A UF organization is fighting for immigrant rights — and members are risking their attendance and grades for their mission.
Students For Socialism at UF organized a walk out Thursday afternoon to protest the UF Police Department’s 287(g) contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The program allows the federal government to partner with local police to enforce immigration regulations. This authorizes officers to interview people about their immigration status, check U.S. Department of Homeland Security databases, detain people until ICE takes custody of them and issue a notice that begins a person’s removal process.
UF first partnered with ICE in April, signing a 287(g) agreement following the detainment of a UF international student who was arrested for driving under an expired license.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents threatened a Rhode Island Superior Court judge and an intern after they botched a detainment operation on Thursday.
Outside the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence, Rhode Island, ICE agents briefly took a high school intern into custody who worked at the Superior Court, WPRI 12 News reported.
Courthouse security had noticed someone taking photos of the intern from outside the courthouse earlier that day. The individual, when approached, identified himself as an ICE agent before he was told to stop taking pictures.
The
intern, unsettled by the federal agents stalking him, was offered a
ride home by Superior Court Judge Joseph McBurney. However, ICE agents
surrounded the judge’s car and threatened to smash its windows if they
did not exit the vehicle.
The Superior Court’s head of security intervened, telling the judge and the intern to stay in the car.
The intern was briefly handcuffed and taken into custody by ICE agents, as seen in video from bystanders.
After an argument ensued, the ICE agents confirmed they had misidentified their target and left the scene.
The agents took him out of a vehicle that was being driven by Superior Court Associate Justice Joseph McBurney, who was taking the teen to school.
The agents allegedly ignored the teen, who insisted they were detaining the wrong person.
Agents restrained the teen’s hands behind his back and took him across the street.
In a rush to hire huge numbers of ICE officers across the U.S., a report from NBC reveals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed recruits into its training program before they have completed the required vetting process.
In one incident in Brunswick, Georgia, staff at ICE’s training academy discovered a recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, according to the current DHS official. Meanwhile, more than 200 new recruits were dismissed during training due to not meeting ICE's hiring requirements, according to recently collected internal ICE data reviewed by the outlet.
The data shows that the majority failed to meet ICE’s physical or academic standards, and just under 10 recruits were let go for criminal charges, failing to pass drug tests, or safety concerns that should have been noted during background checks before they arrived at training.
Imagine yourself walking down the street when suddenly you are approached by a beefy-dude who gets into your face and begins to aggressively force himself upon you. As you attempt to break away you find yourself surrounded by four other men, some who have completely covered their face behind a mask, and each of them yelling at you, taunting you, and wrestling you onto the ground to place you in handcuffs. This violent assault leaves you disoriented, traumatized and bewildered. You are aggressively thrown into a van, and taken away to a location which only upon arrival do you realize you are being detained and judged as an enemy of the State. Having lived peacefully and lawfully, having held a job, having begun the process that leads toward citizenship, you are now, with no due process of law cast into a hole, not allowed to call your family, your lawyer, or a friend. You are disappeared and have become subject to the lawless immorality that is readily, purposely and cruelly eradicating the customs, traditions and way of life that once made our nation a beacon of hope and light to all the nations.
What can we the people do about this immoral and egregious practice that is bringing shame to our beloved country? The Des Moines Indivisible Citizens Movement, those who organize democracy rallies at Big Catch Plaza, are joining up with a larger King County grass roots movement called The Whistle Warriors to develop and distribute whistles throughout our community. Our mission is to empower immigrant families and community residents with a simple, effective, community-supported tool for rapid alert, ensuring community safety and promoting neighbor to neighbor solidarity during times of ICE raids.
We encourage all citizens who witness these types of assaults to film the event, and to blow the whistle attempting to draw a crowd who can collectively document as many details as possible, texting the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WAISN) hotline at 844-724-3737. Our goal is to hold ICE accountable to the rule of law, and to protect as best we can those who have lived amongst us as friends and neighbors. Such nonviolent actions on our part carry the promise that “we the people” are present and observing as we insist on upholding our higher community standards of justice and decency, particularly from those who act in our name.
