Suffolk Closeup: ICE creates a crisis

Came the news late last month: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement —ICE — had started renting office space in Woodbury, in Nassau County, “for up to 40 ICE attorneys … a move that is alarming advocates who see it as a sign the agency is ramping up its deportation campaign on Long Island,” said Newsday.

Reporter Bart Jones quoted Craig Padover, president of Hauppauge-based Aresco Management, owner of the building, saying: “There’s no ICE agents … no field operation of any kind,” he said. “It’s just a legal office.”

But space “for up to 40 ICE attorneys” is quite a contingent of ICE lawyers.

“The ICE expansion on Long Island,” the piece continued, came as “Democratic lawmakers in Congress are holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security as they demand reforms to ICE amid alleged abuse by agents.”

Long Island is not alone for ICE expansion. Wired magazine reported earlier last month that ICE “is carrying out a secret, rapid expansion of its physical footprint, involving over 150 new leases and office expansions across the United States.”

Last year, ICE more than doubled its number of officers and agents from 10,000 to over 22,000, becoming the largest federal police force. 

Regarding Suffolk County, Newsday investigative reporter Sandra Peddie wrote an article at the start of this month beginning: “Interview rooms with handcuff bars, holding cells and weapons storage areas are among the extensive renovations proposed to turn Internal Revenue Service office space” in Holtsville into an ICE “processing detention center.”

For many months now, there have been demonstrations throughout Suffolk and Nassau, and elsewhere across the U.S., protesting the activities of masked ICE agents in military-style tactical gear arresting people, only a small minority of whom have criminal records.

Kristi Noem, who has run ICE, was just fired from the post (and given another federal position) by President Trump. 

As a piece in The New York Times began: “Kristi Noem was not fired after federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two American citizens. She was not ousted when a chief judge in Minnesota said her immigration agency had violated more court orders than some federal agencies do in their entire existence … Rather, Ms. Noem was ousted shortly after she appeared to cross one of the few red lines of the Trump White House: She appeared to shift responsibility for her own political problems back to President Trump.”

“During a congressional hearing,” it noted, “Ms. Noem was asked if Mr. Trump had approved a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in which she was prominently featured … Ms. Noem responded, ‘We had that conversation, yes, before I was put in this position and sworn in and confirmed. And since then as well.”

However, Trump subsequently told Reuters: “I never knew anything about it.”

Her “comments,” said The Times, “suggested Mr. Trump had signed off on a massively expensive ad campaign that even some in her department found cringe-worthy — with Ms. Noem on a horse at Mount Rushmore.”

Still, even with Noem out at ICE, Stephen Miller, widely described as the architect of its activities, is still firmly ensconced in the federal government. 

As Rolling Stone magazine, in an article headlined, “The worst White House aide in history,” said: “The president’s most trusted adviser has pushed the country to the brink with his draconian and now tragically deadly policies. America has not seen anything like this in living memory. Miller has turned ICE into a de facto secret police force and unleashed them around the country … His conduct inside and out of the White House, where he serves as deputy chief of staff, has made him a fearsome adversary to any who oppose his extremist views … Miller has ushered in a domestic reign of terror like no other unelected official and in doing so has earned a place among America’s most loathsome characters,” said the piece by Sean Woods.

Another critical article about Miller has run in Politico, written by his own uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist. It was headed: “Primary Source. Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.” The subhead: “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”

“It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus,” he wrote. “Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms … the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebearers had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”

Here, “this family emerged from poverty … to become a prosperous, educated clan of … scholars, professionals, and most important, American citizens.”

“What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller?” asked Dr. Glosser. “Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister. I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew … who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country. I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses — the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents … been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

“The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the ‘America first’ nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited,” Dr. Glosser wrote, “his family would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol.”