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The stated mission of ICE prioritizes anti-terrorism, immigration and border enforcement, customs regulation, cyber-security, and disaster prevention and management. Operationally, the agency quickly shed any pretense of being the frontline force defending national security against internal threats. Instead, it emerged as become an overt instrument of repression of working-class immigrants.
This contradiction of mission versus function led researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), one of the nation’s top immigration enforcement data collection centers, to conclude in 2007:
Despite the repeated statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters.
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