ICE Agents are promoted for using brutality? Is this what you voted for? Fight back, resist and let’s stop Trump’s regime now!
Hi Reader,
Over the past year, we have all watched masked immigration officers use escalating force to carry out the current administration’s immigration policies. Cuts to federal spending have gutted the offices and agencies meant to monitor and rein in abusive actions.
But ProPublica has been documenting what the government won’t.
When Americans started reporting a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents, we started digging. Our reporters sifted through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports to catalog all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers.
In October we revealed that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents. Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. And more than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer.
When government officials said immigration officers use a “minimum amount of force” when making arrests, we documented nearly 50 instances of immigration agents breaking vehicle windows to arrest those inside — something they rarely did before. Use-of-force experts and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement insiders say there is no known policy change greenlighting agents’ smashing of windows. But there are arrest quotas, and they are increasingly aggressive.
We saw immigration agents:
- Breaking car windows while children sobbed inside.
- Smashing glass next to a pregnant woman.
- Dragging people out of cars who don’t have a criminal record.
- Shattering windows to arrest U.S. citizens.
- Breaking into cars of people who weren’t the agents’ intended targets.
- Arresting bystanders who were filming car windows being smashed.
- Using a baton to break a rear window of a white pickup truck, taking the driver to the ground and pressing his head forcefully into the asphalt. The man, last seen in the video bleeding from the head, has not been identified.
We also found that some officers who break glass aren’t being disciplined — they’re being promoted.