The irony of today’s disgraceful press conference is that it reveals that Trump is on the losing side of history, both in court and in the court of public opinion. The more Trump calls immigrants criminals, the more he will propel a growing, bottom-up national consensus that ICE and white supremacy must be expelled from police stations and sheriffs departments in order to truly secure our communities.
In response to a federal court ruling not to block a controversial anti-immigrant law (SB168) from going into effect on October 1, various immigrant and civil rights groups made the following statements.
On Friday, a federal court judge enjoined a major part of ICE’s infamous Secure Communities dragnet, a culmination of years of immigrant communities challenging the mass deportation program.
In a landmark ruling addressing the legality of ICE’s signature deportation program, Secure Communities, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction blocking the agency from issuing arrest requests based solely on error-ridden electronic databases.
On Thursday morning, ICE hosted a flurry of press conferences, ostensibly about the danger of cities’ non-compliance with immigration enforcement, while ICE and sheriffs from across the country attended a 2-day conference in Washington, DC hosted by known hate group FAIR.
Today, as sheriffs from across the country arrived for their national conference in Louisville, Kentucky, civil rights groups launched a call for the group to disavow known hate groups and a vocal anti-immigrant sheriff from Florida, Bob Gualtieri, that are promoting a greater role for sheriffs in deportations and targeting of immigrants nationwide.
On Thursday, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles heard closing arguments in the trial Gonzalez v. ICE, a class-action lawsuit challenging the “click and arrest” tactics at the heart of ICE’s nationwide deportation dragnet known as “Secure Communities” or S-COMM.
After years of constitutional violations committed by ICE, this week, ICE’s deportation dragnet itself was on trial. Gonzalez v. ICE began on Tuesday (05/07/2019) in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The lawsuit challenged the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) unconstitutional practice of asking local law enforcement to incarcerate individuals based on nothing more than incomplete and error-ridden database information.
Three former employees of TDL Restoration Inc., sued to recover their owed wages and won in federal court. The complaint alleged that TDL Restoration Inc., a related company TDL Management Corp., and the principals of the companies did not pay employees for all of the hours that they worked, that they never paid overtime, that they repeatedly “paid” the employees with checks that bounced, and that they violated other provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law.
In response to leaks of a planned escalation by the Trump administration, Pablo Alvarado, NDLON Executive Director, released the following statement: No one doubts that Donald Trump will do anything to stay in power. Nor that ICE is the rogue agency he uses to send political messages to opponents and allies alike. The question is why do local and federal Democratic officials continue to enable and fund them?