ICE is heating up again
This week on Breaking Culture Live, we speak with some of the organizers helping communities protect their neighbors
This week on Breaking Culture Live - broadcasting at 12:00 pm Chicago time on July 15th - we’ll be speaking with Zachary Mueller, Senior Strategist at States at the Core,
an organization that has helped train thousands of rapid responders in communities across the country and has recently started trainings on protecting election sites.
After a bit of a breather following the public outcry over the ICE/BP murders of Renne Good and Alex Pretti (which resulted in the dismissal of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem) ICE has once again increased the pace of its arrests. Early this month, The New York Times reported they had doubled their arrest quota, making up to 2,000 arrests a day. This has predictably resulted in an increase of violent encounters between ICE agents and residents of major American cities.
As I hope you have heard, last week agents operating in Houston killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old immigrant from Mexico who had three children, had been living in the United States for 35 years, was a small business owner with no criminal record, and was in the process of regularizing his immigration status. As per the usual, the immediate response from ICE propagandists was to paint Salgado Aruajo as a criminal threat, claiming ICE agents shot him in self defense after he attempted to kill them with his car.
But eyewitness testimony and video footage once again suggests that this was another botched encounter between the fascist paramilitaries operating in our cities and people just trying to drive to work. Agents were driving in unmarked vehicles, tailing him in his work van, and aggressively attempting to box him in. There hasn’t yet been any evidence that the agents announced themselves as immigration officials - and Salgado Aruanja wasn’t even the target of the operation. It appears that he was shot through the passenger window and handcuffed on the ground before anyone administered any medical care.
Meanwhile, the AP reports that ICE is pressuring the other men captured in the operation to self deport in order to prevent them from being present to testify in any future proceedings. And by pressuring they mean that they are telling the men that if they attempt to fight their removal cases, they will be thrown into one of the horrific concentration camps ICE has set up around the country to house detainees - like Camp East Montana near El Paso, Texas, where at least three detainees have died this year due to their treatment. Four detainees recently sued the U.S. government over the conditions there, which included “severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; no meaningful programming or recreation; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors or nail clippers, outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight.” The facility also recently had a massive measles outbreak.
Assisted by a policy that prevents detainees from being released on bond while waiting trial, the message is clear: either you agree to leave the country without due process, or you’ll be thrown into one of these holes to rot while you wait for the overburdened immigration court system to process your claims. It is this kind of coercive and unjust processes that have led to the majority of the almost 100,000 deportations heralded by the Trump administration.
Communities are organizing on every level to help halt these authoritarian actions - from running rapid response networks to prevent the detention of their neighbors to organizing to prevent the construction of ICE concentration camps in their cities and towns.
States at the Core is one of the leading organizations assisting in these efforts. And Zachary Mueller is working not only in the on-the-ground organizing that is crucial to preventing the unaccountable actions of the fascists in our streets, but also in helping communities craft compelling narratives to combat the administration’s propaganda blitz. He is also helping to lead the efforts to protect elections going into the midterms.
We will talk about all of this when we meet this Wednesday. Please join us on the YouTube Channel at noon Chicago time or catch the recording after it is posted.