#U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

[saywhat-politics]

A U.S.-born citizen was arrested in Florida on Wednesday and charged with illegally entering the state as an “unauthorized alien.” Twenty-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was detained for a day at the request of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite his mother producing his birth certificate and Social Security card at a court hearing.

Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggans inspected the birth certificate during a court hearing on Thursday, confirmed it was “an authentic document,” and said she found no probable cause for the charge, the Florida Phoenix reported. But a state prosecutor said that because ICE had asked the local jail to hold Lopez-Gomez, the court did not have the authority to grant his release.

[gwydionmisha]

The above two are different cases.

Meanwhile the anti-1st Amendment round up and illegal detention/deportation continues.

US judge halts deportation of Turkish student at Tufts

Rubio's such a horrible person that he's proud of it.

Another bullshit illegal deportation attempt based on Government lies.

Now if the Democratic Politicians would actually get on board....

[cavenewstimestoday]

A U.S. citizen was held for pickup by ICE despite proof he was born in the country

Politics Apr 19, 2025 2:35 PM EDT MIAMI (AP) — A U.S. citizen was arrested in Florida for allegedly being in the country illegally and held for pickup by immigration authorities even after his mother showed a judge her son’s birth certificate and the judge dismissed charges. Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, 20, was in a car that was stopped just past the Georgia state line by the Florida Highway Patrol…

[xtruss]

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Wants To Know If You’re Posting Negative Things About It Online

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Wants To Hire Contractors To Monitor Social Media For Threats. Those Who Criticize The Agency Could Be Pulled Into The Dragnet.

— Sam Biddle | February 11, 2025 | The Intercept

Supporters of immigrants’ rights protest against Donald Trump’s policies on Feb. 7, 2025, in Homestead, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Amid Anger And Protest over the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to monitor and locate “negative” social media discussion about the agency and its top officials, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.

Citing an increase in threats to ICE agents and leadership, the agency is soliciting pitches from private companies to monitor threats across the internet — with a special focus on social media. People who simply criticize ICE online could pulled into the dragnet.

“In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” the procurement document reads.

If this scanning uncovers anything the agency deems suspicious, ICE is asking its contractors to drill down into the background of social media users.

That includes:

“Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE; 2). Information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organization(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence; and 3). Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding [sic] to violent acts.”

It’s unclear how exactly any contractor might sniff out someone’s “proclivity for violence.” The ICE document states only that the contractor will use “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles” to accomplish its automated threat detection.

Once flagged, the system will further scour a target’s internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world position and offline identity. In addition to compiling personal information — such as the Social Security numbers and addresses of those whose posts are flagged — the contractor will also provide ICE with a “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.”

The document also requests “Facial Recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject.” The contract contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.

The posting indicates that ICE isn’t merely looking to detect direct threats of violence, but also online criticism of the agency.

As part of its mission to protect ICE with “proactive threat monitoring,” the winning contractor will not simply flag threatening remarks but “Provide monitoring and analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative).” This includes regular updates on the “total number of negative references to ICE found in social media” from week to week.

“ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm.”

Such sentiment analysis — typically accomplished via machine-learning techniques — could place under law enforcement scrutiny speech that is constitutionally protected. Simply stated, a post that is critical or even hostile to ICE isn’t against the law.

“ICE’s attempts to capture and assign a judgement to people’s ‘sentiment’ throughout the expanse of the internet is beyond concerning,” said Cinthya Rodriguez, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente. “The current administration’s attempt to use this technology falls within the agency’s larger history of mass surveillance, which includes gathering information from personal social media accounts and retaliating against immigrant activists. ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us.”

Scanning online speech in the name of homeland security is a bipartisan initiative. The document soliciting contractors appears nearly identical to a procurement document published by ICE in 2020, which resulted in a $5.5 million contract between the agency and Barbaricum, a Washington-based defense and intelligence contractor. A new contract has not yet been awarded. ICE spokesperson Jocelyn Biggs told The Intercept, “While ICE anticipates maintaining its threat risk monitoring services, we cannot speculate on a specific timeline for future contract decisions.”

