equate ICE to a modern version of the Gestapo,

This is not Germany in the 1930s.

ICE is a contemporary version, but the current world is different.

The chronically online doomer may retort, but once ICE is done with immigrants, then they will go after trans people.

After all, what's the purpose of increasing ICE's staffing and funding or building a network of detention camps across the country if not to use them against the undesirables?

There's about 15 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and about 3 million trans people.

That's five times as many undocumented immigrants than trans people.

Last year, ICE reached a record high number of deportations, over 600,000.

This number still leaves millions and millions of undocumented immigrants.

ICE will never be quote-unquote done with immigrants.

This logic again reduces ICE to this vague, abstract evil and fails to consider the purpose of ICE and why it currently operates as it does.

So what motivates ICE?

Do individual ICE agents share the same motivations as the agency itself or the people directing it?