The Spire

Ian Sykes ’28

Opinions Editor

DISCLAIMER: This article has been updated after publication. Due to privacy concerns, the attached image has been cropped to respect the privacy of those mentioned.

Yep, you read that right. Holy Cross brought ICE to campus.

As it has been exhaustively covered by other Spire writers and even some mainstream news outlets, Holy Cross’ Center for Career Development belligerently hosted representatives from the ICE’s HSI (Homeland Security Investigators) division to recruit students into their secret police conglomerate, which was met with vigorous repudiation by our campus community.

While representatives of Holy Cross (namely President Rougeau) and other apologizers of Holy Cross said that this was merely a recruiting event for the Department of Homeland Security, it was much more than that. I was one of the few people to actually attend the event, as I had registered for it prior, so I got to see what it was about first-hand.

It wasn’t FEMA. It wasn’t the Coast Guard. It sure as hell wasn’t NASA. It was ICE, and they didn’t care. If you are reading online, click here to see a picture I took of their slideshow that reveals such. For those reading the paper edition, it is exactly what you’d imagine—it says ICE on it. Their presentation wasn’t about recruiting for Homeland Security in general—it was about recruiting to work for ICE and its corollaries. Holy Cross hosted ICE.

Even though they muted everybody’s microphone and turned the chat off, I quippingly thanked the CCD and the recruiters in a Q&A question for going out of their way to host an agency that kidnaps innocent families and terrorizes our neighbors, and I excoriated them for hosting an event that so deeply disappointed large swaths of our campus community. They played it off, as you might imagine, by dissociating themselves from ICE, and trying to ameliorate their reputation by lauding themselves as an ethical law enforcement agency that protects the innocent and wronged.

This article is not one meant to disparage law enforcement—we all live in a society governed by laws and we need someone to keep them in effect. In fact, I find the rule of law to be so paramount to our society that one day, I hope to contribute to holding it together by being a lawyer or civil servant myself.

But ICE doesn’t care about the law.

The masked ICE gestapo that President Trump has unleashed on this country is happily acting with impunity, doing whatever they can to stake terror and fear into the hearts of people in America, immigrant or not. They are detaining people and sending them to decrepit detention facilities where their rights are violated, they are detaining citizens, they are terrifying schoolchildren, they are detaining people doing things the “right way”  at courthouses, and they managed to skirt the salary lapse of our most recent government shutdown by the mere virtue of them being the pricks that they are. Apparently, their campaign of making non-citizens (or anyone who is in this country who was not born here) terrified and wary of being in this country was too important. 

If you are about the rule of law, you should care about due process. If you care about due process, you might come to the conclusion that ICE is not giving people due process, and that America needs immigration reform. If you came to that conclusion, I’d agree with you—and I’d also add onto that by saying that Holy Cross should care too, right? We should care about immigrants getting due process. Our Jesuit mission and the Catholic faith asks us to look out for the marginalized, doesn’t it?

We just hosted an interfaith vigil for migrants earlier this month, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops just issued a writ large denouncement of ICE’s conduct. Hosting ICE conflicts so deeply with our Jesuit mission that it’s almost comedic. We all belong to a school that prides itself on holding values of acceptance and tolerance of the beleaguered in our society—so why then, in their right mind, would Holy Cross host ICE, an agency that has done so much harm?

This is a question that I cannot answer, but this is unacceptable. Holy Cross must stop willingly making itself complicit in this horror, and they must move forward knowing that our campus community will not stand for this irreconcilable molestation of our mission.

Featured image courtesy of Google Images