ICE already has extensive social media surveillance capabilities provided by federal contractor Giant Oak, which under both Trump’s first term and the Biden administration sought “derogatory” posts about the United States to inform immigration-related decision-making. The goal of this contract, ostensibly, is focused more narrowly on threats to ICE leadership, agents, facilities, and operations.

Civil liberties advocates told The Intercept the program had grave speech implications under the current administration. “While surveillance programs like this under any administration are a concerning privacy and free speech violation and I would fight to stop them, the rhetoric of the Trump administration makes this practice especially terrifying,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Threats to ‘punish’ opponents or deport those exercising 1st Amendment rights combine with these invasive practices to create a real ‘thought police’ scenario.”

[peppermintsolarpunk]

A resource for Californians.

Image transcript: [THIS IS HOW RAPID RESPONSE WORKS:

If you see ICE activity in your community, call your rapid response hotline.

Once you call, legal observers will arrive to document any suspicious activity from ICE.

If there is an arrest, an attorney will provide legal assistance to those affected.

A button at the bottom reads “FIND YOUR LOCAL RAPID RESPONSE NUMBER”] end id.

You can find your local rapid response number here (again, this resource is California-specific, feel free to add other states’ resources in the reblogs, I’m just not aware of any yet).

I recommend adding your county’s number to your phone contacts so that you can pull it up quickly when needed.

Be safe out there, friends. You have people on your side.

[surviving-the-next-4-years]

ICE is throwing a tantrum and is threatening violence against anyone who criticize them.

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

(X) (X)

ETA more options since the phone line is back down (WOOT):

The digital tip line:

And this:

(From a source I will not link.)

[gwydionmisha]

Now we find out if there is even a shred of rule of law left.

[wausaupilotreview]

Wausau School District dispels ICE visit rumors, reaffirms policy

The Wausau School District on Monday dismissed talk about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents visiting schools and reiterated their policy of honoring only valid judicial warrants.

Damakant Jayshi The Wausau School District on Monday dismissed talk about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents visiting schools and reiterated their policy of honoring only valid judicial warrants. “There have been rumors that ICE agents were at our buildings,” said Wendy Cartledge, WSD’s director of pupil services. “Those are false.” She made the statement during a briefing on existing…

[xtruss]

The “Unusual Nonprofit” That Helps “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)” Spy On Wire Transfers

A Little-Known Database Logs Hundreds of Millions of Wire Transfers Sent To or From Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.

— Shawn Musgrave | April 14, 2025

Photo Illustration: Fei Liu, Getty Images

When Immigration And Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are trying to track down undocumented immigrants, they seek out all the data they can find. In Arizona, they’ve found a special trove that’s ripe for abuse.

The Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, database offers a rare glimpse into the financial lives of millions of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. The database contains details about more than 340 million wire transfers sent via Western Union and more than two dozen other companies that immigrants rely on to send money back home.

The database contains a record of every transfer of $500 or More sent using these services to or from Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. For each transaction, TRAC captures the name and home address for both the sender and the recipient, plus dozens of other sensitive data points.

“This Database Is A Loaded Weapon Lying Around For The Taking.”

“This database is a loaded weapon lying around for the taking,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, Deputy Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which has called for TRAC to be shut down. “This is a data collection program that disproportionately sweeps in the records of poor people and immigrants, groups that the Trump administration is going out of its way to target.”

TRAC is Unusual in Many Ways.

The data dragnet is powered by Arizona’s state attorney general using administrative subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s sign-off. But TRAC operates as a nonprofit and a clearinghouse for ICE and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies around the country to access the data. The current Arizona Attorney General, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, is aggressively suing the Trump administration on numerous fronts — yet the database is an invaluable potential resource for its anti-immigrant campaign. And despite being a target of privacy advocates and lawsuits for years, TRAC has continued to suck up data.

