1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

ICE is attempting to build a network of human warehouses across the country, frequently over community objections. We need to do whatever is in our power to keep them from doing so. One step we can take: banning public funds from going to the detention camp enablers. Any company that contracts with ICE to help run their warehouses should be barred from getting state contracts, receiving government subsidies or benefiting from special tax breaks. Anyone who is employed by these camps should be prevented from being employed by our government again. Please support efforts to make this law in our state. Trump’s deportation machine will not operate alone. They will need businesses to retrofit their human warehouses and to supply and maintain them. They will need local residents to fill staff positions. Anyone helping them function is making possible violence and dehumanization, civil and human rights violations and an assault on the values we hold dear. There should be consequences for that complicity. And creating those consequences will hopefully throw a wrench into the machine itself, preventing them from getting the support they are relying on. We know what goes on when ICE and CBP think we aren’t looking. We have heard of our friends and neighbors who’ve been snatched off the street being denied decent health care, shoved into overcrowded cells, being left to lie in feces and urine, being raped, being murdered. Ensuring that those who collaborate with that for a buck can’t profit off the taxpayers, too, is a very small thing, and perhaps a way to keep it out of our state entirely.