Mainstream Media 'Discovers' Protests, Forgets History of ICE
Newsweek reported on Nick Sortor's call-out of a police chief after an arrest at an ICE protest, treating it as a newsworthy event. What they conveniently gloss over is that ICE agents, and their predecessors, have been terrorizing communities for decades. This isn't a new chief problem; it's a feature, not a bug, of an organization whose roots trace back to the racist Immigration and
Naturalization Service, notorious for raids, family separations—long before the 2018 'zero tolerance' policy made headlines. The "protest" itself, a direct response to a child detention center, only exists because the government continues to fund and enable policies tearing families apart, often citing 'national security' where human rights are clearly violated. The media frames incidents like
these as isolated events or clashes between individuals, rather than systemic consequences. It’s almost as if they want us to forget the history of state-sanctioned violence against immigrants, or the fact that the DHS, which oversees ICE, receives billions in taxpayer dollars annually (DHS budget for 2023 was $101.1 billion, per appropriations reports). The outrage isn't about one police chief;
it's about the entire apparatus. How many times must people protest state-sanctioned cruelty before the media stops presenting it as a surprise?