Immigration

ICE Retracts Threat To Stop Illegal 'Ideas' at the Border

The pro-censorship post was quite the Freudian slip from the Trump administration.

|

ICE agents monitoring a protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Miramar, Fla. | Orit Ben-Ezzer/ZUMA Press/Newscom
ICE agents monitoring a protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Miramar, Fla. May 19, 2017. (Orit Ben-Ezzer/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

The Trump administration insists that its crackdown on pro-Palestinian students is not an attack on freedom of thought. "This is not about free speech. This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in defense of detaining Columbia University protest spokesman Mahmoud Khalil in March.

But on Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that its job was to stop ideas along with people. "If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it's our job to stop it. People. Money. Products. Ideas," said the since-deleted social media graphic.

After the statement sparked an uproar, ICE quickly claimed that it was a mistake. "That post was sent without proper approval and should never have been shared," ICE Media Operations Unit Chief Mike Alvarez tells Reason via email. "'Ideas' should have said 'intellectual property.'"

Mistake or not, the post reflects the Trump administration's philosophy that free speech stops at the border. The same day as the ICE post, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would begin screening foreign students' and immigrants' social media accounts for "antisemitic ideologies" or "terrorist sympathizers."

A couple of days before, the State Department submitted its memo on Khalil's detention to the courts. Although Rubio concedes in the memo that student activism is "otherwise lawful," he argues that the presence of anti-Israel student protesters "undermines U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States."

In other words, it is about free speech. By removing foreigners based on the content of their words, the Trump administration is hoping to change, by force, the range of ideas that Americans can hear. ICE's graphic was a more honest restatement of the position the administration has spent the past few months dancing around.

Decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that part of free speech is letting Americans hear ideas that they're interested in hearing, even from foreigners. In 1964, Congress ordered the postmaster general to search mail from abroad and detain material that lawmakers deemed "communist political propaganda." The next year, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law, after an American publisher sued for his right to receive Chinese publications.

Justice William O. Douglas argued in the case that "to control the flow of ideas to the public" would be inherently "at war with the 'uninhibited, robust, and wide-open' debate and discussion that are contemplated by the First Amendment."

The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of nonprofits that includes the American Civil Liberties Union and Association of American Publishers, channeled Douglas in its response to the ICE post.

"No idea is illegal. It is breathtakingly absurd and outrageous to even suggest that ideas need to be policed. And that the promise of the First Amendment—the freedom to think freely—is the bedrock of American values. This post subverts everything our constitution stands for," the coalition wrote.