A leading international human rights organization is calling for ICE to be abolished after the group claims it documented widespread abuses by the immigration enforcement agency, including fatal shootings, attacks on protesters and unconstitutional conditions at detention centers.
The group, Amnesty International, on Thursday, Sept. 24, called for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to be abolished and issued a 168-page report detailing ICE’s suspected abuses. The report covers everything from the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez to systemic issues of denying immigration detainees attorneys while holding them in conditions that "may amount to torture," the group said.
"There are simply no reforms
that would bring this agency into alignment with the United States’s human rights obligations," Amy Fischer, Amnesty International’s director for refugee and migrant rights in the U.S., said at a news conference Thursday. "The scale, persistence and structural nature of these failures cannot be adequately addressed through piecemeal reform."
Amnesty International is one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations. It was founded in the United Kingdom in the 1960s by lawyers working to free unjustly imprisoned people. The group won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis categorized the report as "smears."
"These are smears by the far-Left to vilify ICE law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every single day to arrest murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists from American communities," Bis said in a statement. "Radical Democrats and the far-Left want to abolish ICE and release criminal illegal aliens from jails into American communities. These policies would make Americans less safe."
Over 70% of ICE detainees have no criminal conviction, Syracuse University researchers said in July. Some 65,700 people were in detention centers around the country at the time.
The case marks perhaps Amnesty International’s first call for the U.S. to abolish a government agency in the group’s 65-year history.
"It is a rare move for Amnesty International to call for the abolition of an agency of any government," Fischer said. "Yet, Amnesty International concluded that ICE’s failures extend across its leadership, recruitment and training, operations, oversight and accountability."
USA TODAY has reached out to ICE for comment.
The immigration enforcement agency was established in 2003 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Under President Donald Trump, the group has become a lightning rod for controversy amid carrying out his agenda, including that of mass deportations.
Amnesty International researchers traveled to cities where immigration authorities deployed as part of Trump’s crackdown, interviewed 154 people impacted by enforcement operations and reviewed dozens of videos.
What the report covers
The report covers many of ICE and fellow Homeland Security agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s most high-profile moments since Trump returned to the White House.
Among them was the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., aggressive immigration operations that have resulted in several fatal shootings and a "military-style raid" involving Black Hawk helicopters on a Chicago apartment building.
But the report also sheds light on less-public abuses, including ICE blocking detainees from seeing attorneys while pressuring them to sign "voluntary" deportation forms, keeping as many as 100 immigrants for up to two weeks in cells meant for 12 people and prolonged use of shackles that were found to be "punitive" and amounts to "torture."
There are over a dozen references in the report to ICE practices that Amnesty International said may amount to "torture."
Some unexpected findings
The report also details some of the advanced technologies ICE has been using amid enforcement operations, including broad use of facial recognition technologies.
According to the report, ICE uses the emergent tech to identify immigrants as well as people protesting against immigration enforcement actions.
ICE, the report says, then used the information to track down where protesters lived and showed up at their homes in an effort to intimidate them. People interviewed in the report said immigration enforcement officers they had never met would greet them by their full legal name.
Others reported drones following protesters or immigrant families around. It’s unclear if the drones are connected to ICE but the people quoted in the report suspected that they were, saying they were only nearby when ICE officers were in the area.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Torture': Amnesty International calls for ICE to be abolished
