Transcription
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We're getting new reports about a chilling and downright shocking escalation of ice tactics against the residents of Chicago. In the middle of the night, hundreds of armed federal agents and police, backed up by riot trucks, smoke grenades and helicopters, breached fences and busted doors in an immigration raid on an entire apartment building on the city's South Side. They pulled dozens of residents from their homes and zip ties, including children, some of them without any clothes. They then held some outside for hours and dragged the others into rented vans.
"It was scary. Because I've never had a gun put in my face."
Neighbors like Ebony Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs go off.
"They was terrified. The kids was crying. People were screaming."
"They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner because they was bringing the kids out too, had them zip tied to each other. One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here, he said. Them kids."
They zip tied the kids together. ICE put out a statement saying they were pursuing trendier gang members, but US citizens living in the building say they were detained too. The cops told them that if they had any unrelated warrants, they wouldn't be going back home. 37 people were ultimately arrested after agents separated children from their parents on the street.
And if you're looking at this and asking yourself, how is this legal? That is the right question to ask. And it has kind of an answer. And to understand it, you have to go back to Los Angeles this summer, where federal immigration agents started pushing the envelope on orders from the White House. They raided Home Depot parking lots and Walmart lots, and they grabbed people they saw near. One Home Depot masked agents with batons grabbed Narcisco Barranco, who has lived in the US for more than 30 years and has three sons serving in the Marine Corps. Agents beat Barranco on the ground, dislocating his shoulder before detaining him in Van Nuys.
Agents raided a car wash, sending patrons and workers scrambling before the 79-year-old owner, who is a US citizen named Rafi, tried to ask them what they were doing.
"That is when Rafi was taken down by agents and eventually handcuffed. Rafi says he was injured in the process."
"And they sat on me. Until my elbow. About a week ago. And this is my arm."
Rafi says he and five others at his car wash were taken to a federal detention center downtown. We're still working to learn more about why they were detained.
"And that man is not alone."
"Look how you got my hand. I'm American, bro. These guys are literally."
"Literally based."
"Off."
"Of skin color."
"I just want to show you my homie was."
"Born here just because of the way he looks."
"The."
Agents kept stopping people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants for no reason other than they weren't obviously white, like Brian Gavidia, the man you saw there, the 29-year-old American. He wasn't arrested, but he says agents went through his phone for 20 minutes and kept his Real ID card.
Now, these are obvious violations of people's core constitutional civil rights, their right to equal protection and the freedom from unlawful searches and seizures. And victims filed a class action lawsuit, and after an entire bench trial, a federal judge sided with those victims and ended the ICE sweeps. And in her ruling, she wrote, it is illegal to conduct roving patrols which identify people based upon race alone, aggressively questioned them and detain them without a warrant, without their consent, and without reasonable suspicion that they are with status. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
An appeals court upheld her injunction against ICE. You have to stop doing this. And so the Trump administration took the issue to the Supreme Court. Last month, the court's six-three conservative majority voted to just let Trump and ICE continue for now as the case works its way up. To use racial profiling in their immigration rates, halting the lower court's decision, saying, go ahead now. They gave no reasoning or explanation for their decision. Silent, except Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a short concurring opinion saying there's absolutely no problem whatsoever with racially motivated stops by law enforcement. Quote, if the officers learn the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the US, they promptly let the individual go. Welcome to the era of what critics call the Kavanaugh stop. Carte blanche for ICE to continue violent, warrantless raids and stops all over the country to undocumented immigrants, lawful residents and American citizens alike, like Leonardo Garcia Venegas. You see him there being cuffed roughly by ICE agents on a construction site where he's working. Vargas showed the agents his Real ID as proof of citizenship, and they told him he was lying. And it took hours to get him out of custody. So not exactly expeditious. And then get this: two weeks later, ICE arrested him again at another worksite. He's now suing the government.
The consequence of all this is what we're seeing now in the dead of night in Chicago, dozens of federal agents raiding an entire apartment building with kids in it just to see what they can find. It's the most egregious abuse of our basic rights Americans I've seen in a long time. Maybe my lifetime. And it comes two weeks after Secretary of Homeland Security Kirsti Noem posted a hype video of another violent ICE raid with helicopters and grenades, this time on a house in the Chicago suburbs. And guess what? Two US citizens were mistakenly arrested.
You know, there's a reason the American Founders put the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures in the Bill of Rights from the start. Masked secret police profiling people and now targeting entire apartment buildings, making everyone prove they're not guilty of something is the province of tyrants. It is the opposite of