Student ICE Protests Highlight Decade of Dehumanization Tactics
📰 THE STORY: In 2018, Newsweek reported on American students organizing a nationwide school walkout to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) due to the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' policy at the border, which led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents. 🔍 WHAT THEY'RE NOT TELLING YOU: Historical Context: The 'zero tolerance' policy, while
intensified, built upon a decades-long framework of immigration enforcement that ramped up significantly after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the wake of 9/11. Its predecessor, the INS, was already notorious, but post-9/11 fear-mongering led to an exponential increase in detention capacity and deportations, with over 3 million people deported by 2018, many under the
Obama administration. The militarization of the border under programs like Operation Gatekeeper (1994) in California, which pushed migrants into more dangerous terrain, set the stage for these later abuses. Double Standard: While the mass separation of children at the US border rightly drew outrage, Western media largely ignored or downplayed similar instances of state-sanctioned trauma in other
contexts — for example, the widespread disappearance of children indigenous to Canada and the USA through residential schools and forced adoption policies (as documented by the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada). Or the systematic destruction of families and displacement of Palestinians since Nakba in 1948, which has seen generations displaced. The outrage, it seems, is selective