Gratien Milandou-Wamba is a new Mainer. He is an asylum seeker from the Republic of the Congo. He was a corrections officer at the Cumberland County Jail. He wore the uniform. He helped run the machinery of incarceration. And still, they came for him.

ICE arrested Milandou-Wamba on his drive to work. He was wearing his Cumberland County Sheriff’s uniform. His asylum application was still pending. No criminal charges. No warning. Just disappearance.

This is an important story not because it is seemingly exceptional, but rather because it reveals the truth about the border, about racism and America and about capitalism.

Immigration policy has always been about disciplining workers. Capital needs labor, but it needs cheap, disempowered labor. That’s what the border does. It sorts people. Grouping us into categories for the purposes of management and control: documented, undocumented, refugee, guest worker, tourist, criminal, citizen. It divides us, turns us against each other and makes sure that some people are always afraid — afraid to speak up, to organize, to demand dignity. That fear is the point.

During the United States’ long rise as global power, this country relied on immigrant workers to conquer the frontier and fuel industrial expansion. Immigrant labor built the railroads, worked the mills, staffed the slaughterhouses. Over time, many of those “European ethnics” were “whitened,” not through some mythic melting pot, but through participation in political violence against groups — Blacks, Latinos and Asians — who struggled to find a place on the favored side of the color line. The Irish “became white” when they became cops. The price of belonging? Helping to enforce racial order.

Milandou-Wamba followed that script. He wore the uniform of an agency complicit in carceral control of immigration. But whiteness is not expanding anymore. It is retracting. The borders are hardening. Immigrants aren’t being absorbed into the national project. They’re being cast out.

The old social contract — the promise of inclusion through work — is being torn up. Automation, financialization, the deindustrialization of the core and hyper-exploitation of the periphery — these have created a surplus population that is no longer needed, only managed. Capital doesn’t need you to work. It needs you to be quiet. Or gone.

The “wages of whiteness” are also less generous. The ecological foundation of consumerism is collapsing. Climate change is driving migration and instability around the world. The refugee crisis is a climate crisis. And the ruling class has chosen its response: surveillance, police, incarceration, information warfare. The climate crisis isn’t just producing disasters that uproot and displace people. It is producing fascism.

That is the world we’re living in. And that is why No ICE for ME exists.

We are a grassroots campaign demanding an end to all cooperation between the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and ICE. We are fighting to stop the jail from holding people for ICE. This is a simple demand that local officials can meet. Sheriff Joyce and the Cumberland County Commissioners have the power to end this collaboration today.

But our goals go beyond reform. Our ultimate goal is collective liberation, which means our safety cannot come at others’ expense. It means rejecting the divide-and-conquer logic of the border and racism. It means tearing down the carceral state, not just for immigrants, but for everyone: Black and brown people, queer people, poor people. It means building a world where no one is disposable, no one is caged and no one is deported.

Gratien Milandou-Wamba was not protected by the system he served. That tells us everything. The border is not a line between nations — it is a line between those whose lives are valued and those who can be thrown away. It runs through communities, workplaces and, yes, even though staff of jails. It must be abolished.

The future will either be fascism or freedom. There is no middle ground. Join us. Choose freedom. Choose solidarity. Choose collective liberation.