As ICE Conducts Made-for-TV Raids, Cities from Chicago to Newark Resist Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to stay in Chicago. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, says it arrested more than a thousand people, after detaining another thousand on Sunday, in raids that immigrant communities and their allies say violate the Constitution and are being carried out in retaliation against sanctuary cities. Newly sworn-in Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is in New York City now on an ICE raid that was covered live, and agents have been told to be camera-ready. She was live-tweeting the raid. Soon we’ll go to Newark, where Mayor Ras Baraka denounced a warrantless ICE raid Thursday that detained a U.S. veteran and other U.S. citizens.

But we begin today’s show in Chicago, where ICE officially launched, quote, “enhanced targeted operations” Sunday, with the TV personality Dr. Phil joining Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and streaming the immigration raids live by about 10 teams of about 10 federal agents each. Nearly half those arrested Sunday had no criminal record. ICE says collateral arrests will continue as it claims to target people who are dangerous. On Friday, school officials in Chicago refused to allow agents into an elementary school who were actually not ICE agents, but from the U.S. Secret Service. This comes as four Chicago-based immigrant rights groups have sued to stop the raids, and the Chicago City Council voted this month not to lift limits on involvement in federal immigration enforcement actions. On Monday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee launched an investigation of Chicago and several other sanctuary cities.

We go right now to Chicago, where we’re joined by Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas. She’s also a recipient of DACA — that’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Dulce, thank you for joining us. Can you talk about what’s happening in your city?

DULCE GUZMÁN: Yes. Thank you for inviting me.

In the city and surrounding suburbs, there is a lot of palpable fear and anxiety among families. As you just said, there was over 1,100 ICE arrests across the country, and we still don’t know about how many of those were from Chicago. What we have heard from families is that many are choosing to stay home. Many are choosing to not send their kids to school. Several businesses are reporting that they’re seeing less business, people coming in. So, there’s a lot of fear and anxiety that is spreading, for the same reason that we know that ICE is not only targeting people with criminal backgrounds, but they’re targeting people that have been here for many years who have not committed any crime, who are our neighbors.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dulce, even those that they claim are folks with criminal backgrounds. apparently many are actually minor infractions. There was a report of a man in Waukegan who was picked up by immigration authorities for deportation who apparently had two — who had been in the country for 20 years and had two DUIs, driving under the influence, convictions in the past. What about these minor crimes being treated under federal law as aggravated felonies?

DULCE GUZMÁN: Yeah, I think that this administration is trying to make a point about public safety, when we know that this is not about public safety. If this really was about public safety and legality, we would not have seen the 1,500 pardons of people that stormed the Capitol and made — caused violent crimes on police officers. I believe that this is a very high media strategy that’s being used to elevate what this administration is trying to push, which is a white supremacist agenda.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, Illinois does not permit the detention of people who are subject to potential deportation, so where are the people that ICE is picking up in Chicago and the surrounding areas? Where are they being sent?

DULCE GUZMÁN: As of now, we don’t know, but we suspect that they might be going to nearby states like Indiana, where Indiana does allow detention centers.

AMY GOODMAN: Dulce, we want to go across the country, from Chicago back here on the East Coast to Newark. Dulce Guzmán is with — executive director of Alianza Americas. In Newark, New Jersey, another sanctuary city, which is in a state where nearly one in four residents are foreign-born, nearly half of all children are part of immigrant families, three days after President Trump’s inauguration, ICE agents raided a seafood depot in Newark without a warrant, taking three people into custody, including a U.S. military veteran. This is the Newark Mayor Ras Baraka condemning the raids.

MAYOR RAS BARAKA: It’s a slippery slope when we think it’s OK to suspend the Constitution of the United States in order to make a political point or statement. … And if we allow people to identify us or put us in categories of criminal or any other thing just by the way we look, then we’re going back to a time that was very dangerous in this country, specifically for people that look like me.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. She was on the ground soon after the raid took place. And you’re the largest immigrant group in New Jersey. Talk about what happened. Describe the scene for us in Ironbound, one of the most diverse areas of Newark.

AMY TORRES: Sure. I mean, I think it’s important to understand what the Ironbound is. This has been an immigrant enclave and hub forever, you know, starting with the Portuguese whaling industry, something that is so archaic, it’s like outside of our living memory, right? So, this is not these sort of, like, new arrivals, the criminal gangs, all of the things that this administration says that they’re targeting.

The other thing is that, you know, ICE has called what they’re doing across the country “targeted enforcement operations.” They refuse to call the detention centers camps. They refuse to call deportations anything but expulsions. Now they’re refusing to call raids anything but raids, right? But what we’re seeing is that ICE officers stormed this workplace. They immediately announced, “Do you want this announcement in Spanish or Portuguese?” If this is a targeted enforcement operation, don’t ICE officers know what they’re enforcing? Don’t they know what languages they’re speaking if they’re targeting certain people for arrest? And if this is such a targeted enforcement operation, why are U.S. citizens and veterans being interrogated and detained on the spot and having their credentials questioned?

I think it’s really important, above all else, to understand what our constitutional rights are.

