Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants “at least 500 special agents who normally conduct long-term investigations into dangerous criminals and traffickers” as part of a recently announced campaign targeting major cities, The New York Times has confirmed, reporting the out-of-control agency “has begun 24-hour-a-day surveillance operations around the homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants,” and “plans to deploy hundreds of additional officers in unmarked cars in the coming weeks.”
None of this is about public safety, but instead about furthering a white supremacist agenda to terrorize large cities that brown and black communities call home. Just take a look at what federal immigration officials themselves have admitted, as reported by The New York Times: “The latest directive is simple: Arrest as many undocumented immigrants as possible, and ‘flood the streets,’ as one official involved said his bosses had put it.”
The New York Times reported last month that officials were deploying a number of “elite tactical agents” with Customs and Border Protection—they’re essentially the agency’s SWAT team, the report said—to assist ICE in sweeps in a number of large cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. A recent viral image from Twitter of what appears to be an agent armed with an assault weapon lurking outside the door of a Bronx, New York, apartment has been an indication that operation has since begun.
Advocacy group Immigrant Defense Project told The New York Times “it had also received reports of ICE agents using ruses to gain entry to people’s homes or to obtain information about their relatives. But the reports of heavily armed officers banging on doors at a Bronx apartment building this week were unusual. ‘We have never had a report of an incident where the officer had an assault rifle,’ at least not openly in the streets, said the deputy director of the Immigrant Defense Project, Mizue Aizeki.”
Assault rifles and tactical gear and pounding on doors while armed with an assault weapon to presumably 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. Further adding to this outrage is a new lawsuit detailing how ICE has also manipulated its own policy in order to keep just about every person they sweep up in the New York City area detained, when in the past they would have been released to await their immigration court date.
Advocates responding to the viral image of the armed agents used it as an opportunity to share vital Know Your Rights information that could spare many families from unlawful detention:
Last month, top Democratic leaders from the House Judiciary and House Homeland committees condemned the initial report of widespread ICE raids as “politically motivated and not grounded in national security,” saying they “do nothing more than punish residents and instill fear in communities.” That same week, Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey called “The BORTAC deployment to Boston and other cities is unnecessary, unwelcome, and dangerous. But the specter of heavily armed, military-like personnel in our cities will accomplish one thing: provoke fear. Administration officials have reportedly said the BORTAC members are expected to ‘stand by as a show of force.’”
As the viral image and latest report indicate, they are indeed showing their brute and violent force, and families in our communities are at stake. “This is inhumane, it is fascism, and it is terrorizing communities, not to mention a horrific waste of taxpayer money and resources at a time we should be investing in strengthening public health systems and fighting actual threats,” tweeted Vesna Jaksic Lowe, a journalist formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is government prioritizing racism and fear above all.”