This is from last October, the numbers must be higher by now. And of course 2 citizens have been killed since this was written.
The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And nearly 20 children, two of whom have cancer.
www.propublica.org
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,”
Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been
dragged,
tackled,
beaten,
tased and
shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their
necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside
in the rain while in their underwear. At least three
citizens were
pregnant when
agents detained them. One of those women had already had the
door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem
watched.
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for
more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government
does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
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Good example. And shifting to a crackdown on dissent is another red flag for Trump’s developing police state. At least in his dreams!
LESS THAN 40 MINUTES after federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old
nurse Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue in south Minneapolis, Clayton Kelly was thrown face-first onto the sidewalk, tasting snow and street grime as a federal agent’s knee drove into his back.
The incident, a video of which The Intercept reviewed and corroborated with an independent eyewitness, occurred not long after Kelly and his wife arrived in the area where Pretti was killed. With protesters amassing and agents from Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement flooding the area, the couple told The Intercept, they just wanted to observe the scene.
“All of a sudden,” Kelly said, a federal agent “started running toward me, pointing and yelling, ‘That’s him. Get him.’”
Ten days earlier, Kelly had watched as an immigration agent
shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during a federal enforcement action in north Minneapolis. As Kelly told the local outlet
Sahan Journal, an SUV with police lights chased another vehicle, and then, “They went into a house. … I heard two shots before the area was just being swarmed by ICE immediately.” Sosa-Celis was injured — and Kelly’s account contradicted the official narrative released by the Department of Homeland Security.
At the scene of Pretti’s killing, Kelly told agents they would find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” he recalled. After the exchange, he and his wife, Alana Ericson, began walking toward another section of Nicollet Avenue where people were congregating, and as soon as Kelly turned his back, that was when agents began shouting and running toward him.
“I had my hands up. I kept saying, ‘I’m leaving. I’m leaving,’” Kelly said.
Kelly is far from the only civilian to be brutalized by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. But his detailed account of his beating and detention offers a clear example of how the agents, ostensibly deployed to carry out immigration enforcement, have instead shifted their purpose to encompass a
crackdown on dissent. In Kelly’s case, it raises the question of whether he was facing retaliation for acting as a witness…..
……While federal agents pinned Kelly down, given Pretti’s recent shooting, Ericson feared they could kill her husband.
“I kept telling them he’s a U.S. citizen. They said, ‘We don’t give a f—,’” she said.
Kelly had previously undergone fusion surgery in his thoracic spine, a procedure that permanently joins vertebrae to stabilize the back. “Several agents piled on top of me,” Kelly said, and one put his knee on the site of his surgical wounds. “They were sitting directly on my spine.”
“I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe, but I had almost no air left,” Kelly said. “An agent pushed the pepper spray nozzle right into my left eye and sprayed. I turned my head so I wouldn’t get it in both eyes, but my left eye was completely burned.”