ICE has played an outsized role in TRAC over the years, chipping in data of its own at times. ICE agents have also been top users of the database, served on TRAC’s board, and even funded its operations.

But Mayes’s office and TRAC downplayed concerns that ICE might use the data to target immigrants for deportation. The database does not contain details about immigration status, they noted, and it’s intended exclusively to investigate money laundering along the border, which was how TRAC first started more than a decade ago. Before searching the data, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023.

“The Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC) Offers Officials A Massive Grab-Bag of Data to Root Around In.”

But privacy advocates told The Intercept that TRAC has insufficient safeguards and unacceptable risks, particularly under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has been shifting agents at ICE and other agencies away from investigating money launderers, with orders to prioritize deportations and raids. Agents who are grabbing U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and visa holders off the streets on pretext; shipping people to a mega-prison in El Salvador based on “administrative errors”; and filing questionable search warrant applications might simply lie to access data that makes the deportation machine run a bit more smoothly. On Monday, ICE inked an agreement with the IRS to obtain data about undocumented workers, including their home addresses.

“The Trump administration has already shown that it is acting recklessly at best with who it deports and why,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “TRAC offers officials a massive grab-bag of data to root around in for transactions it can label suspicious, and there isn’t currently any oversight.”

“Limitless” Investigative Power

TRAC’s origin story is a testament to that familiar bipartisan itch to expand surveillance powers. Despite an early loss in state court over the dragnet, Mayes and her predecessors — one fellow Democrat and two Republicans — used settlement agreements and administrative subpoenas to build the database into a go-to resource for cops and federal agents nationwide.

It started with one subpoena to a single company. In 2006, then-Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat and former mayor of Phoenix, demanded data from Western Union about all wire transfers of $300 or More to any location in the Mexican border state of Sonora from any location worldwide over a three-year period. He did this under the state racketeering law, A.R.S. § 13-2315, which requires financial institutions to produce records in response to “reasonable” requests from the attorney general’s office.

Western Union initially proposed providing partially anonymized data to protect its customers’ privacy.

This wasn’t acceptable to Goddard and a task force of federal and state agencies, which wanted as much data as possible — including about innocent customers’ transactions — to establish “control groups.”

Western Union fought the subpoena, and in 2007 a state appellate court ruled Goddard had exceeded his authority under the racketeering law. The Arizona Court of Appeals was concerned at the subpoena’s sheer breadth, especially its geographic coverage far beyond Arizona state lines, and ruled it was not “reasonable” under the law.

“It Would Provide A Justification For Requesting Financial Data From Anywhere In The World.”

“The argument the Attorney General makes here would make the investigative power granted in A.R.S. § 13-2315 limitless,” the court found. “It would provide a justification for requesting financial data from anywhere in the world merely because it might serve to provide a baseline of ‘innocent data.’”

After losing the court battle over the subpoena, Goddard turned up the pressure on Western Union by suing it directly. In 2010, Western Union settled with the attorney general’s office and agreed to comply with subpoenas for data about Wire Transfers Above $500.

Beside the higher threshold amount, the scope of data sharing under the settlement agreement was even broader than what Goddard had previously sought. Western Union agreed to share five years’ worth of historical data and give Goddard’s office “near real time” data about transactions sent to or from “the area within 200 miles north and south of the United States/Mexico border,” plus all of Arizona. Unlike the prior subpoena, this included portions of every state on both sides of the border.

The state attorney general’s office now had a data pipeline from one of the biggest players in the wire transfer industry. And it was just the beginning.

“Unorthodox Arrangement”

In early 2014, Western Union signed a second settlement with Goddard’s successor, Republican Tom Horne. This agreement expanded the data sharing to its current scope: all wire transfers above $500 to and from the entire country of Mexico plus the entirety of four U.S. southern border states — Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas — regardless of proximity to the border.

By this point, the dragnet had expanded beyond Western Union too. Horne’s office sent subpoenas to at least five of its competitors in late 2013, records show, including to MoneyGram, Sigue, and Continental Exchange Solutions.

