Despite having been forced to tone down its overtly aggressive approach to raids, detentions and deportations since the widespread resistance to Operation Metro Surge in Minnepolis earlier this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions have reached unprecedented numbers. The new head of the US Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin announced at the beginning of September that ICE has exceeded the record for number of detentions in a single month in June, July and August, totalling 43,900, 50,208 and 50,925 respectively. Every day, ICE officers are filmed carrying out illegal detentions, brutalising and kidnapping people, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, and holding them indefinitely without any right to contact their families. Week after week, videos emerge from detention centres exposing the deplorable conditions and treatment of detainees. Already this year, 26 people have died in ICE custody and at least 10 have been fatally shot in ICE operations.
On 20 September, protests erupted in Austin, Texas when an ICE officer shot Wilbur Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man, through his car door during a traffic stop operation. Garcés Pérez was in the middle of completing a delivery as a DoorDash driver when he was stopped and shot. With an obvious gunshot wound in his back, ICE officers pulled him out of his car, handcuffed him with his hands behind his back and left him on the ground without medical attention. Bystanders who witnessed and recorded the incident began to gather around in opposition to the racist ICE thugs. This quickly turned into a hundreds-strong protest. The city’s mayor Kirk Watson – a Democrat – held a press conference to say that he was ‘angry’ but ‘not surprised’ by the incident, and was keen to insist that local police played no part in it apart from facilitating and enforcing the traffic stops across the city…and of course repressing and arresting several anti-ICE protesters after the fact. The solution Watson proposed was more body-worn cameras.
It is clear even in Democrat-controlled cities, there is no opposition to federal thuggery and racist state terror apart from empty platitudes. The opposition continues to come from the streets in spite of the opportunist Democratic party trying to dispel any real, organised movement. The strength of the movement remains in the streets.
