In our names, and with our dollars, Federal immigration officials are force-feeding immigrants in response to at least one hunger strike. The force feeding is paid for with Federal tax dollars and administered by agents of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They force plastic nasal tubes down the throats of hunger-striking migrants during a hunger strike that has involved somewhere between 11 and 30 detainees. These hunger strikers have concluded that they have no other way to express their resistance to cruelty inside a Texas detention facility. ICE is force-feeding immigration detainees on hunger strike, Los Angeles Times Online (Associated Press story, January 31, 2019).
It is not reported however what training the ICE agents have in force feeding, if any.
Nor do we have any idea what training ICE agents get for this next story, reported by among others, Sarah Mervosh, ICE Created Fake School to Uncover Visa Fraud, New York Times, p. A19, Friday, February 1, 2019. In this story, ICE agents conducted what amounts to a "sting" operation to ensnare evil falsely documented migrants who applied to become students at a fake university set up by ICE itself.
Separate from the story of what training, once again, these ICE agents have in this kind of activity -- as distinct, say, from professional law enforcement operations conducted by the FBI -- there is another question: Who said that spending our tax money on ensnaring would-be students who applied to "the (fake) University of ICE," was better than spending our tax money on catching drug dealers, for example? Recently, Customs and Border Patrol disrupted the importation of drugs into the U.S., but ICE is not CBP.
So, to say again as the title of this article already suggested: Are these operations treats paid for by our tax dollars? Or are they unnecessary or low priority uses of our money?
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