Under Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone on an explicitly fascist zag as it seeks to recruit 10,000 additional U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Robert Reich and others have detailed in recent weeks how ICE is now actively seeking to recruit extremist young men from gun shows, Ultimate Fight Club venues, rodeos, martial arts centers…
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In response to the terrifying intensification of ICE over the past year, both in their expanded presence and violence in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles, communities are mobilizing to protect each other, publicly denounce ICE, and form campaigns to peel away corporate support of ICE to weaken the various sources of ICE’s financial, political, and reputational power.
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Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out.
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Minneapolis, Minnesota — Tear gas filled the air outside the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis on January 9 as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers led two demonstrators away in handcuffs. For hours on Friday, caravans of ICE vehicles passed in front of the pop-up protests, carrying immigrants to be processed for deportation. Amid a mass influx of federal immigration agents to…
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In late September, Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) stopped Jose Bonilla Lopez, a gardener who lived in the city’s northwest. According to a police report, it was a case of mistaken identity. Instead of releasing him, they turned him over to masked federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, who seized him as neighbors chanted for his freedom.
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Border Patrol’s high-profile immigration crackdowns in North Carolina and Louisiana over the last two months have brought fresh scrutiny to the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on immigration raids and arrests under the Trump administration. The massive spending bill pushed by Trump and passed by Congress this summer increased immigration enforcement by $170 billion…
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