The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Donald Trump has put his whole government toward mass deportation. One of the most visible aspects of that is a playbook that’s beginning to become standardized in city after city around the country: Border Patrol and ICE urban terror playbook.
We’ve seen it in LA, Chicago, and now in Charlotte. We know it’s coming to more cities.
The playbook includes Border Patrol, ICE, and other feds going through areas where they think immigrants are living and working, and arresting or pulling over anyone they think looks undocumented.
This isn’t me just saying that. The Trump administration has argued in court — and the Supreme Court agreed — that they should be able to stop someone based on whether they seem like they’re undocumented, including considering their race.
This has become known as a Kavanaugh stop, after the Supreme Court justice who explicitly signed off on it. It flips the script on the way we think law enforcement works — that you have a crime, and you have someone you think committed the crime, and then you go after them. It means that places like Home Depot parking lots have become staging grounds for confrontational and even violent arrests.
And time after time, we’ve seen legal immigrants and US citizens reporting that they were taken into custody just based on how they looked. One woman in Charlotte, whose last name is Greeley, said she was told “you don’t look like a Greeley” by the agents arresting her.
It also includes really aggressive tactics, against both immigrants and anyone who protests or criticizes their actions.
In Chicago, Border Patrol raided an entire apartment building, with agents even rappelling down from helicopters to storm the building. It’s become common for them to throw tear gas canisters around, including in residential neighborhoods where kids are playing or going to school.
Protesters outside Chicago have been shoved to the ground, handcuffed, arrested, and sometimes criminally charged for trying to impede or assault officials. Just this week in North Carolina, federal agents followed protestors using drones.
The person behind the most extreme tactics is Dan Bovino. Back in January, before Trump even took office, Bovino’s team made national headlines when they conducted an aggressive raid in California farm country, smashing car windows and rounding up people who “looked like farm workers” outside a Home Depot and at a gas station where many of them were eating breakfast. Many of these people turned out to be US citizens or green-card holders; others got swiftly deported without a hearing. Sound familiar?
Trump appears to love Bovino’s tactics. In October, he purged ICE leadership, kicking out the heads of 10 regional field offices and temporarily replacing them with people from Border Patrol. Leaks inside the administration indicated that the White House was sick of ICE trying to target individual immigrants with arrests, and wanted more of Bovino’s profiling-based tactics.
The point of this is to be visible. They want us talking about it, and more importantly, they want immigrants to be afraid. In Charlotte, 15 percent of kids in one school district didn’t show up to school this week. This is the core of the mass-deportation strategy: they know they can’t arrest 11 million people, so they try to scare as many of them as possible out of living their lives in the United States in the hopes that they’ll give up and deport themselves.
It’s important to remember that these aren’t the only places where mass deportation is happening. Around the country, ICE is being supplemented by tens of thousands of other agents, arresting immigrants in courthouses, at their check-ins or green-card interviews, and at their homes, churches and schools. The tear-gas canisters are just one face of what immigrant communities are going through everyday.