AMY GOODMAN: Did they have a warrant?

AMY TORRES: They didn’t produce a warrant. And subsequently, they haven’t produced one since. So, look, understanding what our rights are, presidential administrations come and go, right? ICE directives come and go. The Constitution is here to stay, and our constitutional rights are here to stay. And so long as you understand that unless an ICE officer produces a warrant with your name clearly and correctly spelled, and signed by a judge, you do not need to answer their questions. If you understand that, you can also develop an analysis that everything that ICE officers do outside of that warrant is a deception tactic, it’s manipulation, just like they use the theater of fear and panic to intimidate people into giving more information than they should. And that is how ICE operates in our community. They operate — one of their most effective tools is fear and panic.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Amy, I wanted to ask you about this, the highly publicized nature of these raids, with having reporters and celebrities accompany the raids and having them all filmed, when the reality is that even at the rate of a thousand arrests a day, that would take the Trump administration — in one year, they’d have 365,000 people arrested. It would take them 30 years, even at this rate, to be able to deport all the people they claim they are aiming to deport.

AMY TORRES: Yeah. Well, I think two things. If Dr. Phil can film ICE officers during an arrest, there’s no reason that you and I can’t, either. If you are a bystander and you see ICE in your neighborhood, you see ICE on your block, you take out your phone, and you start filming, because if Dr. Phil can do it, you better bet that you can do it, too.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this is an administration that is built for the billionaire class. Yes, ICE’s current directives are built on racism. It’s built on the post-9/11 nationalism that bore Department of Homeland Security to begin with. But this is also a gift to private prison corporations. That’s very true here in New Jersey, where the world’s largest private prison corporation, CoreCivic, is looking to expand its footprint and to challenge our ban on immigration detention. It’s true in Newark, where GEO Group, one of the other largest private prison corporations, is looking to expand here in Newark, New Jersey, and in other cities across the state.

So, yes, whether it’s 100 arrests today or 1,000 arrests today, it is built on fear, so that if we can’t detain people for profit, we are detaining them in the isolation of their own homes. We are segregating them from society. We are making people so fearful that they’re withdrawing their kids from school. They’re too fearful to see a doctor. They’re too fearful to go to their pharmacy. You know, outside of Newark, we had a pharmacy raid in Paterson here in New Jersey just this weekend. And what that does is segregate society so that if the federal administration can’t physically remove you, you are physically removing yourself into a shadow economy, into places where you can’t stand up or you don’t feel confident standing up for your rights.

And I think the important thing for folks to remember who are not from the immigrant community is that what we learned from Newark with the interrogation of a U.S. citizen and the interrogation of a U.S. military veteran is that it’s not enough to have the privileged status. Simply existing in the same place as immigrants makes you guilty by association. ICE officers are not going to discriminate on whether you look or sound like a citizen, whether you are able to produce documents that show that you are a citizen or a military veteran. Simply being in proximity to their target, which is immigrant communities, is enough to arrest and detain you, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Amy Torres, I want to get your response to Democratic Congressmember Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey signing a letter condemning private immigration detention in New Jersey, but he also voted to support the Laken Riley Act, the Laken Riley Act which will fill more ICE jails.

AMY TORRES: Look, I think a lot of folks have spent time asking immigrant communities, “How are you feeling? What does this moment feel like? What are communities saying?” I want to know how Josh Gottheimer feels. I want to know how other people, other politicians in power feel, knowing that, you know, Trump was first elected to office nearly 10 years ago. It’s been this long that immigrant communities have been telling people in power how we feel. I want to know if they feel shame. I want to know if they feel disgrace. Do they feel guilt? Because I’m tired of talking about how our communities feel, what is our reaction. They know how we feel. But we need to hear from them. If they have taken a commitment to public office, if they’ve taken a commitment to public service, if this is not the hill that they’re going to die on, they picked the wrong fight.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in Dulce Guzmán from Alianza Americas again. Dulce, how have you seen the elected officials in Chicago responding to this crisis, especially considering that Trump’s border czar, Homan, has actually said of both the governor and the mayor that they suck, and if they try to impede his work, that he could prosecute them?

DULCE GUZMÁN: Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker are standing up for immigrants. They’re reiterating their commitment to protecting our communities by enforcing our trust laws, enforcing our sanctuary city ordinance here in Chicago. They have been speaking up for our immigrant communities because they know that we belong here and they know that we contribute to our neighborhoods. We help grow our economies. So I think that we’ve had a very welcoming response both from Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker.

But we need more elected officials to speak up on our behalf. As Amy was saying, it’s not enough for us to be telling people how we feel. We’ve been doing that for decades. It is a time for us to show up for our neighbors, to speak up about the economic, cultural and social contributions that immigrant families make to our cities.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Of course, this is an issue we will continue to cover, and we will be doing an interview in Spanish after the show and post it at our Spanish website, which you can link to at democracynow.org. Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas, joining us from Chicago, and Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice.

Coming up, we look at the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Rwandan-backed M23 fighters have entered the eastern Congolese city of Goma, and we look at what’s happening in Sudan. What does the global gold industry have to do with it? Stay with us.