The Physicians for Human Rights report released this week catalogs 412 instances in which crowd-control weapons met the bodies of protesters outside ICE detention centers — and reads the resulting injuries as failures of the system. The system has not failed.
The authority of the sovereign to enforce the immigration laws of the United States is as old as the nation itself. The Supreme Court recognized in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) that the power to exclude or expel aliens is a sovereign attribute inherent in every independent nation, essential to its security and its very existence. That power has not diminished with time. The Immigration and Nationality Act vests it in the Department of Homeland Security, and the officers whom the Department deputizes carry the sovereign’s authority into the field. The Lord has set the bounds of the nations (Acts 17:26), and the magistrate is the keeper of the bounds.
The protests outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey — where demonstrators had gathered in solidarity with detained immigrants on hunger strike — drew a crowd the Guardian placed in the dozens. As the assembly grew heated, a line of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials stood outside to guard the detention center. During a scuffle, ICE officials pepper-sprayed a sitting United States senator from New Jersey, and in the days and weeks that followed, local and state officials moved in alongside federal officers, using batons and shields, deploying teargas canisters, and arresting dozens. The assembly was not a lawful exercise of the First Amendment when it became an obstruction of the law. The magistrate is charged with the maintenance of order, and the maintenance of order includes the authority to disperse an assembly that has become an obstruction.
The report defines misuse by the categories of person hit — journalists, elderly people, children — and by the distance at which the round was fired. The standard of gentleness it presumes has no foundation in the law the officer is charged to execute. The crowd-control instruments that the Department of Homeland Security and its state and local partners have employed — chemical irritants, kinetic impact projectiles, stun grenades — are the standard tools by which the sovereign clears ground for the execution of the law. The officer who deploys a pepper-spray canister or a rubber bullet at a protester who has blocked the entrance to a federal detention facility is not exceeding his authority. He is exercising it. The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, instructed that the ruler does not bear the sword in vain (Romans 13:4). The sword is the magistrate’s authority to impose order by force. The injury that results is the system, operating as designed.
The Department of Homeland Security personnel — ICE and CBP officers — were responsible for sixty-four percent of the documented incidents. The surge operations that accompanied the enforcement directive under the command of the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, Gregory Bovino, produced a predictable increase in contact between enforcement personnel and the populations that sought to obstruct them. The report treats this as a finding. It is a description of the order working.
During the demonstrations outside Delaney Hall, a line of ICE officers in tactical gear stood between the entrance and the crowd. The assembly had been there for hours. Some had sat down in the roadway. Some had placed their hands on the vehicle of an ICE officer who was attempting to enter the facility. As the scuffle widened, the officers moved into the crowd.
A federal officer whose name the Department of Homeland Security has not released raised his weapon and fired a kinetic impact projectile — a rubber bullet — into the crowd. The round struck a woman in her late twenties in the right eye. The projectile was designed to break apart on impact. It did not break apart. The round struck the globe of the eye, and the globe of the eye ruptured. The force of the impact drove fragments of the rubber casing and fragments of the sclera into the orbit.
The woman fell to the ground. She was wearing a medical mask. The mask was not designed to protect against a projectile. The blood from the ruptured eye pooled in the mask and ran down her neck. The officers did not advance to render aid. The crowd parted around her. A protester with medical training knelt beside her and applied pressure to the orbit with a folded cloth. The woman was conscious. She was screaming. The eye that had not been struck was open and fixed on the sky. The eye that received the projectile was not there.
The paramedics reached her forty minutes later. The orbit was packed with gauze. The vision in the struck eye was lost. The trauma to the remaining eye, from the sympathetic response to the injury, was assessed at the trauma center. The ophthalmologist placed her on systemic corticosteroids at a high dose. The vision in the remaining eye dimmed over the following days. At the six-week follow-up, the vision in the remaining eye was measured at 20/200. The woman was, by the medical definition, legally blind in both eyes. The traumatic brain injury from the impact — the acceleration of the head at the moment the projectile struck the orbit — was assessed by a neurologist at the same center. The neurologist diagnosed post-concussive syndrome: persistent headache, dizziness, sensitivity to light, difficulty with short-term memory. The woman was a graduate student. She is no longer enrolled.
The Physicians for Human Rights report documents 203 injuries — blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures — and states that the true number is likely far greater. The ProPublica investigation published earlier this year identified seventy children across the United States who had been harmed by teargas or pepper spray during immigration enforcement operations, including toddlers and infants. The officers who deploy the instruments are not named in the report. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to the Guardian’s inquiries.
The protester who placed her body between the officer and the entrance to the detention facility placed herself outside the order the magistrate is charged to maintain. The round that struck her eye was the instrument of that order. The blindness that followed is the disclosure of her standing.
The Lord has set the bounds of the nations, and the magistrate is the keeper of the bounds. The protester who stood against the execution of the immigration law stood against the magistrate’s authority to keep the bounds. The sovereign’s instruments met her where she stood. The blindness is not a cost the system paid. It is the disclosure of what the system was always for. Those who are within the order are within. Those who place themselves against it are met by the sword. The sword does not distinguish. The eye that received the projectile is the evidence of the distinction. The order is in its place.