Resources for Resistance No. 10: ICE and the Sociological Imagination
Whence comes this capacity to terrorize?
“It’s been a minute” since I’ve written here. I’m not going to mire myself in guilt about that, but simply endeavor to resume. Suffice it to say that I’m becoming ensconced in a new life in Midcoast Maine, in a new community, with new relationships, new connections, and new work.
Much already has been written on the legal and logistical aspect of the Trump regime’s deportation schemes. The U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS was established in November 2002, by an act of Congress signed into law by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. It opened its doors in March 2003, conveniently in time for the initial US invasion of Iraq, I might add. The department and the agency are now seen as forces of nature, but it wasn’t always thus.
Into the new agency went components of immigration, intelligence-gathering and disaster management; DHS also swallowed the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. “The process for deciding which existing agencies would be moved to DHS, and which ones would stay in other departments, was haphazard at best,” wrote journalist Dara Lind. A former high-level DHS official likened it to a “shotgun marriage” among agencies “some of whom still don’t recognize the department as a department.” The result was poor management and accountability, even as the agency’s budget and staffing continued to balloon.
The sprawling agency was intended to be united around a mandate to “protect the American homeland” — a framing that begs the question, protect from whom? The answer became clear over the last two decades: Activists and peaceful protestors, immigrants with deep community and family ties, people seeking refuge in this country, non-citizens encountered on the high seas, anyone going through the airport. In truth: Potentially anyone.
This overbroad and elastic mandate was always a danger to civil liberties. Back in 2002, we warned that DHS would reach into every nook and cranny of our lives and liberty. We called the initial blueprints for the agency constitutionally bankrupt.
— Naureen Shah, Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division,
ACLU National Political Advocacy Division “20 Years Later, It’s Time to Overhaul the Department of Homeland Security” November 23, 2022 ACLU.org
Democratic administrations had over half the lifespan of the agency and department to shape their execution. Democratic majorities in Congress for some of that time had opportunities to reshape them. As I’m never one to facilely accept a false equivalence between the two parties, I'm nevertheless compelled to account for the ease and speed with which ICE under DHS has stepped to the Trump regime’s authoritarian agenda of what I would term ordinary renditions irrespective of citizenship status or due process. They may be termed “renditions” precisely because they are not “deportations” following due process, and “ordinary” as in commonplace, in contrast to the so–called “extraordinary renditions” that took place after 9-11 and during the Iraq war.
ICE was transformed into an instrument for ordinary renditions precisely because the way it was structured in forming DHS gave it the structural capacity to be so.
We are rightly horrified by the terrorization inherent in these human rights abuses, and angry at the abrogation of the Constitution in the flaunting of due process to accomplish them. However, in keeping with “the emotional turn” in social movement theorizing, we should pause to step momentarily outside of them for a deeper understanding. At least three things are true of emotions in this view: they are collective; they unite the inner and outer worlds, in an often beneficial cognitive short–circuiting; and they may be used strategically for action mobilization.
This understanding is yet another example of the utility of the sociological imagination, which I champion as a matter of collective benefit, and admittedly, self–interest.
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.
The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.…
— C. Wright Mills, “The Promise,” Chapter 1 of The Sociological Imagination (1959)
Understanding that ICE and DHS did not appear de novo, and that Democratic administrations allowed them to persist largely unchallenged shows the delicate interplay of culture and social structure in the current moment. It also allows us to consider strategically how the democratic republic may be preserved by effectively challenging unaccountable power, and restructuring it when the authoritarian regime is ended. For it will end, by our hands, or those of our successors.