ICE Should Compensate Advocates Who Are Spending Their Own Time & Money Reuniting Separated Families
Last night (Wednesday, December 2), the Department of Justice released data that could allow attorneys and advocates to finally reunite families that were separated under the Trump administration’s heinous family separation policy.
Many parents that were separated from their children in 2017 and 2018 have still not been reunited. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told reporters: “Not only have they not been helping, but they have been withholding this data.” We don’t know yet if new data such as phone numbers that were released yesterday prove to be helpful.
On the one hand, we should applaud all of the people who have worked to bring families back together. Not just the ACLU, but grassroots organizations, immigration attorneys, social workers, and many others whose names we may never know.
But on the other hand, we should be outraged not only at the family separation policy, but the fact that these organizations and people have had to spend enormous time and money to do a job that should have fallen squarely on the government’s shoulders.
Nevermind the ethical issues for a moment, there is an important economic critique of immigration enforcement that I don’t think is articulated clearly or often enough. From ICE raids at chicken factories in Mississippi, to family separation, to the everyday travesty of justice that is the immigration court system, the US deportation machine offloads tremendous economic burdens onto working Americans.
Working people pay a literal price for ICE’s obsession with deportation. Social services networks, health care systems, and schools share the financial cost when spouses, parents, or children are deported. Families, churches, and communities are forced to raise thousands of dollars in attorney fees and filing fees when immigrants are put into the deportation process. Immigrants in detention centers are gouged for phone calls and cajoled into working for nickels to mop the floors.
The reality is, ICE is a Big Government program that starts with consuming over $8 billion in taxpayer money and then goes on to extract a premium from communities across the country through a huge variety of secondary expenses absorbed by individuals and institutions.
Should the government be forced to compensate attorneys and advocates for their time and resources spent reuniting families? You bet. Every. Last. Penny.
It’s time that we start to understand the economic toll that we pay for ICE’s irresponsibility and elevate this as an important discussion point. It’s not just the right thing to do, I also suspect that many Americans who aren’t moved by ethical arguments could get on board with this critique.
By the way, the NBC news article for was co-written by Jacob Soboroff, who is a great person to follow on Twitter if you want to get breaking news about immigration.
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