In response to the Trump administration’s targeted ICE enforcement in cities across the United States, Amy Fischer, Director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:
“To put it simply, these ICE operations are unconscionable and fly in the face of human rights.
“These harmful ICE operations directed by President Trump are racist and create undue chaos and damage to communities. ICE agents have provided unfettered access to media to exacerbate the fears and bolster their racist and inaccurate talking points, threatened enforcement at schools and churches, detained people who are citizens and longtime residents, and even gone so far as covering up people’s security cameras at their homes to avoid any public accountability.
“President Trump has been fixated on his mass deportation agenda, rooted in white supremacist beliefs and narratives, to unjustly go after our immigrant friends and neighbors across the United States.
“Over the course of his campaign and now in just the second week of his second term, President Trump made numerous unfounded and baseless claims about ‘criminal immigrants’ in this country. Listen closely and many of the crimes being associated with people shown in these dystopian arrest videos have been ‘charged with’ and ‘arrested for’ crimes without having a conviction on their record, throwing away all semblance of due process.
“In reality, we know these raids use the pretext of targeting people that have some prior involvement with the criminal legal system to go into communities and remove as many community members as they can. People with criminal histories are still people with rights, families and communities that care for them, and must still be treated with dignity.
“Just as President Trump has been given a chance and reelected president in spite of his own criminal conviction, so too should immigrant neighbors with convictions be given another chance to thrive in their communities in the United States.”
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