The 2014 agreement also marked the establishment of TRAC as a separate nonprofit entity, initially bankrolled by Western Union and under the control of the attorney general’s office through its board. TRAC’s first director and president served simultaneously as a special agent supervisor at the agency, records show.

In 2015, Republican Mark Brnovich took over as Arizona’s attorney general. An early advocate for the argument that undocumented immigrants constitute an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, Brnovich was recently tapped as Trump’s ambassador to Serbia.

During Brnovich’s tenure, TRAC expanded rapidly, from 75 million transaction records compiled from 14 different companies in 2017 to 145 million records from 28 firms in early 2021, according to meeting minutes of TRAC’s board. In 2021 alone, TRAC added a “25% increase of data,” other minutes show. TRAC’s user base also exploded, from 300 different law enforcement agencies and 600 users in 2017 to nearly 700 agencies and 11,600 users in late 2021.

As of 2018, ICE Was The Top Agency Using The Database.

As of 2018, ICE was the top agency using the database, with almost 950 active user accounts, records show. During the Brnovich years, the agency became a key player in other ways. A top ICE agent in Phoenix joined TRAC’s board in 2017. In summer 2019, when the Western Union settlement concluded and the company was no longer on the hook to finance TRAC, ICE kicked in a year of funding.

Around this time, ICE also started contributing data about millions of wire transfers to TRAC using its own legally dubious administrative subpoenas, according to findings published by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. in 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2021, agents at two different offices of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations sent a type of federal subpoena called a “customs summons” to multiple companies, including Western Union. By law, this type of subpoena is limited to investigations related to merchandise imports and customs duties, a limitation which agents at ICE and other DHS components have flagrantly ignored before.

Some of ICE’s subpoenas covered transactions thousands of miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, demanding data for more than a dozen additional countries spanning from the Caribbean to China and parts of Europe.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI had also demanded data from certain companies, Wyden found.

“This unorthodox arrangement between state law enforcement, DHS and DOJ agencies to collect bulk money-transfer data raises a number of concerns about surveillance disproportionately affecting low-income, minority and immigrant communities,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

After Wyden raised concerns about the legality of their subpoenas, ICE withdrew them. A few months later, an HSI agent received an award from the White House for his “innovation, creativity, and foresight” in getting TRAC access to “an additional stream of millions of financial transaction records.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes during an interview with The Associated Press on November 21, 2024, in Philadelphia. Photo: Matt Slocum/AP

TRAC Under Mayes

Mayes narrowly won the state attorney general’s race in 2022, and she was sworn in as Wyden and the ACLU brought renewed scrutiny to TRAC. Once a Republican, Mayes switched parties in 2019, a change she attributed recently to her revulsion at the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

From the beginning of her administration, Mayes has defended TRAC. Like her predecessors, Mayes has overseen its continued expansion using administrative subpoenas under A.R.S. § 13-2315, but her office declined to comment on how the agency squares these subpoenas with the state appellate court’s decision from 2007. As of July 2024, 22 companies were “actively producing records” to TRAC, according to an HSI newsletter.

“The subpoenas are just as illegal now as they were several years ago,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.

Mayes has also taken steps to protect TRAC against legal challenges.

Shortly before she took office, four people whose data was swept up in TRAC filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against Western Union, MoneyGram, and other companies the plaintiffs used to send money to family abroad, as well as DHS and ICE. The plaintiffs alleged TRAC’s data sharing violates both federal and California financial privacy laws. In their defense, the companies pointed to the subpoenas they received over the years, including from Mayes’s staff.

TRAC wasn’t a defendant in the lawsuit, nor was the Arizona attorney general’s office. But in September, Mayes submitted a letter to the court defending TRAC. Mayes emphasized that she had “embraced and furthered” the program and claimed her office’s success at combating transnational criminal groups was “highly dependent” on her “ability to issue and enforce the subpoenas.”

“Because a primary issue before this Court is the legality of the Defendant [companies’] compliance with these subpoenas, it is difficult to identify a party more interested in such litigation than the State of Arizona,” Mayes wrote.

