The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is in full force right now. The accompanying outrages, cruelty, incompetence, and extraordinary waste of money are on display every week.
Consider this past one:
In Austin, Texas, an ICE agent shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, a Venezuelan immigrant who was on a Door Dash delivery. ICE agents rammed his car, then shot him through his passenger side door (see video.) Garces Perez was then denied proper medical care. Furious neighborhood residents gather at the scene of the shooting in a large, spontaneous protest that ended after troopers used pepper balls to disperse them. The protests expand. Local authorities are demanding information and have launched their own investigation.
In Evanston, Illinois, ICE agents bloodied and briefly detained a local man, a U.S. citizen, after they say they mistook him for someone they were looking for. The victim reported injuries to his “head, neck and teeth.” This video shows ICE agents grabbing and shoving the man to the ground; this video shows the man lying in the street, and the ICE agents driving away.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a man is dead after crashing his car while fleeing ICE on Sunday. Mario David Coronado Juarez, a married father of three, was on his way to his construction job. His family is demanding an investigation. Rep. Hillary Scholten, a Democrat who represents Grand Rapids, wrote on social media that “No one should lose their life in a traffic stop. My office has sent a letter to ICE demanding answers.” ICE officials briefly banned traffic stops in July, but Trump furiously overrode them, writing that the traffic stop is “one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools,” and asserting that “The Radical Left Dumocrats[sic] would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”
Many immigrants in detention are now being disappeared. The Associated Press reported on Monday that ICE “has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them.”
ICE’s policy of sending immigrants to third countries – where they know no one and are often kept in indefinite custody – is becoming more of an issue. It’s about time, considering how the practice is cruel, unlawful and prone to human rights violations. Case in point: The plight of Ahmed Soliman, 31, an Egyptian man who has lived in Phoenix, Arizona, since he was four years old, and who feared being tortured in Egypt because he is gay. ICE sent him to Equatorial Guinea, one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world, that has a long record of torture. He and others are being held prisoner in a hotel. The New York Times, picking up on dogged reporting from the Arizona Star, called attention to his plight, and to a video showing Soliman and another man being “hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs.” The Washington Post reported on Monday that a key to these deportations is that the Trump administration has “authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June.” Maybe more people will start talking about this issue now?
ICE has “signed five construction contracts worth up to a combined $7.3 billion to expand immigration detention at government-owned sites in New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and California,” reports Project Salt Box. This is part of ICE’s abandonment of it plans to buy and convert massive warehouses, which faced significant pushback from protesters and local officials. Now ICE is building new and expanded facilities on land the government already controls in order to vastly increase their capacity to detain human beings in inhumane conditions.
Meanwhile, DHS’s culture of cowboy cruelty continues to fester, with leaders voicing no regrets of any kind for anything they’ve done. This gets expressed every day on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
For instance, after Rep. Greg Casar, the firebrand congressman who represents part of Austin, said at a press conference that “we will all be more safe when ICE gets the hell out of Austin,” DHS responded:
No amount of smears and false narratives will slow down ICE from doing its job by removing dangerous illegal aliens from our communities. Sanctuary politicians may continue to shamelessly protect illegal aliens, but the Trump Administration will remain focused on protecting the American people. If ICE were not in Texas, these illegal alien predators, murderers, and traffickers would still be free to harm more Americans.
Here Come the Democrats
Polls show Democrats in good position to take the House and maybe the Senate in November, leading to the important question: What will they do to rein ICE in? Or maybe even more importantly: What can they do?
Some are campaigning on a platform that calls for abolishing ICE entirely. But even if they take the Senate, that’s not something they’ll be able to do as long as Trump has veto power.
So what will their goals be? What will their demands be? Is anything non-negotiable?
Congressional Democratic leaders – Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries – have called for Congress to enact guardrails. There are 10 of them. They include:
Targeted Enforcement
No Masks
Require ID
Stop Racial Profiling
Uphold Use of Force Standards
Democrats these days propose bills mostly for messaging. But presumably, some of them will be on the agenda after January. Possibilities include:
Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s “American Dream and Promise Act,” which would provide a legal pathway toward citizenship for Dreamers – undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children – as well as for many recipients of Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure, which is similar to TPS.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “Make ICE Pay Act,” which would redirect nearly $140 billion in ICE and Border Patrol funding towards local recovery efforts in states affected by ICE and CBP surges and named operations.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari’s “Drain ICE Act,” which would rescind and repeal $75 billion in funding for ICE and mandate reporting requirements about detainees in immigration detention facilities.
