Smith-Wade-El likens ICE officers to ‘slavecatchers’

By now, most Americans probably have gotten the memo that many Democratic officeholders dislike U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Lest anyone wonder just how much, Representative Ismail Smith-Wade-El (D-Lancaster) so specified in a recent e-newsletter to his constituents.

In a special February 3 edition of that missive, titled “ICE DEEP DIVE” [capitals in the original], the two-term progressive lawmaker wrote at length to denounce the federal agency. He couched his denunciations in the spirit of the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. With bold lettering, in the fifth paragraph of his jeremiad, he condemned ICE agents in especially severe language.

“The ICE agents are like the ghosts of 19th century slavecatchers who rounded up free and escaped enslaved alike to deport them down South,” he wrote. He repeated the same phrasing farther into his email, again in bold type: “With each action by DHS, the ghosts of 19th century slavecatchers who rounded up free and escaped enslaved alike to deport them down South are returning with force.” 

Other spiteful terms pervaded Smith-Wade-El’s message in which he called federal immigration law enforcers and “a personal militia” created by Republican President Donald Trump. The representative referred to federal immigration detention facilities as a “concentration camp system that is primarily targeting people of color and anyone who would seek to exercise their constitutional rights to protest.” 

The reference to such camps was also repeated.

“We must call [illegal-immigrant detention centers] what they are — concentration camps,” he wrote. “The allocation of $45 billion from the federal budget is for the sole purpose of creating concentration camps to hold immigrant people of color all across the United States.” Framing the issue as a danger to minorities across America, he declared, “Nowhere are we safe…” and “cruelty is the point.”

Policy objections he raised included the Trump administration’s practice of deporting some immigrants accused of serious crimes for imprisonment in nations with illiberal human rights records such as El Salvador. He furthermore lamented the increase in detentions and deportations of illegal immigrants that has taken place over the last year as well as the potential disuse of either administrative or judicial warrants in some cases.

At one point, Smith-Wade-El strongly suggested that millions of illegal immigrants should not be subject to detention or deportation.

“Mass deportation threatens to break up the 4.7 million households that are comprised of undocumented residents and US citizens or others with legal status,” he wrote. “ICE’s raids and abduction and detention of parents from their homes, workplaces and community spaces have left their children abandoned.”

Smith-Wade-El complained that immigration enforcement has gone to dangerous lengths, citing ICE agents’ fatal shootings last month of U.S. citizen protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. He characterized the killings as “murder” and worried that problems with ICE officers’ conduct will worsen with the reduction of their pre-deployment training from nearly five months to roughly two months.

Smith-Wade-El also delved into other topics he considered relevant, blasting the Trump administration’s removal of historical exhibits that recognize Black history and underscore America’s pre-Civil War history of slavery. 

“President Trump wants us to forget the world-changing sacrifices Black folk made to make this country more equal,” the representative wrote.

Kevin Harley, a Republican political consultant with Harrisburg-based Quantum Communications who lives in Lancaster, rebuked the legislator’s analogy likening ICE agents to slavecatchers as unseemly and ahistorical.

“Representative Smith-Wade-El’s comparison of ICE agents, federal officers enforcing federal immigration laws, to nineteenth-century slavecatchers is deeply inflammatory, grossly inaccurate, and profoundly divisive,” he said. “Equating law enforcement officers who uphold our borders and the rule of law with those who enforced human bondage trivializes slavery, one of our nation’s darkest chapters, and poisons public discourse at a time when unity is needed.”

The representative embraced numerous bills introduced by Democrats in the Pennsylvania General Assembly that pertain to this issue. They include restricting state appropriations for ICE activities, augmenting penalties for ICE officers convicted of wrongdoing, barring local police from cooperating with the agency, disallowing ICE officers to wear masks, tracking residents’ complaints against such officers, prohibiting the use of citizenship status as a factor in hiring, and letting people without Social Security numbers apply for driver’s licenses.

A bill Smith-Wade-El is himself sponsoring would create the Office of New Pennsylvanians to be “tasked with attracting, retaining, and embracing immigrants in our state.”

The anti-mask measure and others being discussed in the commonwealth — and at the federal level as part of current Department of Homeland Security funding negotiations — are controversial in light of recent increases in threats against ICE agents. Last month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, within which ICE operates, reported a recent 8,000-percent increase in death threats against ICE officers and a 1,300-percent increase in assaults on them.

Neither Smith-Wade-El nor the Pennsylvania House Democratic Caucus returned requests for comment.

Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.