Why Did ICE Agents Arrest and Detain a 71-Year-Old U.S. Citizen?

[ad_1] Earlier this week—in a narrative that reads as an ideal encapsulation of abuses by Trump’s immigration enforcement—masked ICE brokers roughed up and detained a 71-year-old U.S. citizen volunteering as a authorized observer to watch them at a federal courthouse in San Diego.

Grandmother Barbara Stone says she was documenting the detention of asylum-seekers with the group “Detention Resistance” at San Diego’s immigration courtroom when she was baselessly accused of pushing an officer. A number of masked brokers then pursued Stone, grabbed and handcuffed her (leaving bruises), confiscated her telephone and purse, and detained her for over eight hours, she says.

As soon as Stone was launched, ICE returned her bag however stored possession of her telephone. Why? Stone says an ICE agent in contrast the scenario to “a drug bust the place they maintain a drug supplier’s telephone as a result of I had used it within the crime.”

However the one “crime” of which Stone says she’s responsible is documenting immigration enforcement. If that is true, the episode would observe with different obvious makes an attempt by ICE brokers to keep away from accountability of late, as an illustration, by sporting masks to allow them to conduct raids and arrests anonymously.

In an announcement to an area outlet, ICE accused Stone of assaulting an officer, citing “a 700% enhance in assaults” in opposition to its brokers over the past 12 months (a statistic the company makes use of to justify brokers concealing their identities, as effectively).

That 700 p.c enhance, it must be famous, is a considerably deceptive option to say there have been 79 alleged assaults in opposition to ICE brokers this 12 months, in comparison with 10 in the identical timeframe final 12 months. In the meantime, ICE interactions have turn out to be dramatically extra frequent and aggressive .

ICE’s numbers sadly deserve additional scrutiny, because the company has been defining “assault” fairly loosely. In one other high-profile arrest of a U.S. citizen, for instance, ICE final month detained New York Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander for assault—an accusation not not like when a schoolyard bully accuses his sufferer of getting in the best way of his fist, as Washington Submit columnist Philip Bump put it .