Wessler called the letter a “pretty aggressive attempt to shut litigants out of court,” particularly since this was “private litigation in a different court in a different state.”

Mayes’s letter cited a handful of federal prosecutions in which TRAC has played a role. One in particular, which resulted in drug trafficking and money-laundering convictions in California last October, shows the sheer scope of the database.

In December 2020, two informants told federal agents that they used a small money transmitter business in Oakland to launder drug proceeds to Mexico. Cashiers had been using an unsuspecting victim’s ID and personal information as cover for the transactions.

A table included in court filings shows the data that TRAC already had on this innocent third party, along with the fraudsters. There were more than a dozen entries for wire transfers she sent to “family or friends in Mexico,” as an IRS agent wrote, as early as five years prior and for amounts between $650 and almost $3,000.

“I would be worried about whose hands this data would get into,” said Sarah Lopez, a migration scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied remittances from Mexican immigrants to their communities back home, of the detailed data compiled by TRAC. “There are millions of people sending repeat transactions” via wire transfers each year between Mexico and the U.S., she said, “then multiply it by two because people are being tracked on both sides of border.”

Lopez was skeptical that the $500 threshold amount in the TRAC subpoenas — unchanged for more than a decade — was a meaningful screen to prevent excessive surveillance of immigrants’ remittances. “Five hundred dollars is not a lot of money to send,” she said, noting that immigrants often send money to help with significant one-time expenses like housing and health care, and that service fees incentivize larger transfers.

TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, defended the $500 threshold as “striking the right balance” based on recent data about average remittance amounts to Mexico and recent discussions he had with companies that share their data. Two companies told TRAC that, in 2024, “nearly 80% of all of their transactions are below $500, which means TRAC only has insight into approximately 20% of all transactions,” Lebel wrote in an email.

Mayes’s letter to the court proved fatal to the class-action lawsuit over TRAC. In late September, the court dismissed the case entirely, ruling that her office had “a legally protected interest” in defending the subpoenas but could not be added to the case. In November, shortly after the election, Mayes submitted a similar letter in another federal lawsuit regarding TRAC, which is ongoing.

“Despite the lawsuit and the public scrutiny of its actions, AG Mayes’ office is doubling down on its surveillance tactics,” said Daniel Werner, a senior staff attorney with Just Futures Law, which represented the plaintiffs in the dismissed class action lawsuit.

A Model of Secrecy

When it comes to TRAC, Mayes has distinguished herself from Brnovich, her Republican predecessor, in one key respect: secrecy.

Under Brnovich, the attorney general’s office released hundreds of documents about TRAC’s internal operations to the ACLU. These included nearly 140 subpoenas sent to more than 20 companies, meeting minutes from the TRAC board, and user lists.

Over the past year, The Intercept submitted multiple records requests to Mayes’s office, seeking updated versions of many of these materials plus other records. The agency sent the same documents it released to the ACLU and materials about TRAC’s operations under prior administrations. But it refused to release almost any records about how TRAC currently works, including documents that would show how its database has grown and shed light on its relationship with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

Mayes’ office now claims it would violate A.R.S. § 13-2315 itself to disclose any more of the TRAC subpoenas. “We are correcting the previous administration’s error and following the law,” wrote Richie Taylor, Mayes’s communications director, in an email.

“Their argument is wrong and borderline frivolous,” Wessler told The Intercept, noting that the statute clearly shields the data obtained by the subpoenas but says nothing about the subpoenas themselves. “An attempt to shield these subpoenas behind a spurious claim of secrecy is galling.”

For basic materials like TRAC’s meeting minutes, Mayes’s office now claims that it has no obligation under Arizona law to provide them since TRAC is formally a separate entity. When The Intercept asked TRAC directly for these same materials, it claimed, in turn, not to be subject to public records requests given its nonprofit status.

“The Public Records Law is an important part of Arizona law, but it simply doesn’t apply to TRAC,” wrote attorney Andy Gaona, which represents TRAC, in a letter in December.

