Searching for God # 151

 From the website of Alex Padilla, U.S. Senator from California, October 5, 2026, in a piece entitled ‘Padilla, Booker, Blumenthal Urge Mullin to Immediately Recall ICE Officers Hired During Hiring Surge’ we find: 

Republicans poured $75 billion into ICE through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and then added another $38.5 billion more this summer, allowing ICE to hire thousands of new officers with incentives including a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and up to $60,000 in student-loan repayment. To meet the hiring demand, the agency lowered hiring standards and cut corners on background checks, raising concerns about unqualified and poorly trained armed officers conducting immigration arrests. Several incidents involving death and violence led to increased calls for oversight by Senate Democrats. ICE is now reportedly preparing for a second hiring surge of 5,000 employees, including deportation officers, before the end of the year – roughly a 17% increase in three months – without having completed background investigations for thousands of hires from the first surge. The letter follows recent New York Times reporting detailing a formal whistleblower complaint to the DHS Office of Inspector General from a 17-year ICE veteran overseeing background investigations. The complaint alleged that job offers were extended to candidates without completion of basic fingerprint, identity, or credit checks and were evaded by political appointees. In another whistleblower disclosure to the Senate, a former ICE Academy instructor and agency attorney disclosed that ICE cut training hours on use of force, firearms safety, and the constitutional rights of the public during this same period. According to another New York Times report, 7,500 active officers with arrest authority hired during last year’s surge are still awaiting the full background investigations required for their positions. “DHS cannot allow officers whose backgrounds were never properly vetted, and who may never have received adequate use-of-force training, to remain on the streets with arrest authority and firearms,” concluded the Senators. 

Clearly, it is not only the ‘mission’ of ICE, but also the methods of ICE that rank as reprehensible. Recruitment bonuses, little to no vetting, political appointing, abbreviated training hours on the use of force, firearms safety, and constitutional rights of public citizens...and the whole recruiting surge based on an underlying premise to increase substantially the deportation of detainees. 

And then there is this from the Prison Policy Initiative, prisonpolicy.org, in a piece entitled, ‘Cooperation with ICE doesn’t stop community arrests: New data on the results of state strategies,’ by Jacob Kang-Brown and Brian Nam Sonenstein, October 6, 2026: 

The Trump administration has spent its second term pressuring state and local officials to collaborate with the federal government’s mass deportation campaign. The reason why is simple: the administration cannot hope to get close to their arrest and deportation goals without the help of local law enforcement. Following the killings of Ale Pretti and Renee Good by ICE agents in Minnesota in early 2026, the administration sent out so-called ‘border czar’ Tom Holman to make a deal: ICE agents would redeploy elsewhere if governments gave ICE access to people held in jails or deputized police to serve as federal agents. However, our analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project shows this was a false bargain: ICE has spent 2026 arresting people en masse at their homes, in their neighborhoods, at their jobs, and elsewhere in their communities—regardless of whether their states collaborated with or resisted Trump’s mass deportation agenda. But we also find that state policy has nonetheless made a measurable impact on the scale and type of arrests ICE has been able to make, and states that have refused to comply have made headway in blunting the surge in arrests. This is especially true when it comes to arrests from ‘detainers,’ which ICE uses to ask local law enforcement to voluntarily assist in handing over someone already in jail instead of releasing them. Detainer-related arrests require less effort and fewer resources than ICE raids and occupations, and have been a crucial tool for ensnaring criminalized people in the administration’s project. We found that states that have refused detainers have seen fewer arrests overall.....Troublingly, our analysis also shows ICE continues to use the ‘federal criminalization loophole’ to circumvent laws meant to prevent police from participating in immigration enforcement, expanding the number of people detained on federal immigration charges by 25% since the end of the Biden administration. To close this loophole, states and localities will need to go further and limit collaboration with the U.S. Marshalls—not just ICE. 

And from the same report: 

ICE is using detainers to turn local law enforcement into its volunteer jailers: Shocking images of ICE agents snatching people from cars and workplaces have rightfully fueled national outrage, but a less-visible similarly devastating offensive has taken place behind jail walls. While the Trump administration has insisted it’s focused on targeting the ‘worst of the worst,’ in reality most people in jails facing ICE detainers are being held pretrial and have not been convicted of a crime; most who have been convicted do not have serious criminal records. Nonetheless, our analysis shows that local jails play an essential role in boosting ICE arrest numbers through their voluntary compliance with these detainer requests. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org) today issued a press release with the headline: New ACLU Report Sounds the Alarm on How Trump Administration Mass Deportation Agenda is Eroding Democracy. It reads in part: 

Notably, the report categorizes the dizzying array of abuses into three major categories which often overlap: 

• Attacks on civil rights and liberties 

• Attacks on democratic checks and balances 

• Attacks on multiracial, pluralistic democracy. 

‘From the cancellation of Congressionally mandates protections like Temporary Protection Services (TPS) to the arrest of non-citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights, the Trump administration has repeatedly violated bedrock democratic principles under the guise of immigration enforcement,’ said Sarah Mehta, deputy director of immigration policy and government affairs at the AVLU. ‘As this administration has shown, no one is safe from its extreme mass deportation agenda. Our elected officials—and the state of our democracy—cannot afford to allow this lawlessness to continue. The time to act is now.’ 

Last night Rachel Maddow on MS Now, detailed a series of protest marches, some she called pilgrimages, from ICE detention centers, for example miles outside Los Angeles into the heart of the city, to draw attention to these virtual concentration camps. Those marches, extending as they are proposed to do into days, given the distance (one is 96 miles, another in Oregan of 48 miles), are being joined by Roman Catholic nuns, (despite the silence and refusal of the church to support them, as well as by several clergy of various sects and denominations. And while we are not inclined to agree with the state official in Utah who has declared the vote “sacred,” we do concur that the non-violent protest with force of the extraordinary abuse of power by the current U.S. administration falls congruently and legitimately within the insights once issued by Leo Tolstoy in ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You.’ 

Here is a brief excerpt focusing on the nature and meaning and purpose of religion: 

And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science imagines it, a manifestation which at one time corresponded with the development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case grasp the essence of religion....the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of foreseeing and point out the path of life along which humanity must move in the discovery of a new theory of life, as a result of which the whole future conduct of humanity is changed and different from all that has been before. (pps. 87-88) 

If ever there were an opportunity for the world to begin to ‘foresee’ the path along which humanity must move, given the multiple boiling cauldrons of threats in our collective faces, that opportunity is also within our collective reach. And, not only do we all know that none of our threats will be successfully met with the military, nor with the tariffs and economic manipulation, nor with propaganda, nor with the extreme advances of cyber-security and AI. The ‘theory of the practice of the future’ refined slightly by Jurgen Moltmann’s ‘theology of hope’ which, given absolutely no evidence of the promise or hint or even vision of hope, is what emboldens us to continue to hope.