Endgame for Illegal Immigrants
DHS Sheds Cheery Façade with Deportation Program
By Lucas Power
Posted: 03/27/2007


A recent Gallup Poll states that only 1 in 4 Americans favor deportation over other immigration proposals such as working to obtain citizenship or staying on temporary visas. So what is the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doing rounding up people in dragnets and setting them down a path to deportation?

The following is from an Op-Ed piece in the Boston Globe:

It's a 10-year campaign to track down and deport all the immigrants to the United States who are living and working here without proper documentation, by the year 2012.

Let's be clear: This means expelling roughly 12 million people.

We've seen Endgame at work already in other parts of the country, with ICE conducting more and bigger raids. In December, for example, the agency raided Swift & Company slaughterhouses in six states, arresting about 1,300 workers and deporting roughly half of them.

Already, on any given day, ICE holds approximately 26,000 people in detention. And on March 6, we got a chance to see Endgame at work on a large scale here in Massachusetts. We saw the human cost of an operation directed at 361 people.

The pace of raids will need to accelerate, however, in order to meet Endgame's aggressive deportation goals over the next five years. We'll see more of the surreal New Bedford-style tactics: arrest first, ask questions later. We'll hear more stories of the human suffering that results from such tactics: of nursing babies who become dehydrated when separated from their mothers, of 7-year-olds frantically looking for their missing mothers, and of minors being flown to distant states without adequate protection.

We'll see more people's rights trampled, and more families torn apart by ICE's race to deport in order to meet Endgame's staggering goal.

Read the full story here.

The actual report is here. There’s a link to it in the Boston Globe story, but PINE is all about serving it up on one of those handy, compartmentalized trays, for the people, so there.

Regardless of your stance on immigration, this carries an ominous tone. Not since the Multi-State Terrorist Information Exchange or MATRIX has a program been so unfortunate and unfortunately named. Well, Operation Iraqi Liberation beats it, but nevertheless… An endgame is when there are only a few pieces left on the board. Endgames also favor an aggressive king.

Now that we’re all on the same page when it comes to my intellectual ability to look up chess terms, let’s press on.

The Endgame report cites the use of existing detention facilities in the massive arrests. Last I heard prisons and jails were all bursting at the seams with non-violent offenders. So just where do these people expect to cram all of the immigrants?

Fortunately, our government had the foresight to build large prison camps just in case of a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or some kind of immigration problem. Lookit: here and here.

To be fair, the government didn’t build them. That illustrious position went to none other than Kellogg Brown and Root.

That’s not really the point, though. The big deal here is the very real upheaval that comes from gathering up thousands of people and carting them off, first to a prison and then to whichever IMF impoverished nation they came from. There are some who argue this is a basic “rule of law” issue. An illegal immigrant is precisely that, illegal. That fails to address the fact of 400,000 low skill jobs for 5000 visas per year. And has anyone bothered to calculate the cost of removing that 12 million from the workforce? Do we have people to fill these low-skill, low-wage positions? If we can’t employ people on a slaughterhouse killing floor at a sub standard rate of pay, then Wendy's value menu is history. Forget peak oil, the end of cheap beef will cripple this country.

All that aside, it isn't that bad, so long as they are only rounding up immigrants, petty criminals, and enemy combatants. The rest of us have nothing to worry about.

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Deporting illegals is one thing I am willing to pay extra taxes for. When Mexico runs out of oil all hell is going to break out as the whole country is going to head to El Norte just as TSHTF in the U.S. from Peak Oil. We will need those camps on the border to stem the invasion as well as to deal with our own rabble. Better get prepared.
Posted by: RW James, Mar 28, 2007 02:25 PM
There are two million more unemployed U.S. Citizens than there are working Illegal Immigrants - U.S. Gov. & Pew Hispanic Center Statistics. Farm Labor makes up no more than 7% of the cost of food - The Rational Radical & other publications. New Bedford, MA - 9.4% unemployment rate - thousands out of work - yet company hires hundreds of Illegal Workers (Illegal Immigrants). When the Illegal Workers are removed so that U.S. Citizens can work Law Enforcement gets the disrespect - not the Illegal Workers or the Employer. Go figure.
Posted by: B. Schulz, Mar 28, 2007 09:50 AM

http://pine-magazine.com/content.php?id=627