Amnesty International calls for abolition of ICE

WASHINGTON:

Amnesty International called for the abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is tasked with leading Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown in a report released Thursday.

The report, titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns”, documents widespread human rights violations during ICE’s large-scale operations, the rights watchdog said.

The release comes less than a week after a Venezuelan migrant, Wilber Garces Perez, was shot and wounded by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, reigniting anger in the US over the immigration authorities’ methods.

In January, the deaths of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, who were shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, sparked outrage across the country.

“Masked and armed federal agents attacking people in the streets with impunity doesn’t make our communities safer — it puts everyone in danger,” Nadia Daar, director of Amnesty International USA, warned in the report.

The report is based on more than 150 testimonies gathered between March and June in four major cities where ICE concentrated its activities, Amnesty said.

“ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed,” Daar wrote. “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.”

Amnesty said its research demonstrates that the Trump administration is “implementing a system of mass detention and deportation fuelled by racist, xenophobic, and false rhetoric, with the aim of detaining and deporting as many migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees as possible from the United States.”

ICE and the homeland security department did not respond to a request for comment.

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