ICE officers in plain clothes, some dressed as construction workers, and carrying long guns, charged the car of Oscar, Belgar, a Dominican man living in New York this week. When the man tried to flee his armed assailants, they shot him.
The episode is merely the latest in a wave of violence committed by an agency that regularly cloaks the identities of its officers in paramilitary-style baklavas, or in plain clothes with no identifying characteristics as law-enforcement.
ICE is now the most well-funded law enforcement organization on the planet. Its yearly budget exceeds the military spending of roughly 180 nations. That’s out of a total of 195 globally.
And the agency, just one appendage of the US Department of Homeland Security, is a mere snapshot of the increasing power of the US police and surveillance state overall, which has grown increasingly both militarized and intrusive in recent years.
And they operate a lot like the mob.
Official data from the Department of Homeland Security reports 50 individual shooting incidents involving DHS, ICE, and CBP agents At least 11 people have been killed and 25 or more injured.
At least 59 people have died in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration, according to ICE statistics. That tally doesn’t include deaths of those recently released from ICE custody. In June the agency announced it was ending its policy of reporting those deaths to the public.
Dozens of women claim they have been sexually assaulted in DHS custody.
But DHS isn’t just going after migrants. According to Pro Publica, over 500 Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will by DHS personnel in Trump’s second term.
They have also murdered two native-born US citizens.
DHS is already using their public megaphone to demonize Mr Belgar. This follows a pattern by DHS in which they make a series of false claims almost always disproven by follow-up reporting.
Protesters in New York surrounded the hospital where Belgar was being treated when ICE arrived to detain him. A Trump-appointed migration judge has already ordered his deportation, following another DHS patter: much like how the mob operates, if there is no witness, there will be no legal prosecution.
