ICE Campaign of Violence Will Lead to More Deaths

Federal immigration agents toss tear gas at protesters during a raid in the agriculture area of Camarillo Calif Thursday July AP Photo Michael Owen Baker After weeks of brazen rights violations and outright impunity from America s secret police force a federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday issued a sharp rebuke of the racist tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement U S District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong blocked ICE s roving patrols in Southern California halting agents from carrying out unconstitutional arrests based on racial profiling alone Going forward they ll need to have specific grounds for believing someone to be in the country illegally before they can make an arrest Is it illegal to conduct roving patrols which identify people based upon race alone aggressively question them and then detain them without a warrant without their consent and without reasonable suspicion that they are without status the judge wrote Yes it is While the temporary restraining order is a rightful recognition of the deportation machine s racist operations it is unlikely to hinder a territory line regime that holds racist exclusion as its organizing principle and unaccountable brute force as standard procedure Just a day earlier the Trump administration s anti-immigrant campaign took a life in farmland north of Los Angeles Jaime Alanis a Mexican farmworker fell more than feet from a greenhouse when federal agents on Thursday stormed the state-licensed cannabis farm in Ventura County Calif where he had worked for over a decade Alanis died from his injuries in hospital ICE agents detained over people in militarized raids on two large farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo including a number of U S citizen workers and protesters who gathered outside the facilities in response to the raids As of Saturday morning at least two of the abducted citizens were still released missing by loved ones and colleagues Related Documenting ICE Agents Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids Plenty of workers-including U S citizens were held by federal bureaucrats at the farm for hours or more the United Farm Workers union announced in a report U S citizen workers summary only being distributed after they were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones Thursday s raids led to a released eight hospitalizations and multiple other injuries Alanis tragic death is not a freak accident but the consequence of the executive s venture of militarized human hunting In scenes now familiar in California and beyond footage revealed federal agents bombarding protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets And such tactics are likely to continue even after Judge Frimpong s order which does not apply to raids with warrants aimed at workplaces These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities disrupt the American food supply chain threaten lives and separate families A heavily armed masked army dedicated to rounding up poor brown people en masse will inevitably perpetrate and oversee death-dealing acts We have all seen videos showing extreme force by ICE and other federal agents they have chased farm workers through the fields pummeled immigrants pinned down on the street smashed car windows and dragged people from their vehicles Abuses and rights violations in immigrant detention centers are rampant Related ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy None of this is new in the unbroken American tradition of racist state violence and territory line rule Under President Donald Trump s edge regime though violent escalation in immigration enforcement has been lauded licensed and now supercharged with unprecedented funding The consequence will be more deaths like Alanis s and the deaths of people in ICE custody this year alone atop a baseline of suffering for millions These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities disrupt the American food supply chain threaten lives and separate families the United Farm Workers stated Numerous workers and protesters detained by ICE on Thursday remain unaccounted for One farm defense guard George Retes a U S citizen and disabled army veteran was reportedly attempting to leave the area when agents grabbed him from his car They broke his window they pepper-sprayed him they grabbed him threw him on the floor They detained him his sister Destinee Majana recounted reporters in tears Retes had not been located hours after the raid His status as a citizen does not make state violence against him somehow worse but his abduction highlights the indiscriminate and unconstrained nature of these racist round ups Jonathan Caravello a U S citizen and professor at California State University Channel Islands remains missing as well masked agents dragged Jonathan away into an unmarked reason without identifying themselves without giving the reason for arrest and without disclosing where they are taking him the California Faculty Association posted on social media on Friday The Department of Homeland Safety noted in a message that four U S citizens are being criminally processed for assaulting or resisting officers declares that the leadership routinely levies against individuals who have been groundlessly arrested including in the modern bunk arrests of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and New Jersey Democratic Rep LaMonica McIver In a predictably mendacious press release DHS described the Thursday raids as heroic efforts in which federal agents rescued at least migrant children The UFW is also aware of reports of child labor on site the United Farm Workers union disclosed in its announcement The UFW demands the immediate facilitation of independent legal representation for the minor workers to protect them from further harm Farm workers are excluded from basic child labor laws The union added To be clear detaining and deporting children is not a approach for child labor Modern Republican efforts around child labor meanwhile have involved proposing and passing provision in states nationwide to loosen child labor protections including for work on construction sites and in factories Caging and deporting immigrant children is another bipartisan practice that Republicans are aggressively ramping up In the face of the Trump administration s escalating violence anti-ICE protesters continue crucial efforts to impede the detention and deportation machine Judge Frimpong s order marks a rare check on ICE from the courts but it won t stop the administration from its cruel campaign On Friday the same day as the district court ruling and the death of Alanis Trump released on social media that he was giving Total Authorization for ICE to protect itself against protesters who assault agents by arresting them using whatever means is necessary to do so The post ICE Campaign of Violence Will Lead to More Deaths appeared first on The Intercept