Gestapo ICE Raids Target Thousands of Immigrants and Spread Terror Through Entire Communities

June 24, 2019 | revcom.us

Sunday, June 23, was the day that immigration agents were set to launch pre-dawn raids in 10 cities across the U.S. to arrest thousands of people. Clearly, these ICE raids were not just aimed at 2,000 or so immigrant families—but were deliberately meant to spread and intensify the climate of terror among all immigrants.

Think about going to sleep every night, wondering whether heavily armed federal agents were going to bust through your door before the sun rises and put everyone in the house in handcuffs to be hauled away. Think about the nightmare that parents have to go through every day as they leave for work, facing the possibility of being seized by armed agents, dumped into detention and marked for quick deportation—forcibly separated from their children who have no one else to take care of them. Think about people constantly agonizing over whether they should go out of the house to shop for necessities, meet friends, or even get much-needed medical care because of the fear of being caught in an ICE dragnet. Think of this happening to tens and hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

On Saturday, June 22, just hours before these nationwide ICE sweeps were set to start, Donald Trump tweeted that he was postponing the raids for two weeks—so that Democrats in Congress could accede to his demands for imposing even more draconian restrictions on immigrants and asylum seekers. Earlier in the week, in officially kicking off his reelection campaign, Trump had threatened that his regime will soon begin deporting “millions” of undocumented immigrants.

The ICE sweeps were reportedly to take place in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York and San Francisco. According to the Washington Post, the planned mass roundup of “families that have received deportation orders” was referred to in ICE and Homeland Security Department as “family op” and was “slated to target up to 2,000 families.” According to an NPR report, these were immigrants “whose cases the Justice Department fast-tracked as a way of sending a deterrent message to families considering crossing the U.S. border illegally.” The Washington Post reported that ICE “planned to use hotel rooms as temporary staging areas to detain parents and children until all the members of the family are together and ready for deportation,” and that some people arrested who were not facing immediate deportation—known as “collateral damage”—may be released with monitoring devices on their ankles. The New York Times noted, “If the plans had gone forward, some immigrant children — many of whom are American citizens because they were born in the United States—would have faced the possibility of being forcibly separated from their families when ICE agents arrived to arrest and deport their undocumented parents.”

Top Democrat Nancy Piglosi (aka Pelosi) greeted Trump’s postponement by saying it was “welcome”—this is craven and dangerous conciliation with the fascists. Trump’s threat to deport “millions” still stands—and the Trump/Pence regime is moving quickly to step up vicious assaults against immigrants, as a key part of their overall fascist agenda. This is a time for all who stand with the immigrants to remain vigilant—and prepared to act against the resumption of the nationwide sweeps and other anti-immigrant outrages.

From the speech:
The Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants

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