Former ICE Chief Discovers Political Footballs Have Points, Finally
Thomas Sandweg, former acting director of ICE under Obama, told The Hill that the Trump administration used ICE as a 'political football.' One might wonder if Sandweg was simply blindfolded for the previous two decades. (Unless, of course, the ball only became 'political' when his team lost possession.) The agency, birthed from the post-9/11 'War on Terror' hysteria and expanded under both
Republican and Democratic administrations, has always been inherently political. Its very existence, and its mandate to detain and deport, is a political instrument of state power. This isn't a new phenomenon that magically appeared in 2017. Policies like family separation predate Trump, albeit less aggressively publicized, and mass deportations were a cornerstone of the Obama years — earning him
the moniker 'Deporter-in-Chief' from immigrant rights groups long before Trump was even *thinking* about building a wall. The Hill's dutiful transcription of Sandweg's 'revelation' simply reinforces the dangerous, convenient narrative that abusive immigration practices are an aberration, not an engineered feature of a system designed to control and exclude. It’s comforting to blame one
administration while ignoring the bipartisan legacy of weaponizing human misery for political gain.