Monday, July 23, 2018

ICE Has Conducted Hundreds of Raids in New York Since Trump Came to Power. Here’s What Those Operations Look Like.



It was approximately 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in early April when the pounding on the front door began. The sun was still coming up over New York City as a man The Intercept will call Michael jumped out of bed to investigate the commotion. Michael opened the door and found three men and one woman wearing tactical vests standing outside. They were accompanied by a man with a camera, already recording.

The law enforcement officials, who Michael assumed were New York City police officers, were asking about a Russian who lived in the apartment. Michael says that his responses to the officers’ queries were nonverbal, mostly shrugs and nods. “The only thing I said was to the camera crew,” he told The Intercept recently. “I told him to get the camera out of my face.”

The officers entered the apartment and went upstairs. Michael could hear them banging around above, presumably in search of the Russian, who was not home at the time. When the officers returned, they asked Michael for his ID. He produced his New York state identification card and one of the officers made a phone call. They then suggested Michael get dressed and grab his passport. Michael put on some clothes and grabbed the document.

“They seemed very excited, very happy,” he recalled.

That’s when the handcuffs came out, Michael said, and the officers explained that they were with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, otherwise known as ICE. Surely this situation could be righted on the spot, Michael thought. He had a meeting with his immigration attorney that very day, about a pending green card application. Michael recalled showing one of the agents a text message from his lawyer. “It doesn’t matter,” he remembers the agent saying.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Intercept_ 

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