ICE Campaign Of Violence Will Lead To More Deaths

Jaime Alanis’s death shows the horrific consequences of a secret police force behaving with utter impunity.

By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept

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 undocumented 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 border 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 30 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 200 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 reported missing by loved ones and colleagues.

“Many workers-including U.S. citizens, were held by federal authorities at the farm for 8 hours or more,” the United Farm Workers union said in a statement. “U.S. citizen workers report only being released after they were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones.”