Sen. Cory Booker and Reps LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez’s “Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act,” which would end mandatory detention, the detention of families, and the use of private, for-profit detention facilities.
Sens. Edward J. Markey, Jeff Merkley, Ron Wyden, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s “ICE Out of Our Faces Act,” which would ban ICE and Border Patrol from acquiring and using facial recognition technology and other biometric identification systems, and would require the deletion of previously collected data.
There are many others, I’m sure. We certainly need acts that:
Stop new construction of detention facilities.
End third-world deportations and bring deported immigrants back.
Extend Temporary Protected Status for people whose home countries remain too dangerous to go back to.
Defending the Kennedy Center
The Washington Post reports: “Thousands of supporters of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts gathered Friday as the sun set over the Potomac, surrounded as much of the building as they could, linked arms and chanted: ‘Hands off! Hands off!’”
CNN has color and context.
Broadview Redux
The ICE facility in Broadview, outside Chicago, was a flashpoint for protest during last year’s Operation Midway Blitz.
Since then, Block Club Chicago reported, protester have shown up every Saturday. This particular Saturday marked one year since the first violent clash between agents and demonstrators. (Block Club Chicago is a wonderful nonprofit news website that covers the city’s diverse neighborhoods.)
The regular protesters were surprised to see how many agents were gathered in the facility’s gated parking lot, which is normally pretty empty on weekends.
The agents, it turns out, were having a barbecue.
And every so often, they’d take a break, open the gates, yell at the protesters and shoot them with pepper spray.
“Broadview ICE agents continued to open and close the gate and taunting us,” protestor Jennifer Almodovar told NBC Chicago.
Finally a “large group of agents left the parking lot and sprayed at least 10 protesters with high-powered mace,” Block Club Chicago reported.
Two protesters were taken to the hospital. The Coalition Against Broadview ICE Facility is calling for a federal investigation.
And speaking of Broadview, the Chicago Tribune reports that the federal judge in the case of the “Broadview Six” protesters – who maybe ought to be called the “Wildly Exonerated Six” at this point – has called for oral arguments on October 1 about whether to order further inquiry into prosecutorial misconduct and appoint a special counsel to investigate potential contempt charges.
The six protesters believe their prosecution was politically motivated amid pressure from Washington to make an example of them, and that the evidence is now being covered up. They’ve asked Judge April Perry to order the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office to turn over any communications with officials in Washington about the case.
Stay tuned.
The Week in the Courts
A tremendous ruling from a 9th Circuit appellate panel on one of the most cruel and inhumane Trump rules, as the judges declared that “Noncitizens who arrive illegally and are found away from the border well after arrival are protected from arbitrary detention in violation of the Due Process Clause.” That means they should have the opportunity to get released on bond, instead of detained indefinitely. The panel joined literally hundreds of district court judges -- and became the 10 straight appellate panel to declare Trump’s “mandatory detention” rule totally unconstitutional. “The Framers, committed to guarding against arbitrary detention, included numerous provisions in our Constitution to protect against unlawful restraint—the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee, the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive bail, and the Suspension Clause’s assurance of access to the writ of habeas corpus,” the court wrote. “Concern about arbitrary detention is not a vestige of a bygone era. Since the founding, constitutional protections limiting the government’s authority over physical confinement have expanded, not diminished.” Now it’s off to the Supreme Court.
A panel of the D.C. Circuit appellate court denied an emergency request from the Trump administration to let it end hormone therapy and other accommodations for transgender inmates. The panel voted, by a 2-1 vote, to let stand a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking a new Bureau of Prisons rule. The lower court found that the new rule, issued to comply with a Trump executive order, was “arbitrary and capricious based, in part, on the lack of a reasoned explanation.”
A federal judge in Alabama temporarily blocked DHS from conducting warrantless immigration raids on Alabama construction sites, rounding up, and then indiscriminately detaining people. Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock wrote that “senior immigration officials” trying to meet Trump administration quotas “have asserted that the Administration has unlimited power to enforce immigration laws.” But, he wrote, the Fourth Amendment does not permit officers “to detain individuals without reasonable suspicion that they are violating any laws.”
I’m speechless. The cruelty is beyond my comprehension. I will keep doing what I can to support members of Congress that are blue. I’m older and I’m so glad.
What do we do with people who are so damaged that they think this ok or even right? How do you convince them we are all in this together?
Good luck everyone.