El Salvador throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. (ICE Staff 2020a)

In such announcements, ICE emphasized its benevolent role in providing the safe return of U.S. citizens, and, in turn, downplayed its unpleasant role in deportations. ICE did not refer to these as "deportations" but instead used the term "removals," further masking its distasteful practice of continuing deportations amid a global pandemic, which served to spread the virus globally (Kassie and Marcolini 2020). Again, instead of addressing the risks of enforcement, detention, and deportation during the COVID-19 pandemic and its role in amplifying the risks, ICE continued its pre-pandemic narratives of focusing on policies and procedures that existed before the crisis.

ICE not only minimized the seriousness of deportations and detention in its news releases but also diverted attention away from the severity of the pandemic within detention facilities and from its own failures and transgressions. ICE's creation of an alternate reality, in which it functioned primarily as a customs agency that protects Americans from the alleged threat of "COVID fraud", is especially illustrative of this pattern. While ICE discussed the customs side of its operations in a handful of pre-pandemic news releases from 2020, it primarily did so in its limited coverage of counterfeit merchandise (five out of the 175 news releases prior to 12 March 20207). Of the 49 news releases that mentioned the virus, however, approximately half (n = 24) covered COVID-related criminal activity, including news releases on "COVID fraud."

For example, ICE announced the launch of Operation Stolen Promise in April 2020 "to protect the Homeland from the increasing and evolving threat posed by COVID-19-related fraud and criminal activity" (ICE Staff 2020e). On 30 November, it announced Operation Stolen Promise 2.0 "with the specific goal of countering the threat of counterfeit vaccines, treatments and supplies" (ICE Staff 2020g). ICE framed the fraud as a major problem amid the pandemic that required ICE's attention: "Surging criminal activity surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic requires an equally robust investigative response to protect the American public" (ICE Staff 2020e). In announcing its efforts to combat "COVID fraud," ICE relied on nationalist and racist language to celebrate its role as protector of "the Homeland," ensuring the "health and safety of the American public" (ICE Staff 2020f). It also publicized that NBC's Today Show and ABC's Good Morning America featured its "efforts to combat COVID-19 fraud" (ICE Staff 2020d), creating the image that mainstream media (and, hence, likely the public) approve of its work.

For ICE, then, immigration control during the pandemic was more about touting its valiant efforts protecting Americans from potential foreign contraband and criminals than about protecting detained immigrants from an actual deadly pandemic within its detention facilities. It is not surprising that ICE failed to acknowledge its role in spreading the virus in communities throughout the U.S. and across the globe, but it is remarkable how little attention ICE paid to the effects of the pandemic on people it imprisons and deports.

### **5. Discussion: Racial Apathy and White Ignorance**

Berger (2009, p. 493) argued that "[c]rises present ruptures, breaks in the norm that provide opportunities to exacerbate or overturn existing ideologies and practices." Given this and the well-documented threat immigration detention poses to public health during a pandemic, we might have expected ACLU to adopt new and more subversive arguments against the institution. In the context of the global racial justice movement, we might have expected these new arguments to target structural racism as the root cause of the violations of immigrant rights and to call for radical change, such as ending detention entirely and abolishing ICE. We might also have expected the current context of the pandemic to inspire industry stakeholders to use historical narratives that pathologize migrant bodies, characterizing them as diseased, in order to rationalize enforcement, detention, and deportation (Li and Nicholson 2021; Markel and Stern 1999).

Our results suggested that, although each organization adapted its narratives about immigration detention to various degrees, the pandemic did not lead to significant cracks in the system. We argue that the collection of varying and dialogic frames contributes to *racial apathy*, as they remain largely indifferent to the interlocking systems of exclusion and exploitation underlying migrant suffering, thus minimizing the racism migrants experience and reinforcing color blindness. In 2020, private prison companies, ICE, and ACLU, failed to mention anything about how the immigration system in the U.S. was built to maintain a certain racial order, i.e., white supremacy (Sáenz and Douglas 2015). In other words, they assumed the immigration system's racial innocence (Murakawa and Beckett 2010). Under such assumption, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the system itself and propose transformative change: If the system is innocent, one can only critique the practices. Meanwhile, the system, through the frames presented by ICE and private prison companies and even ACLU, continues to depict migrants as "exotic others," i.e., criminals, profitable bodies, victims to be saved and cared for, etc. As such, while the frames from ACLU appeared to contradict those from ICE and private prison companies, the narratives presented by the three parties formed a dialogue that naturalizes "immigrant" as a degraded category and immigration detention as a legitimate institution, despite its sometimes questionable practices.

