Trump is sending armed tactical forces to arrest immigrants in sanctuary cities

[Judi Lynn]

It’s yet another attempt to target sanctuary cities.

By Nicole Narea@nicolenarea Feb 14, 2020, 6:30pm EST

The Trump administration is reportedly sending armed and highly trained law enforcement units to sanctuary cities across the country to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in carrying out immigration raids.

As first reported by the New York Times, 100 US Customs and Border Protection officers, including those from the SWAT-like Border Patrol Tactical Unit, will be deployed from February through May across nine sanctuary cities: Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, and Newark, NJ.

Border Patrol Tactical Unit agents receive special training for high-risk law enforcement activities, including sniper certification and other advanced weapons training. Their primary charge has been tracking down drug traffickers on the US-Mexico border, where violence can often break out, but now they will also be responsible for conducting routine immigration arrests in some of America’s largest cities, according to the Times.

It’s just the latest instance in which President Donald Trump has sought to target sanctuary cities — which do not allow local law enforcement to share information with ICE or hand over immigrants in their custody — for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Immigrants advocates say that the deployment is not only a waste of federal law enforcement resources, it also might endanger immigrant communities.

“This is transparent retaliation against local governments for refusing to do the administration’s bidding,” Naureen Shah, senior policy and advocacy counsel on immigrants’ rights for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “It will put lives at risk by further militarizing our streets.”

More:
https://www.vox.com/2020/2/14/21138272/cbp-tactical-ice-immigrants-sanctuary-cities

[underthematrix]

1. This will not end well for #TraitorTrump and his band of crminals

Link to tweet

[Ferrets are Cool]

2. Police state. No other definition applies. nt

[Ohiogal]

3. That was my first thought, as well.

[Newest Reality]

4. It is this kind of action...

It is this kind of action that is most disturbing and ominous to me.

The immigration crackdown by Trump can only be called scapegoating. It's textbook. He is using human beings and dehumanizing them for his own political agenda, not for the sake of this country our our benefit as he suggests. This is not new and history has demonstrated how it works. We just see an American version instigated by a P.T. Barnum-style mass manipulator.

Immigration has been an issue for a long time and the response is getting worse, rather than attending to the changes that would improve the process and welcome people to this country, along with providing sanctuary for those who desperately need in as a matter of life and death.

Trump is making pawns out of people and is now utilizing the vulnerability of those who have no voice or ability to change that, resist it or fight back. That's how dictators begin to seize power.

I have no reason to believe that, given the time, Trump would not continue to extend this scapegoating to other groups of people and I the way he has reacted to our homelessness crises supports my current view on that. They go for the weak, the vulnerable, the needy first, and work their way up after setting the precedents. It has been working for him, and we see now used for recrimination. Why stop there?

[CaptYossarian]

5. This isn't America.

Trump can kiss my ass. I'll hide these people myself if I have to.

I've only helped one individual with his Citizenship test, but now I may have to find others to help.