In earlier times, ice was used to chill treats for royalty during hot summer days. Today, it’s used to cool the masses, serving as balm for nasty burns and welcome relief from sizzling heat.

But there’s another kind of ice that’s dreaded even in the hottest of summers. This one literally sends terrifying chills up the spine. It’s Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. It’s mission, while ostensibly reassuring, is actually quite frightening when read between the lines: “To protect America and uphold public safety ...by eliminating vulnerabilities that pose a threat to our nation’s borders."

To make a point, ICE recently arrested Elvira Arellano and deported her to Mexico . For five years, the 34-year-old mother lived in the shadows, mopping floors and cleaning toilets at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

In 2002, during a post-September 11 security sweep, she was picked up in a “no-match” raid and ordered deported for lacking legal immigration status. Apparently, her social security number wasn’t valid. That was the same year hundreds of Filipino airport screeners were laid off because they were not U.S. citizens - spurred by a national hysteria about immigrants being “potential terrorists.”

Horrified about being separated from her 8-year-old US-born son, Arellano sought and was given sanctuary by the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago’s Humboldt Park . Mother and son lived in the church for a year. During that time, she became an outspoken advocate for all undocumented immigrants.

One Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, heavily-armed ICE officers arrested and deported Arellano, forcibly separating her from her son who was left behind. She knew the risk of coming out of the shadows.

Sure enough, ICE was there to “eliminate” yet another potential terrorist threat. This country - sweet land of liberty - can now heave a sigh of relief. Never mind that all she ever really wanted (like most of us) was to secure a better life and future for herself and her son - even if it meant doing the kind of job most Americans refuse to do.

Filipinos have not been spared the cold treatment either. Since 1996, more than 4,000 Filipinos have been deported. According to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs, Filipinos have experienced the greatest increase in deportation among all Asians since September 11, 2001.

With Congress failing to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year, Homeland Security (HSA) has found a good excuse to get rid of more potential terrorist threats. HSA is now going after employers who are harboring workers whose social security numbers don’t match with the official record. Thousands of people with no-match numbers are expected to fade deeper into the shadows. They know that the ICE men will come and get them. GRIM REAPER. In his play, “The Iceman Cometh’, American playwright Eugene O’Neill employs the Iceman as the primary symbol. The title recalls a biblical story about the coming of the Savior: “But at midnight there was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh." (Matthew 25:6). In O’Neill’s play, however, the messianic figure (Hickey) does not bring salvation, but death. As one of the characters put it, “Death was the Iceman Hickey called to his home."

The Iceman in this play is the modern Grim Reaper, stalking a world that has become a dark and cruel place. As one reviewer noted, “Despair is a constant presence, love only an illusion and death something to which one looks forward. Relief comes in pipe dreams - groundless hopes for a future that will never arrive."

The fictions that spawned today’s grim realities have not made us safer.
The war mongering, the xenophobic hysteria, the daily toll of dead and dying, the warrantless surveillance, the illegal abuse and torture of prisoners, the extraordinary renditions and now the ICE raids - all these evoke a dark and cruel place. Not on stage, but here in America.

For more than a year now, ICE have carried out well-publicized immigration raids as a way of pressuring Congress to pass stronger border security measures and institute a guest worker program to satisfy Corporate America’s cheap labor needs. A just, humane and comprehensive immigration system was never on their mind. Local authorities in various counties (i.e. Loudon, Prince William) across the country are now taking their cue from the ICE men - from shutting down day labor centers to denying social services to undocumented immigrants. Responding to Federal immigration reform inaction, states are resorting to draconian measures that could easily lead to civil and human rights violations.

9/11 AFTERMATH. In his novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about a distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. In the book, the character of Col. Alfonso Buendia was facing a firing squad when his mind reached back to that moment when the sight and touch of ice gave him a sense of what it meant to be alive.

But our discovery of ICE - or its discovery of us - is far from comforting. It confronts us now with a menacing glare, an instrument of state designed to freeze us into numbness, thus rendering the very “vulnerabilities that threaten our borders” effectively removed and erased.

Years from now, our memories of this summer will not be so easily emptied by time’s passage or the promises of political leaders claiming to have the remedies for the very ills they have inflicted. We would have passed on to the next generation the legacies of our fervent hopes for a better life and a brighter future - an aspiration immigrants like Elvira Arellano and millions like her who have come before - you and I included - such that our children and grand children will fear and despair no more.

As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, let’s not fall once again for the blandishments of demagogues who want us only to grieve over our national wound while ignoring the wounds of others around the world. To invoke imagined threats to justify the ICE men will only foster deeper hatreds and cause more pain.
In a farewell note, Gabriel Garcia Marquez put it best: “My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show."

That would be a better use of ice.
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