ICE Launches All-Out Assault on DC Businesses in Search of TV Moments for Trump

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT on Tuesday began what FOREVER WARS understands is a two-day series of raids targeting businesses, workers, and schools in Washington, DC, especially chain businesses and delivery drivers. 

The tactical goal, according to a source with knowledge of the operation, is 100 raids per day across Tuesday and Wednesday, twice daily in the late morning and mid-afternoon, with a target of 2,000 new detainees by the end of the raid. The operation is large enough for ICE to transfer agents in from out of state. A second source says ICE is transferring prisoners out of ICE detention facilities to make room for more. Community advocates were well-prepared for the raids, which had netted a grand total of seven arrests by mid-afternoon Tuesday.

Palbo Enriquez’s Migrant Insider reports, and FOREVER WARS confirms, that the agency will target elementary schools in the DC area, capitalizing on the Trump administration reversing its “sensitive location” policy that held schools and houses of worship off-limits to raids. This particular escalation is already underway: ICE agents tried to detain a healthcare worker in front of children arriving at school in March. On Tuesday, Enriquez and FOREVER WARS friend Marisa Kabas report that ICE was outside Mundo Verde, a bilingual charter school with students from 3-K to 5th grade on P Street NW, at the time we went to press.

Advocates have been anticipating a coordinated series of raids since Trump’s March 28 executive order announcing plans to deport migrants in the DC area. Now, the other jackboot has dropped. 

For working people, these raids represent another escalation. Advocates, including public officials, have had great success with know-your-rights workshops and information campaigns that focus on ways to exploit the limits of the agency’s legal authority. (Indeed, the administration’s acting director, Thomas Homan, has threatened to arrest New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for holding know-your-rights workshops online.) In response, ICE is raiding workplaces, arriving visibly at main entrances and announcing “I-9 checks”—asking to see tax paperwork proving each employee’s work eligibility—and then stationing agents outside back entrances and maintenance access in order to catch anyone trying to escape. 

ICE likely hopes its intended targets will panic and run from their workplaces while their managers decide whether to let an ICE agent disrupt daily business to look at records that might result in workers' detention. But the advice from legal advocates is largely the same: Stay silent, don’t run away, don’t sign anything, and don’t offer fake documentation. I-9 checks require a three-day lead time.

Dara Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, says the raids are likely a PR play. “This admin’s first round of high-visibility raids, in late Jan/early Feb, had the same results as previous high-visibility raids: not a ton of detentions out of them,” says Lind via text. “Since then, they’ve switched to other tactics to generate the visuals of a crackdown, such as the CECOT video footage. But if you think of their aims as both generating visuals and getting ‘the numbers’ up, sending people to El Salvador doesn’t scale in the same way. What we’ve seen over the last few days, with wide scale enforcement ops around the U.S., is stuff that gets the numbers up.”

This speaks to a problem the administration has with its base. As brutal as its tactics have been, it has not exceeded the Biden administration’s deportation numbers. That's primarily because Biden’s DHS turned away many more people at the border, and that is not good enough for a base that held up signs reading “Mass Deportation Now” at the Republican National Convention. Now that Trump has made the United States a far less desirable place to immigrate, guards of America’s literal borders have significantly less to do. Instead, the Trump administration is policing borders that exist solely in its febrile imagination, where “every state is a border state.” That results in the crackdown on stock clerks, line cooks, and teachers of small children.

The plan is obviously shortsighted. “If ICE wants to snatch up every single immigrant working in food service and delivery, then the entire industry will collapse,” said Amy Fischer, a core organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, which published several pictures of raids on Tuesday on social media. But these policies are about theatrics, not efficacy or public safety. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem evidently hopes that the raids, if successful, will get her in the president’s good graces. 

At the risk of editorializing, this is fucking disgusting. The highest offices in this country are infested by sadists and amoral cowards who are using state power to generate video footage of brown people being tormented because the hateful, addled old man they work for wants to see it on cable television. The only way out of fascism is solidarity. Support mutual aid groups, cover your nonwhite coworkers’ shifts if you’re a white citizen, and don’t talk to cops.

SPENCER HERE. Don't want to step on Sam's powerful and well-reported piece, but just stopping by here to say that the podcast I mentioned last week was a discussion with Rula Jebreal about the Crown Heights violence related to Itamar Ben-Gvir's appearance in Brooklyn and is available here from Zeteo.