The Feds Must Investigate an ICE Shooting: Federal Immigration Authorities Cannot Use Deadly Force With Impunity
By CARLOS MENCHACA
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
FEB 14, 2020 | 11:25 AM
Law enforcement officers are pictured at the scene of the shooting last Thursday. (Kendall Rodriguez/for New York Daily News)
Last Thursday, while carrying out an arrest in Brooklyn, federal immigration agents shot a tourist in the face and then barred the tourist’s mother and lawyers from talking to him while he recovered at Maimonides Hospital. They were reunited only after the consul general of his country intervened.
I witnessed much of this firsthand.
The Department of Justice, however, appears unrushed to investigate whether lethal force and intimidation were justified, despite repeated calls for accountability. Even the media has expressed little shock that this happened to someone with a tourist visa.
This muted response shows how successfully the Trump administration has numbed and cowed the government and the media to its immigration policies.
Here is why we should care: Immigration officers are enforcing civil and administrative law. They are not a police force or the military. Regardless of what anyone says, violating immigration law is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
Yet despite being civil officers, ICE officers hide their identities, even while openly carrying firearms and wearing plainclothes or military-style jackets. They impersonate local police and physically intimidate people who question their behavior. Now, they are using lethal force with impunity.
These tactics are not only outrageous in their own right; they allow ICE to cynically exploit the legitimacy and integrity of the NYPD. This compromises public safety by making it harder for the NYPD to build trust with immigrant communities through neighborhood policing. It also undermines the City Council’s efforts to clarify appropriate relationships between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement.
All this is not the result of a few people going rogue; they are the result of official government policy, which we know is already escalating.
This week, in a brazen display of twisted logic, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that cities like New York are “jeopardizing public safety” by enacting policies that are contrary to “common sense law enforcement.” This merits, in his view, a “significant escalation” from the government against these so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Given what happened last week, and the tactics ICE employs, the attorney general must mean that if someone is a foreigner or an immigrant, the federal government has the right to arbitrarily arrest, shoot or use any other means necessary against them, and that any attempt by local governments to create accountability or prevent the abuse of power is wrong.
That is not common-sense law enforcement. It is authoritarianism, and exposes not just the racist and xenophobic intentions behind the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but also the false narrative that sanctuary cities have rampant crime, when in reality research shows repeatedly that our policies make the city safer.
A day is coming when the nation will wake up from this nightmare and create a more humane immigration system. But only if today we have the moral courage and the political will to speak up and fight with everything we have against the Trump administration’s cruelty.
Menchaca represents Red Hook, Sunset Park and other Brooklyn neighborhoods in the City Council, where he chairs the Immigration Committee.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
FEB 14, 2020 | 11:25 AM
Law enforcement officers are pictured at the scene of the shooting last Thursday. (Kendall Rodriguez/for New York Daily News)
Last Thursday, while carrying out an arrest in Brooklyn, federal immigration agents shot a tourist in the face and then barred the tourist’s mother and lawyers from talking to him while he recovered at Maimonides Hospital. They were reunited only after the consul general of his country intervened.
I witnessed much of this firsthand.
The Department of Justice, however, appears unrushed to investigate whether lethal force and intimidation were justified, despite repeated calls for accountability. Even the media has expressed little shock that this happened to someone with a tourist visa.
This muted response shows how successfully the Trump administration has numbed and cowed the government and the media to its immigration policies.
Here is why we should care: Immigration officers are enforcing civil and administrative law. They are not a police force or the military. Regardless of what anyone says, violating immigration law is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
Yet despite being civil officers, ICE officers hide their identities, even while openly carrying firearms and wearing plainclothes or military-style jackets. They impersonate local police and physically intimidate people who question their behavior. Now, they are using lethal force with impunity.
These tactics are not only outrageous in their own right; they allow ICE to cynically exploit the legitimacy and integrity of the NYPD. This compromises public safety by making it harder for the NYPD to build trust with immigrant communities through neighborhood policing. It also undermines the City Council’s efforts to clarify appropriate relationships between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement.
All this is not the result of a few people going rogue; they are the result of official government policy, which we know is already escalating.
This week, in a brazen display of twisted logic, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that cities like New York are “jeopardizing public safety” by enacting policies that are contrary to “common sense law enforcement.” This merits, in his view, a “significant escalation” from the government against these so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Given what happened last week, and the tactics ICE employs, the attorney general must mean that if someone is a foreigner or an immigrant, the federal government has the right to arbitrarily arrest, shoot or use any other means necessary against them, and that any attempt by local governments to create accountability or prevent the abuse of power is wrong.
That is not common-sense law enforcement. It is authoritarianism, and exposes not just the racist and xenophobic intentions behind the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but also the false narrative that sanctuary cities have rampant crime, when in reality research shows repeatedly that our policies make the city safer.
A day is coming when the nation will wake up from this nightmare and create a more humane immigration system. But only if today we have the moral courage and the political will to speak up and fight with everything we have against the Trump administration’s cruelty.
Menchaca represents Red Hook, Sunset Park and other Brooklyn neighborhoods in the City Council, where he chairs the Immigration Committee.
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