Although a distinct creature on paper, TRAC has been “supervised directly” by the attorney general’s office, as a 2019 manual described the relationship. For years, TRAC’s bylaws gave the attorney general the power to personally select its board of directors and designate its chair. These provisions were still in TRAC’s bylaws as of September 2019, the most recent copy released by the attorney general’s office.

The current TRAC board chair, defense attorney Andrew Pacheco, who took the role in 2022, was chief of the attorney general’s criminal division before going into private practice. While working at the agency, he “supervised the activities of the Transaction Record Analysis Center,” according to his firm bio. The prior TRAC chair, Paul Ahler, served simultaneously as the agency’s criminal division chief.

“It just can’t be that the AGO can shield these public records by creating a nonprofit entity whose board it controlled, and that exists solely to ingest records obtained by the AGO,” Wessler argued, referring to the attorney general’s office.

Mayes’s office said that the attorney general no longer has this level of authority over TRAC but said it did not have a copy of the current bylaws to substantiate this. “TRAC is governed entirely independent of the Attorney General’s Office,” Lebel, TRAC’s president, wrote. TRAC declined to provide its current bylaws as part of The Intercept’s records request.

Other records show close coordination over the years between agency officials and TRAC staff — who sometimes used official government email addresses — including on the subpoenas that fuel the database.

TRAC’s deputy director, Liz Barrick, who joined TRAC in 2018 after several years working at the attorney general’s office, drafted many of the administrative subpoenas herself, records show, which she would forward to her former colleagues at the agency to review and sign before they were sent to the companies.

At one point in early 2018, Lebel and Barrick worked up subpoenas for wire transfers to and from an entirely new state: Georgia, which TRAC wanted to investigate as a “hub of racketeering activities.” For weeks, the pair emailed the attorney general’s office about the proper scope of the subpoenas. When one of the companies expressed concerns, Barrick responded with the agency’s position about modifying the subpoena.

TRAC staff also coordinated with ICE as the agency prepared to send its own data demands to Western Union, emails show. In 2019, Barrick emailed an ICE official some “language to be included in the subpoena.” A few months later, Ahler checked in with Barrick: “What is the status of our federal administrative subpoena to Western Union?”

And in 2021, when Western Union’s lawyer requested a meeting with the attorney general’s office about a recent subpoena, Barrick was added to the call.

TRAC and Mayes’s office both declined to answer whether their staff still collaborate on the subpoenas.

“TRAC really appears to operate more like a Department of the Attorney General Office (AGO) and Not an Independent Organization,” said EPIC’s Kunkler. “The AG’s attempt to weaponize technicalities to avoid disclosing information looks an awful lot like intentionally laundering their actions through a nonprofit to avoid disclosure.”

[reasonsforhope]

"A small group of activists assembled before dawn on a recent day in a South L.A. parking lot preparing to patrol the neighborhood. The gathering was not unlike what you see when police congregate in a parking lot preparing for a raid.

Only this time, the target was federal immigration agents.

The activists were from the Community Self Defense Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights. They were armed with two-way radios, bullhorns, and were trained to spot undercover vehicles from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security.

The coalition formed in the wake of the second election of President Donald Trump and includes groups from across Los Angeles. They say their aim is to find ICE agents, alert the community to their presence using bullhorns, and drive them out of neighborhoods.

“They’re on our land. This is our territory,” said Ron Gochez of Unión del Barrio, which is part of the coalition. “Whatever they do here, they have to know they are going to meet an organized resistance.

“There is nowhere, there is no alleyway, no little corner of our city anywhere where an ICE raid can happen where we won’t know about it almost immediately,” he said.

An ICE spokesperson confirmed in a statement that agents have aborted at least one enforcement action “due to safety concerns brought on by protesters/bystanders.” The spokesperson declined to give his name “due to a heightened security risk to ICE employees.” ...

