MLK Day Is The Perfect Moment To Reject ICE
MLK Day is the perfect day to demand ICE reform, as Donald Trump’s thugs assault liberty, human rights and freedom, operating like modern day slave catchers.
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice,” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
In other words, true peace includes fairness, equality, and addressing systemic wrongs, not just the silencing of conflict. It is not justice to use force to silence people. The silencing of conflict is not justice when the conflict comes from people demanding justice.
As Trump’s ICE thugs assault human rights and freedom, operating like slave catchers, our opportunity to honor and uphold MLK Day is especially poignant and important. We can do that in part this year by demanding reform of ICE.
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The history of the United States is replete with violence, theft, and murder of brown and black people. When we discuss the ideal of the more perfect union, we must acknowledge that long before Donald Trump destroyed what made America great, we — like every other empire — were built on the suffering of the oppressed.
Trump has made it his mission to regress the country back to a pre-Civil Rights era, rolling back at least 60 years of progress that was made thanks to civil rights heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The King Center writes of the incredible progress toward racial equality achieved under King’s leadership, “During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than the previous 350 years had produced. Dr. King is widely regarded as America’s pre-eminent advocate of nonviolence and one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history.”
ICE’s mission is supposed to be to conduct criminal investigations, enforce immigration laws, preserve national security, and protect public safety. Instead, under Donald Trump, they operate like a lawless band of slave catchers, funded with our tax dollars and given protection by the federal government.
SLAVE CATCHERS
Donald Trump has made the slave catchers “great again.” He’s done this by legalizing brutality and weaponizing the law against people of color and anyone who stands up for them by using ICE as a personal police force against Black and brown people, and any white people who stand up for them.
Slave catchers tracked, captured, and “returned” escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, operating through organized slave patrols and under laws like the Fugitive Slave Act.
The slave catchers, like Trump’s ICE, were a brutal system of control, fear, and violence.
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