The whistles can be picked up at the Big Catch Plaza whenever we rally for a return to democracy with its promise of liberty and justice for all.
– Rich Lang
Des Moines Indivisible
When children began coming to his shop by themselves holding their family’s grocery lists, bakery owner Francisco Cuadra knew “things are getting bad.”
As Operation Midway Blitz’s trail bled from Illinois into Northwest Indiana neighborhoods, Cuadra, owner of Santa Maria’s Bakery in Hammond, said some of his customers became too afraid to go out and get bread and basic necessities, regardless of their citizenship status.
Cuadra has owned the bakery since 2010 but rising costs and dwindling customers have made him feel like the business is a “ticking time bomb.” Despite this, he keeps grocery and bread prices affordable and donates what he can.
When news of an ICE arrest at East Chicago’s La Rancherita bakery reached him, Cuadra knew his customers would feel even less safe patronizing his shop.
“(ICE agents) are not respecting people,” Cuadra said. “If you’re Mexican, they treat you like someone here illegally, it doesn’t matter if you’re here legally. They’re even snatching American citizens if they don’t have a ‘REAL ID.’ Which a lot of people don’t have yet because they’re waiting for their license to expire to get a new one. But the government is saying if it’s not a REAL ID, and they’ll detain you, because there’s no star in the corner. They say you have to have the star in the corner of it, or they’ll basically claim it’s not real, it’s a fake.”
A week of immigration enforcement activity across North Carolina culminated in youth-led demonstrations across Durham on Friday, as students and community members protested unannounced Customs and Border Protection and Immigration Customs Enforcement operations in the Triangle.
City-wide walkouts and an evening rally drew hundreds of Durhamites downtown. Students, workers and immigration-advocates alike demanded accountability from local and federal officials. But they vowed to continue organizing as uncertainty and fear surrounding “Operation Charlotte’s Web” continue.
CBP agents first entered Charlotte Nov. 15 before making an unannounced expansion into Durham and Raleigh Tuesday. The Department of Homeland Security has reported over 250 detentions across the state thus far.
For nearly four hours, a crowd of roughly 250 high school students gathered at the CCB Plaza in downtown Durham by the Bull statue to speak out against ICE and CBP agents targeting members of their community. They passed a megaphone from one person to another, voicing support for classmates who missed school this week as the presence of CBP agents left the city on edge.
The classrooms felt empty, they said. Durham Public Schools reported a nearly 30% absenteeism rate this week, accounting for 9,209 of roughly 31,000 enrolled students.
The demonstration came together in less than a week, growing out of a group chat of just 20 students who sought to take a stand against the immigration raid in their city. Both students from Durham and Chapel Hill were in attendance after they walked out of their classrooms around noon. Some DPS students took the “unexcused absence” to rally for their community.
This month, American-born Pope Leo backed the U.S. bishops’ recent decision to oppose indiscriminate mass deportations under the Trump administration. Local church leaders brought that message of migrant dignity to Colorado’s only federal immigration detention center.
Hundreds of people showed up to the event, called Immigrant Stations of the Cross. It was organized by the Catholic Committee for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and took place Saturday morning outside the GEO/ICE facility in Aurora.
“I-I am… I’m moved,” said Father Luke Barder of St. Dominic Parish, his voice shaking. “I look at this crowd, and I know many of them, and I know many of them are all over the ideological spectrum. And it’s this one thing that’s uniting us, and that they’ve come, is a sign of hope for me.”
Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila and Auxiliary Bishop Jorge Rodriguez participated in the closing prayer.
“I’m really inspired to see the Catholic community, Archbishop Aquila, Auxiliary Bishop Rodriguez, many clergy and laity stand together and say that the Church is with you,” said Thomas Weiler of the Catholic Committee for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Together Colorado.
The gathering directly referenced the U.S. Bishops’ Special Message on Immigration released this month by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which stated, “To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering, since, when one member suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). You are not alone… We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s All In with Chris Hayes to react to President Donald Trump signing the bill to release the Epstein files and raise concerns about the administration’s continued efforts to stall and stonewall on their release.
