The protests against police brutality continue
nationwide.
Immigrant rights advocates are sounding the
alarm over the presence of ICE — that’s
Immigration and Customs Enforcement — agents
at some of the demonstrations.
Last week, a viral video showed a group of
ICE agents working with the New York City
Police Department to detain a protester at
a George Floyd rally in New York City.
One of the big concerns we have with ICE partnering
with the NYPD right now is, you know, they’ve
been very opportunistic in terms of policing.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen ICE basically
attach themselves or embed themselves to local
policing forces all over the country.
You know, now almost every fingerprint taken
at a police precinct serves as like an automatic
alert system to ICE and triggers a request
by ICE — could trigger a request by ICE
to ask cops and jails to hold someone after
they’re released from criminal custody.
And in New York state, we’ve seen in the
past three years under Trump a 1,700% increase
in ICE arrests at New York state courthouses.
And this is why we have a bill — Immigrant
Defense Project has a bill right now in front
of the New York state Legislature, the Protect
Our Courts Act, which would limit ICE’s
practice of targeting people in and around
courthouses.
Right now we’re in a moment where people
want to be out, out in the streets advocating,
building that solidarity, especially when
we’re talking about the Latinx, the Chicanos,
undocumented community.
They want to be out in the streets in solidarity.
And a lot of folks are coming.
They are seeing that these protests are being
met with excessive force.
However, they are seeing that this call for
justice is far too big to not answer.
And a lot of folks are going, such as Johan,
who is also another DACA recipient who was caught in.
One thing that is very important to note when
we’re talking about protesting and we’re
talking about anybody going to protest, whether
it is a DACA or somebody who does not have
any papers whatsoever, is that protests are
supposed to be considered sensitive locations.
The Trump administration had even acknowledged
protests being a sensitive location, just
like hospitals, just like funerals, just like
weddings, where ICE is not supposed to be
allowed to even be around the periphery, but
also there is not to be any raids.
But we see now what really this umbrella guise
is, is that if ICE isn’t out there rounding
people up, targeting individuals who they
want to pick up, like what we’re seeing
with the cases in New York, it is the police
departments themselves who are arresting and
giving high charges to individuals, who may
or may not have DACA recipient — may be
eligible to be DACA recipients, and streaming
them into this deportation pipeline.
So this is what’s happening.
It’s all a mechanism that has already existed,
and it has existed
to continue to criminalize Black and Brown bodies.
