The Trump administration has confirmed it’s set to deploy as many as 100 “elite tactical agents” with Customs and Border Protection to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the next several months “as part of a supercharged arrest operation” to sweep up immigrants and separate families in a number of major cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, The New York Times reports.
The administration’s action is being framed as pushing back on so-called sanctuary cities, but it’s also clearly an election-year move designed to terrorize cities with large immigrant communities and communities of color because Houston, one of the cities listed as a target by The Times, doesn’t even have an official sanctuary city policy in place because it’s illegal under state law.
The Times reports “Among the agents being deployed to sanctuary cities are members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol. With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”
SWAT team of the Border Patrol to presumably help detain people who pose no danger to anyone, because in the first major raids of the new administration, around a third of the people ICE swept up had no criminal record at all. In response to states passing policies that help keep families together, ICE also threatened to escalate arrests of folks who weren’t a target, like a relative, but get taken into custody anyway because they just happened to be there. ICE has in fact issued this threat so frequently, it just copies and pastes the text.
Former CBP commissioner Gil Kerlikowske called the Trump administration’s move a “significant mistake,” The Times reported. “If you were a police chief and you were going to make an apprehension for a relatively minor offense, you don’t send the SWAT team. And BORTAC is the SWAT team. They’re trained for much more hazardous missions than this.”
But restraint is for leaders actually interested in the wellbeing of families, not authoritarians solely interested in staying in power. We must fight back: families, know your rights, and Congress, statements of condemnation won’t be enough to get these out-of-control agencies in place, it’s also going to take controlling their funding. Not one more penny to separating families.