Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized more than 22,000 ancient artifacts in Florida last month, including Greco-Roman coins, terracotta and glass vessels, jewelry, and mosaic frames, marking the largest recovery in the department’s ongoing investigation into antiquities smuggling in the state.
The objects, estimated to be between 1,000 and 5,000 years old, are believed to have come from sites across Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and the Levant. The Tampa Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit worked with archaeological specialists and researchers at the University of South Florida and the University of Pennsylvania to authenticate, place in context, and conserve the items recovered in the seizure.
ICE and its parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), continue to carry out a campaign of brutality against immigrants in the United States that has also affected the nation’s cultural heritage.
DHS, under which ICE and HSI operate, drew criticism this April after the Customs and Border Protection crew erecting Donald Trump’s border wall “inadvertently disturbed” the millennium-old Las Playas Intaglio in Arizona, ultimately damaging a quarter of the Native American archaeological site with heavy machinery.
DHS later moved in July to waive most environmental, public health, and historical preservation requirements in order to speed construction of border barriers from the Big Bend region to Amistad Reservoir, Texas, putting more than 400 archaeological sites in the area at risk.
