Amnesty International: ICE Is Broken and 'Cannot Be Fixed'

Amnesty International says Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to be abolished, not reformed. In a new report titled "We Had Whistles, They Had Guns," the group alleges systemic human rights abuses by ICE during large-scale enforcement operations under President Trump's immigration agenda," Le Monde reports. "ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed," says Nadia Daar, director of Amnesty International USA. The findings draw on more than 150 testimonies from four cities where ICE activity has been concentrated.

• "Masked and armed federal agents attacking people in the streets with impunity doesn't make our communities safer—it puts everyone in danger," Daar says. "For the US government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and standards, ICE needs to be abolished and we need to start over."

The operations in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, New Orleans, and Washington, DC involved "human rights violations against immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, people profiled as immigrants, Black and Brown communities, and those who came to their aid and challenged the conduct of the Trump administration," Amnesty's report says. "They also created a pervasive climate of fear that extended throughout entire communities. Violations the group says it documented included:

• Racially discriminatory immigration enforcement operations and arbitrary detention.
• Harassment, intimidation, degrading treatment and unjustified use of force by federal agents.·
• Use of lethal force and unlawful killings by federal agents, which should be investigated as extrajudicial executions.

"Incidents of targeted enforcement were far outnumbered by the numerous accounts of ICE and Border Patrol stopping and detaining individuals based on their race, skin color, national origin, or ethnicity," the report states. Amy Fischer, Amnesty's director of refugee and migrant rights, says this is the first time the group has called for a specific government agency in any country to be disbanded, MPR News reports. She says the violence and discrimination documented in the report are a fundamental part of how ICE operates and can't be fixed with changes like better training. There are "simply no reforms that would bring this agency into alignment" with America's "human rights obligations," Fischer says, per the Minnesota Reformer.