Burlington council votes

This week, the town council in Burlington (where the Massachusetts ICE facility resides) passed a resolution condemning the detention center.

In short, the detention center, which sits just across from the Burlington Mall, has held detainees for days and weeks at a time, in violation of the building’s original purpose (administrative desk work).

This resolution, while itself mostly symbolic in nature, aims to raise awareness in a few key ways:

  • It’s says that Burlington itself as a local government does not support the federal-level actions of ICE
  • Raises awareness about possible building code and human rights violations
  • Keeps the facility in the media cycle
  • Calls upon state politicians to act
  • Puts eyes on the agency going forward to ensure more people are tracking compliance

While this action itself doesn’t directly hinder ICE, it’s an interesting way local governments have found ways to probe for cracks in the armor to drive a wedge through.

Rhetorical takeaways

One of the Town Meeting Members, after the vote, wrote on social media:

We wanted to get people on record with how they voted (or abstained). Once we called for the roll call though, the people who voted no walked out. Their leaving, on top of the others who had already left to avoid voting (or for whatever other reasons) left us without a quorum. Once we realized a roll call would show no quorum, we rescinded the request in order to preserve the favorable vote. Had we gone forward with it, with no quorum established the vote would have been invalid and we would’ve had to come back Wednesday to do it again (hopefully with a quorum, but potentially a whole mess).

I think this is a key point: those who voted against the measure didn’t stick around to justify their vote. They would have rather impeded the measure (against the majority’s will) than try to develop and defend a stance on the record.

In the past, I’ve talked to conservatives about the role of ICE in Massachusetts. In summary, their position looks something like this:

Enforcing immigration law is a basic responsibility of any legitimate government, even a limited one. Supporting small government doesn’t mean opposing all enforcement, it means focusing government on its essential duties, like securing the border and upholding the rule of law. While no agency is perfect and individual misconduct should be addressed through the courts, isolated incidents prove systemic failure. In a country governed by laws, even federal agencies can be held accountable through legal channels, and when that happens, it shows the system is working. Defending ICE is about defending the principles that make America strong: liberty, order, and loyalty to the Constitution.

The right-wing mythos of ICE as the personification of “law and order” is predicated on a perceived adherence to the Constitution. However, this image falls apart when considering that its orders derive from an elected felon, and, for example, when their facilities break local building ordinances.

This is the key to dismantling that argument: if the goal is “law and order”, it can’t be selective. By hammering the selectivity inherent in the application of the law for political ends in cases such as this, it becomes apparent that “law and order” is the cudgel, not the goal—and one which could be used against us more easily than it could be used against those in power, by design.