Furthermore, we argue that, in the context of not only the pandemic but also Black movements that are effectively placing racial oppression on the global stage and promoting the dissolution and defunding of multiple aspects of the criminal justice system, the frameworks of industry stakeholders, including ICE and private prison companies, contribute to racial apathy as well as the epistemology of *white ignorance*. Mills (2007, p. 13) introduced it as follows:

Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge.

This militant unawareness denies the racial reality that defines the structure of American society. In doing so, it reinforces the racial order of white supremacy. Aspects of white ignorance are evident in accounts by ICE and private prison companies, including the ways in which they aggressively disregarded the effects of the pandemic in detention and unmistakably overlooked their role in spreading the virus. In the current context, they appear so divorced from reality that their obliviousness appears proactive. In the following, we further discuss how the groups contribute to the process of racial apathy and the epistemology of white ignorance.

### *5.1. Comfortable and Convenient Criticism: ACLU*

In 2020, ACLU did not call for transformative change in response to the pandemic. Much of ACLU's coverage of COVID-19 within immigrant detention aligned with critical framing against immigration detention prior to the pandemic, where news media coverage focused on human rights violations within these facilities and bad managemen<sup>t</sup> practices (Ebert et al. 2020). Although the content of its press releases and blogs may have contained strongly worded language (e.g., referring to immigration detention as a "death trap," calling for Congress to "reduce funding to ICE for detention operations and shift to communitybased alternatives to immigration detention that are not driven by profit" (Cho 2020b)), the targets of this criticism were specific individuals, practices, and organizations, not the existence of immigration detention. As such, ACLU failed to question the legal system that categorizes certain migrants as "illegal."

ACLU's criticisms of immigration detention represented racial apathy in that its relatively superficial critiques resemble the "minimization of racism" frame of color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2017). Though critiques related to human rights violations and bad managemen<sup>t</sup> are clearly intended to advocate for the rights of migrants, ACLU avoids any discussions of how the racialization and criminalization of migrants serves to rationalize their expropriation. In this way, its rhetoric plays a role in minimizing systematic inequality and does little to question how "illegality" is socially constructed and rooted in global

### power dynamics (Armenta 2017; De Genova 2004; Golash-Boza 2016; Gómez Cervantes 2021; Menjívar 2021).

### *5.2. Profiting from Crises: Private Prison Companies*

Private prison companies prioritized the concerns of their shareholders, their employees, and even themselves as businesses over the oppression and suffering of migrants. Despite acknowledging base concerns about the pandemic in their detention facilities, private prison companies failed to engage meaningfully with critiques from ACLU or other public health experts. Instead, CoreCivic and GEO Group framed the pandemic as threatening to business and employees. They continued to present themselves as ordinary businesses rather than prison operators, much in the same way as they did before the pandemic (Ebert et al. 2020). However, the companies also took advantage of the opportunity of this crisis to present themselves as solutions to the hardships created by the pandemic.

Given the pivotal role the industry played in spreading COVID-19 and in reinforcing a carceral state that deprives poor communities of color access to resources needed to respond to major disasters effectively, this form of self-presentation represents a distortion of reality that reinforces the epistemology of white ignorance. Such narratives resemble those emerging from the aftermath of many other crises: The most dispossessed groups (in this case, migrant detainees, poor communities, and communities of color with little access to medical resources or space for quarantine) suffer disproportionately as a direct consequence of neoliberal reforms (in this case, privatized mass incarceration), ye<sup>t</sup> these groups are relegated back to the same oppressive private market that is thought to be the most "efficient" place to fulfill their needs after the disaster (Silva 2016). Naomi Klein (2010) described this phenomenon as disaster capitalism, wherein beneficiaries of neoliberal marketization exploit the fear and disorientation generated by unexpected crises to further advocate for their agenda. These strategies are not surprising given the private prison companies' financial interests and pre-COVID narratives, but they nonetheless provide insight into how, without directly vilifying or criminalizing migrants, the companies implicate immigrant detainees as the "Other," whose well-being is of little concern.

