You see it on the news. You might be witnessing it in your neighborhood.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, and other DHS agents are terrorizing communities of color in city after city. While pursuing an anti-immigrant agenda, agents are using excessive force against immigrants and their supporters while clad in militarized gear and frequently obscuring their faces from the public. As federal agents occupy cities across the country, they are perpetuating deep fear and anxiety. Families are being shattered. Children are being detained. Some people have even been killed.
These abuses must end. Here are six steps that can make that a reality:
1. Abolish ICE and Border Patrol & End DHS Profiling Based on Protected Categories
ICE, Border Patrol, and other DHS agents are brutalizing perceived immigrants and their neighbors, regardless of immigration status. We need to abolish ICE, Border Patrol, and DHS operations and offices that drive these abuses. Simple guardrails are insufficient.
2. Remove DHS From Our Streets
ICE, Border Patrol, and other DHS agents are instilling fear and spreading violence in cities across the country targeted by the Trump administration. These agents’ actions have torn families apart, unduly surveilled social justice advocates, suppressed lawful protests and accurate news coverage, and caused deaths. The authority of immigration agents to conduct roving interior enforcement in American cities must be eliminated.
3. End Sweeping Domestic Surveillance & Intelligence & Safeguard Our Personal Data
DHS has used its surveillance and intelligence tools on racial justice and immigrant rights advocates who help vulnerable communities. DHS also shares biased, unreliable information it packages as “intelligence” with local police, who can use it to investigate residents of their communities. Although government surveillance has long targeted civil rights and racial justice advocates, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Trump administration has weaponized its surveillance resources to an unprecedented level to quell dissent and suppress protest.
National security agencies also traffic in enormous amounts of personal data to target racial justice advocates, immigrants, allies, and those who oppose this administration’s policies.
All of our sensitive data must be walled off from DHS and other security agencies that abuse it, and we must shut down harmful DHS intelligence offices and programs.
4. Slash Funds for Private Surveillance
Unaccountable private contractors sell harmful surveillance tools and people’s sensitive data to the federal government. They are shielded from certain accountability measures that apply to public, but not private, tools and data. At the same time, these private contractors profit from taxpayer funds used to fuel violence brought by DHS agents against immigrant communities and communities of color. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies must be prohibited from spending public funds on private tools or data.
5. Dismantle Federally-Led Law Enforcement Task Forces
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, federal-state or federal-local task forces have long targeted people in the United States based on ethnicity and religion. Now, the Trump administration has used them to adopt an inhumane immigration agenda and criminalize those who oppose it. These task forces harm vulnerable communities while providing no tangible public safety benefits. The Trump administration adopted this model to implement its inhumane immigration agenda and criminalize those who oppose it.
Homeland security, joint terrorism, and similar task forces plagued by abuse must be eliminated.
6. Build Accountability Mechanisms
ICE and other DHS agents violate people’s civil and constitutional rights with little recourse. Congress must pass the Bivens Act and the End Qualified Immunity Act to allow survivors of DHS abuses to seek legal remedies when their rights have been violated. Federal agencies must conduct independent, transparent investigations of officers’ potential violations of the law or people’s constitutional rights, and permit state and local agencies to investigate DHS officers’ actions.
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Many of these DHS abuses are a disturbing example of the Trump administration’s reliance on aggressive, draconian policing that is both ineffective and punitive while failing to secure public safety for everyone. America’s cities are being infiltrated by federal law enforcement in ways that directly undermine and threaten our multiracial democracy — and we must take steps to end this era of authoritarianism.