ACLU puts feds on defense: 54 claims in 17 states
The civil liberties group also released a report identifying 432 incidents of alleged misconduct.
The killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, and Lorenzo Salgado Arauja sparked mass protests across the country, but those names barely scratch the surface of serious claims of misconduct by federal agents across the United States.
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it had filed 54 claims in 17 states seeking redress for violence, abuse and neglect by federal law enforcement.
“What we've seen over this past year is the government's law enforcement agents in immigration enforcement agencies have really turned daily life across this country into a danger zone,” the ACLU’s deputy executive director Yasmin Cader told All Rise News in a video interview. “They've flooded our communities. They're violating people's constitutional rights, and they are using force and intimidation really as a standard operating procedure.”
‘Chaos and Cruelty’
In an 80-page report titled “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty,” the ACLU reviewed more than 1,200 incidents of immigration enforcement last year across eight states and found 432 incidents of alleged misconduct by federal agents.
“We define misconduct as the use of force or threatened force, the use of intimidation tactics, and retaliatory actions taken against those observing or documenting enforcement,” the report states.
According to the report, agents pushed, shoved or kicked people 418 times; deployed chemical irritants 361 times; pulled people out of cars 76 times; and used lethal force 16 times.
Dozens of these incidents sparked legal actions filed today, including one on behalf of 68-year-old Norma Bowe, a professor, nurse and grandmother assaulted while trying to operate a mobile health clinic in front of Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, N.J.
“She was there to provide care,” Cader said, referring to Bowe. “But instead of her being able to do so in a consistent way, she herself was attacked.”
The ACLU also listed other heart-wrenching cases:
“· A mother, who was five months into a high-risk pregnancy when she was held with her four children, including her 11-month-old child, in a CBP facility for approximately four weeks. The family was held in a cell with limited access to clean running water and without any windows to the outside.
· Rodney, from Georgia, who was arrested by ICE agents with guns drawn while his two young children watched, and was later denied needed medical care and accessibility accommodations while in ICE custody.
· Willy, a U.S. citizen in North Carolina, who was on his way back from a restaurant when federal immigration agents racially profiled him, put him in a headlock, and threw him to the ground.”
“By design”
As incidents like these ticked up, the Trump administration — enabled by a GOP-dominated Congress — set the blueprint for a national deportation force funded by an historic influx of taxpayer cash, which the ACLU illustrated in its report.
Along with money came more than 50,000 new hires, a number that the ACLU notes continues to grow.
But the ACLU emphasizes that the target of its report is authoritarianism, not simply immigration enforcement.
“The tactics and rhetoric of the Trump administration reviewed in this report are straight from the authoritarian playbook,” the report states. “They include suppressing protest through the use of force, intimidation, and retaliation, as well as deploying ICE and other federal law enforcement as an internal security force into cities run by the administration’s political opponents.”
Cader cautions the public not to view these flare-ups of violence through the lens of unintended tragedy.
“It isn’t an accident. It isn’t an offshoot. It is by design,” Cader said. “Because what we’re seeing is this violence going against people from the outset of the interaction. It isn’t happening just in response to resistance. No, it is by design to intimidate and to try to force people to comply immediately. And so, I think that’s a really important element of what we are calling out here because of the danger that it has for everyone in this country.”
Read the report here, and look out for my full video interview with Yasmin Cader later this week.
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