Via Rawstory.
Felix Torres, a Chicago man, was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) agent on Monday morning at around 6:00 a.m. local time. Officials alleged in a statement that ICE was at Torres’ home in attempt to make an arrest when someone pointed a weapon at agents, leading to the shooting, according to NBC Chicago.
Family members who spoke with the outlet said Torres was unarmed, his daughter, Carmen, explaining that no one was told why agents were at their home. Chicago’s People’s Response Team, an activist organization dedicated to “supporting efforts to end police violence in Chicago” noted that there were at least eight family members in the home at the time of the raid.
According to the family none of them are undocumented and Felix not only didn’t have a gun, he doesn’t even own a one. But the other questions is why was ICE even there in the first place when Chicago is a sanctuary city, let alone shooting an unarmed man?
Continued.
Carmen Torres said, “They didn’t say anything. They just came in and pointed pistols in our faces and dragged us out,” DNA Info reported. “It’s a lie when they say he was holding a gun. He doesn’t even own a gun,” she said. “They shot my dad. They shot him, and I don’t know why.”
According to DNA Info, ICE officials said they were not at the residence to arrest Torres. Alderman Gilbert Villegas, a city official said, “We’re going to have to talk to CPD [Chicago Police] to find out if this was a coordinated effort, because if it was in any way, that raises concerns about us as a sanctuary city.”
This is the downside of almost any “Get Tough” strategy. People make mistakes, they get itchy trigger fingers and people get hurt. When you demonize 11 Million people you’re quite likely to also pick on people that have nothing to do with any of it, severely putting their lives at risk for no good reason what so ever.
The same morning that this shooting took place Attorney General Sessions held a press conference which threatened pulling Justice Dept. grant money from sanctuary cities.
“Today I’m urging states and local jurisdictions to comply with these federal laws, including 8 U.S. Code § 1373,” Sessions explained. That law states that no government entity can restrict sharing information with the Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding individuals’ citizenship or immigration status. “Moreover, the Department of Justice will require that jurisdictions seeking or applying for Department of Justice grants to certify compliance with 1373 as a condition of receiving those awards.”
Not complying with 1373, Sessions warned, could “result in withholding grants, termination of grants, and disbarment or ineligibility for future grants.” He added that the Department of Justice will “also take all lawful steps to claw back any funds awarded to a jurisdiction that willfully violates 1373.” This would impact what he described as an expected $4.1 billion in federal grants.
…
Despite Sessions’ claims that eliminating sanctuary cities will improve public safety, the reverse is actually true. Research shows that there are 35.5 fewer crimes committed per 10,000 people in sanctuary counties compared to nonsanctuary counties. Likewise, median household incomes are higher and poverty and unemployment rates are lower. But if the Department of Justice cuts grants that actually fund public safety programs, it’ll have the opposite effect, making it harder to for those cities to maintain their safety and security.
Sessions’ statement completed set off Rep. Ted Lieu who argued Sessions is himself “Illegitimate” because of his false statements to congress during his confirmation hearings.
Lieu went into attack mode on Monday after Sessions threatened to go after sanctuary cities during the daily White House press briefing. He said the Justice Department would deny funding to cities unless they prove they aren’t serving as immigrant sanctuaries.
Session claimed that “countless Americans would be alive to day” if not for Sanctuary Cities protecting criminal immigrants. He went out of his way to invoke the case of Kate Stienle who was killed as a result of an accident.
SAN FRANCISCO — The bullet that killed Kate Steinle on Pier 14 last month as she walked with her father was fired accidentally, a ballistics expert testified Thursday on behalf of the man charged with her murder.
“The gun was pointed at the ground,” James Norris, the former head of the San Francisco Police crime lab, said repeatedly on the stand Thursday during the preliminary hearing of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican national and five-time deportee who has ignited a national debate on illegal immigration and drawn the ire of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Out of court, Norris called the shooting an accident. “You couldn’t do this on purpose,” he said of intentionally ricocheting a shot and hitting a person roughly 100 feet away.
Exploiting an accidental tragedy like this in order to demonize the undocumented is despicable. But unfortunately increasingly typical. Contrary to Sessions claim that these violent crimes are “countless” the Federation of Illegal Immigrant Reform only lists 17 cases for 2016 and 19 for 2015. That’s not exactly an epidemic of crime.
On top of Sessions you also had DHS Secretary Kelly nearly walk out of a meeting with Muslim Americans when he was asked about racial profiling.
Nabih Ayad, an attorney who founded the Dearborn-based Arab American Civil Rights League, says that Kelly seemed to take great offense when he asked him about whether the president’s executive orders and new DHS protocols were discriminatory against Muslims. In particular, the Free Press reports that Ayad asked Kelly “to create a record of who gets stopped for questioning at ports of entry so there can be data to see if there is disproportionate targeting of Arabs and Muslims.”
However, this caused Kelly to stand up and threaten to leave the meeting.
“He stood up and walked away almost,” Ayad told the Free Press. “He said, I’m leaving unless you decide to stop your questions and have someone else ask a question. … He actually got out his seat.”
Getting huffy and insulted when someone asks you a pointed question isn’t a good reaction. It’s a classic deflection play when you potentially have a guilty conscience. There are plenty of examples of ICE agents not going after “criminals” but breaking up families — like repeatedly detaining Muhammad Ali Jr. for no good reason, detaining a Colorado man because of his “Hispanic Appearance”, holding Doctor from Canada at the border for 5 Hours to grill him about his “Tribal chief”, holding a French historian at the border for 10 hours, or like this one.
And there are other examples of ICE specifically targeted so-called Sanctuary Cities.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are raiding targets in "sanctuary cities" to pressure those jurisdictions to cooperate with federal immigration agents, CNN reported Friday, citing a senior U.S. immigration official familiar with the situation.
CNN's source reportedly revealed that senior ICE officials have discussed carrying out more operations in these areas during internal meetings.
"There's been questions about whether Austin is being targeted. We had a briefing.... that we could expect a big operation, agents coming in from out of town. There was going to be a specific operation, and it was at least related to us in that meeting that it was a result of the sheriff's new policy that this was going to happen," U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin said during an immigration hearing Monday, adding that an Austin raid in mid-February was done to retaliate to a local sheriff's limited cooperation with ICE
However, ICE has categorically denied any suggestion that the operations were specifically aimed at the sheriff's county.
And that’s been backfiring so far.
On his fifth day in office, he signed an executive order to strip such cities and counties of their federal funding.
The threats appear to be backfiring. Since Trump’s election in November, nearly a dozen cities and counties — from progressive California to deep-red Alabama — have voted to adopt sanctuary city policies. Several more cities and an entire state are considering the move. Some cities that have long held sanctuary status are taking Trump to court, while others are creating legal defense funds and taking other measures to protect undocumented residents.
“We are not going to work with [Trump]. We’re not going to make it easy on him.”
“When we saw that visitors to our community and our nation were under attack by this unjust position and order that the president has made, we wanted people to know that he does not speak for us,” said Jonathan Austin, the president of the Birmingham City Council, which voted unanimously this week to become a sanctuary city. “We need to be a city that’s welcoming and a sanctuary to everyone, regardless of who they are.”
What’s happening here, and to people like Ali Jr. and others, and in Chicago with the Torres family — looks like bigoted vindictiveness and profiling and quacks like bigoted vindictiveness and profiling… it’s possible that it’s bigoted profiling.
Rather than helping keep Americans safer from the massive 20 or so violent immigrants each year, it may ultimately be very costly to the lives and survival or other citizens as it slowly diminishes confidence in the DOJ and DHS.
Thanks Drumpf.