### *5.3. Smoke and Mirrors and Moral Panics: ICE*

In contrast to both the ACLU and the private prison industry, ICE attempted to take advantage of the pandemic by creating an alternative reality that not only excused itself from its responsibilities in worsening the pandemic through immigration detention but also reinforced its role as enforcer and protector of law and order. Although it maintained its self-characterization as a law-and-order agency, the agency manufactured a moral panic (Cohen 2011; Flores-Yeffal et al. 2019) to change its, and thus America's, enemy from "illegal" immigrant to foreign contraband. Nonetheless, this new focus continued to criminalize and dehumanize immigrants as threats, classifying them as invisible criminal others who do not matter and racializing them without resorting to explicit racial language. Indeed, in the pandemic era, ICE characterized itself less as an "immigration" agency that manages enforcement and more as a "customs" agency that protects Americans from COVID-related fraud. By making this change, ICE deflected attention away from the increased risk of the virus among detained individuals and surrounding communities. This narrative instantiated white ignorance, expressed apathy towards immigrants, and demonstrated remarkable irresponsibility and cruelty towards those negatively impacted by the pandemic.

Instead of rationalizing immigration detention through characterizing migrants as diseased, ICE practically ceased discussion of immigration detention altogether. It is not surprising that ICE failed to acknowledge its role in spreading the virus, but what is surprising is how little attention ICE paid to the effects of the pandemic on people affected by its practices. Differences in uses of the pandemic aside, industry stakeholders, including private prison companies and ICE, stand together in their rare responses to criticisms of their practices and their silence about their role in exacerbating the negative effects of the pandemic. Again, these patterns reinforce white ignorance, in that they were indifferent towards migrants in detention and seemingly oblivious about the effects of the virus in detention and their role in spreading the virus within detention facilities and beyond. In its news releases, ICE seldom talked about the virus in detention facilities, as was the case with GEO Group and to a lesser extent CoreCivic. This silence is conspicuous.

The quietness of the industry is particularly evident when we examined calls from public health experts and news media coverage of the pandemic in these months. Our supplementary sample of *New York Times* (*NYT*) coverage of COVID-19 and the industry (see page 11) illustrated the peculiarity of ICE's and private prison companies' inaction and lack of attention paid to the pandemic within their facilities. In articles published from 12 March to 30 April 2020 that mentioned the industry and COVID-19, nearly all (30 out of 32) reported on problems and criticisms of (mostly) ICE's actions/efforts in heightening the negative effects of the pandemic in terms of detainment, enforcement, and deportation. For example, an 18 March article on the pandemic reported problems with ICE's inactions:

Many ICE detainees say they feel like sitting ducks who will inevitably be infected. "The officials here have not said anything to us about what is happening outside, or any extra precautions that we should take," said a 40-year-old man from the Congo who is detained in a Karnes City, Texas, facility. (NYT Staff 2020b)

Another article reported on ICE's practice of continuing arrests in places with growing numbers of COVID-19 cases, noting that:

One agency whose operations did not appear to have been affected by the outbreak was the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, whose agents have continued to arrest immigrants around New York City over the past 10 days ... alarming advocates and lawyers who believe they could endanger vulnerable people who are already in custody. (NYT Staff 2020a)

The *NYT* articles discussed the role of the industry in amplifying the pandemic, the increased risk of the virus in detention, and the increased risk of spreading the virus in deportation efforts. In the face of similar messages, some governments, such as that of Spain, decided to close down immigration detention (Brandariz and Fernández-Bessa 2021). ICE, on the other hand, carried on and discussed contraband.