He also discussed the actions of Lindsey Halligan, President Donald Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney to bring the case against former FBI Director James Comey, underscoring how her missteps in the case showcase the true vindictive motivations of the Justice Department acting on Trump’s orders.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On whether the Trump administration will commit to releasing the full Epstein files:
I’m not at all confident. I think if past is prelude, what we can expect is more stonewalling, more cover up, more inartful ways of explaining why they’re covering up. I think when this chapter of history is written, it will be a test case in how not to handle a crisis. This has already been dragged out for almost a year. I think, by drip, drip, drip of new documents they put out and more that they withhold it will continue to only feed the appetite of the public to know the full truth. And the interesting irony here is that by announcing investigations into Democrats in the Epstein files and saying the president is not under investigation, well, presumably that means that any documents that mention the president can be released because he’s not part of an investigation — it’s only Democrats that were named by Epstein that would be withheld.
So that’s a strange irony they’ll have to try to grapple with. But I think we can fully expect that they will stonewall, and they will, I think, incur the wrath of their base when they do. And the final point on this is to bring it back to what really should matter here, and that is the victims deserve this accountability. I think it is what drove such a strong bipartisan vote. They deserve to know the truth. They deserve to have these files released, whoever they implicate, and hopefully that day will come.
On Trump’s hand-picked attorney admitting the grand jury never saw final Comey indictment:
It’s astonishing that the indictment that was ultimately presented to a judge was never seen by the entire grand jury. So, they bring one indictment in. It is three counts. The grand jury refuses to indict on one of those counts. They should have brought a new indictment before the grand jury and presented that. They didn’t. And it still seems that maybe part of the answer is this strange practice of bringing in an indictment that the grand jury hasn’t seen. But there’s also allegations of missing pages of a grand jury transcript. There are also allegations that this insurance lawyer turned prosecutor may have erroneously instructed the grand jury as to the law. Another really serious problem. You have the problem of her appointment itself, which may have been unlawful. And considering that she’s the only one who signed that indictment that could also get this case thrown out.
And then you have, I think, what was really the gravamen of the hearing today, before it was acknowledged that the indictment, the new indictment, was never shown to the full grand jury. And that is the retribution here, the retaliation here. The evidence of that is so strong, where you have Trump telling Bondi, “You got to go forward with these prosecutions.” You’ve got the firing of a Republican U.S. Attorney who wouldn’t do it because there wasn’t evidence. You’ve got firing of other top people. You have this personal lawyer thrown in. It is so plainly, palpably vindictive that I can’t imagine facts more compelling than the ones we’re seeing to have it thrown out on that basis alone.
On Trump’s Justice Department putting the president’s interests before the rule of law:
[…] We’re seeing the same problem at multiple layers in the Justice Department. So, you force out the career professionals. You bring in this insurance lawyer. She goes alone into the grand jury or doesn’t apparently have very good advice with her. And you have all these problems in the grand jury. It’s one thing when you have an enabler at the Justice Department, it’s another when you have one who is not particularly competent. But then you have the kind of demonstration that you played earlier of Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, saying, “We’re opening this investigation of Democrats in the Epstein files because of new evidence. Is that right? Did I say new evidence? Do we have new evidence? It’s whatever Todd Blanche said it was in his tweet.”
This is the problem when people at the Justice Department at various layers view their responsibility not to the law, not to the rules of ethics, but to the president. And given that they’ve taken the position also that the president, under their unitary executive thinking, is also empowered to command prosecutions they can’t really claim — as they tried in court today — that, well, this prosecutor wasn’t vindictive herself, and therefore it’s not a vindictive prosecution when it was ordered by the vindictive commander in chief.
[…]
These political prosecutions are not different in kind than the administration’s efforts to silence critics at the universities, silence critics at law firms, silence critics in the media. It is part of a broad effort to intimidate and coerce people into silence. And I think we need to see it as that kind of systemic attack on our democratic society and our First Amendment.
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