Tracking ICE

Last week, a high school history teacher, an ethnic studies instructor and a youth program leader were among the activists in South L.A. Nine people in three cars rolled into the darkened streets looking for ICE agents.

“We drive the streets of our neighborhood looking for anything suspicious,” said Gochez, a 43-year-old father and high school history teacher. "We start early in the morning because we know this is when ICE starts their operations.”

Gochez is a member of Unión del Barrio, one of the members of the coalition.

Unión del Barrio started the patrols in 2020 during a Biden Administration crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. The organization restarted the patrols over the past few weeks in response to the second Trump Administration.

On Wednesday, Gochez’s two-way radio crackled with the sound of a colleague checking in from another car on patrol.

“Copy. We are on Jefferson and Trinity. All clear,” she announced.

They looked for ICE vehicles – typically with heavily tinted windows, usually on an American made sedan or SUV, almost always with a cage in the back seat for detainees. Sometimes, the cars are parked sideways on a street in front of their target or grouped together in a grocery store parking lot.

Gochez said he and the other activists try to catch ICE agents in those lots as they gather before a raid.

“We try to catch them at that stage — that way we’re able to affect their plan and at the same time, we start alerting the community.”

When they find federal agents, they go into publicity mode.

“We go live on social media,” Gochez said. “We use our megaphone to alert the immediate community that ICE is present.”

In a recent Facebook Live post, Gochez can be seen speaking into a bullhorn across the street from where ICE agents appear to be conducting a raid.

“Everybody in this community, if you can hear me please do not come outside if you are undocumented,” he says on the video. “We have terrorists in our community.”

He implores people who are documented to come outside and support the protest.

Enforcing law vs defending community

Later, L.A. police officers confronted Gochez.

“We’re not interfering,” he told them.

“Yes you are,” responded an LAPD officer, who forced Gochez and the other protestors down the street.

The participation of city police officers appeared to violate L.A.’s sanctuary cities law, which prohibits police from cooperating or assisting ICE agents...

ICE backs off

As part of the coalition, Unión del Barrio has trained people from more than 50 other organizations to engage in similar patrols, including The National Lawyers Guild, Jewish Voice for Peace and The Peoples Struggle San Fernando Valley, according to Gochez.

It's unclear how many conduct regular patrols like Unión del Barrio does.

Gochez estimates his and other groups have intercepted ICE on about a dozen occasions. He said in some cases, ICE has backed off of a raid because of Unión del Barrio’s presence.

Cardona said ICE agents called off the raid when they were called out at the Target. “That one day, we knew we prevented several people from being detained and deported, their lives being uprooted.” ...

Union del Barrio urges people to use a text thread or to have some sort of a phone tree to alert each other about the presence of ICE in their neighborhoods. The group also has a hotline people can call if they spot ICE.

“We get calls from Uber drivers. We get calls from street vendors. We get calls from business owners and just everyday normal people who support the work that we do,” said Gochez, who refers to ICE detentions and arrests as the “kidnappings.”

“It is a kidnapping – no different from when they kidnapped Native Americans during the Indian Removal Act,” Gochez declared.

He said many of the calls to the coalition are false alarms, involving local agencies, like LAPD or the county Sheriff’s Department, conducting their own undercover operations. But the coalition is focused on the actions of federal immigration agents.

A new tactic

Experts said the tactic of patrolling for ICE is relatively new.

Mirian Martinez-Aranda, an associate professor of sociology at U.C. Irvine, said it lets members of immigrant communities know they are not alone.

“It's a new form in which immigrant communities and their supporters are finding a way to protect each other and to stand up for what's unfair and cruel,” Martinez-Aranda told LAist.

-via LAist, March 17, 2025

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

A Palestinian man who led protests against the war in Gaza as a student at Columbia University was arrested Monday at a Vermont immigration office where he expected to be interviewed about finalizing his U.S. citizenship, his attorneys said.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident who has held a green card since 2015, was detained at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, his lawyers said.

The attorneys said they do not know where he is. They filed a petition in federal court seeking an order barring the government from removing him from the state or country. ...