Let’s Make Oregon ICE-Free
On October 14th, we celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, which honors the history and culture of Native Americans. On this day, it’s also fitting that we protest the violation of Indigenous communities caused by colonial borders. More than 20 tribal reservations are on U.S. borders, where indigenous peoples suffer the oppression of surveillance and racist border policing. When migrants and asylum seekers who speak Indigenous languages are detained, inadequate language services prevent them from fighting for their rights. Because of the U.S. family separation policy, many Indigenous migrant children will never see their parents again, and will likely never learn their own language or culture — a continuation of centuries of cultural genocide.
U.S. immigration policy has always been motivated by racism, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to Operation Wetback, to today’s targeted demonization, detention, and deportation of black and brown immigrants; so it follows that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies will harbor racism and violence. Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson writes that there “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP”. Children in detention report “being punched, shocked with Tasers, and denied food and medicine” and ICE detainees report sexual abuse. ICE workplace raids have been conducted to terrorize, workers have been segregated and targeted by race, and in raids, race has been used as “the sole criteria for harsher interrogations”.
Our borders are regions of persistent surveillance and racist policing because of immigration policy. For decades, courts have eroded Fourth Amendment rights and anti-profiling protections in the “border zone”, the region within 100 miles of a border. Journalist Will Parrish writes that “U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created an “atlas of surveillance” for technologies used along the Southern border, which include surveillance drones, surveillance towers, cell tower simulators, Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), networked cameras, and facial recognition software. ICE agents conduct searches in government and commercial databases that reveal intimate details of our lives: who we associate with, where we go to church, where we work. Systems that were promoted as “anti-terrorism” measures are now used against black and brown immigrants in the “border zone” and beyond as law enforcement and national security agencies expand their powers and deepen their cooperation.
Oregonians have expressed their vision of our state as a place of safety and fairness by passing sanctuary laws, but, while ICE agents have prowled around hospitals and courthouses, and technology is used to track and profile residents of Oregon, we must protest that we don’t have true sanctuary. Oregon cannot be a true sanctuary until we remove ICE from our state. Join us in the PDX Coalition to Close the Concentration Camps in creating an ICE-Free Oregon.
Racial Justice Working Group
Portland Democratic Socialists of America
