You already know ICE and so many DHS agents that work with them are cruel. As is so often said the cruelty is the point. They often make a point of beating and injuring people they ‘detain’ and increasingly shoot people. And kill them. Now as you will see there’s a new element – they will STEAL from people and make some extra coin selling off what they steal!
The tale of an iPhone stolen from a U.S. 10th grader who is a U.S. citizen when he and his father were arrested is something folks need to know about. Mediaite’s article on this infuriating saga includes a video where MS NOW Stephanie Rhule again couldn’t help herself as she was overcome with incredulity and exclaimed ‘Are you kidding me?’ Sometimes she gets outraged, sometimes she fights back tears over injustice the Trump admin has inflicted (going back to his first term) but we need more like her who are willing to let fly with some genuine emotion.
So what got her so worked up? It’s about something that took place in Texas. A guy who’d been living in this country since back in the 1990s and had four kids was driving his 10th grade son to school. They stopped at a McDonalds to get some breakfast. Normal stuff, then their lives changed forever. The father was detained and deported to Mexico where there was no one he knew, the son was choked so violently he required hospital treatment and now four children are left to try and ‘raise/support’ themselves – a sister has postponed her wedding as the family has to try and pull together to keep going. Some of the actual incident was caught on video:
The dramatic footage acquired by journalist Antonia Hylton shows the moment that officers repeatedly rammed the van carrying undocumented immigrant Arnulfo Bazán-Carrillo and his 16-year-old son, Arnoldo, who recorded the chase on his phone.
The pair had just pulled out of a McDonald’s in Houston when several unmarked vehicles stopped up beside their white van and emergency lights flashed behind them. Believing they were being stopped by police, the pair pulled into a nearby parking lot.
Masked men jumped from the vehicles with guns drawn, Arnoldo told the network, without visible badges or agency markings and without identifying themselves. Bazán-Carrillo drove away before agents gave chase.
I don’t know how good/bad the level of crime and/or carjackings is in Houston but I’d probably try to get the hell away in a hurry, hopefully without panicking and having an accident. Federal agents did in fact give chase AND rammed their target’s vehicle at least four times as video taken by the 10th grader shows. I urge you to watch the clip of Rhule’s show where correspondent Anton Hylton provides that video. (you can click to it at the 29 minute mark):
It really is worth the seven minutes because it gets into Hylton’s reporting the line of bullshit ICE tried to feed her before she told them she had video of the incident! That shut them up real quick. As you’d expect, Hylton provides proof including still photos of the son and the other kids, and of course the sounds of the vehicle he was in being struck, with the kid having a panic attack and his father trying to comfort him, urging him to remain calm.
Well, ICE choked the hell out of a TEENAGER, a U.S. Citizen and badly. To add insult to injury, there’s additional video that shows an agent (the back of his vest says DEA but as you know Noem has others under her command working alongside ICE) walking away with the kid’s phone. Later that very same phone was dropped off at a kiosk that takes phones and dispenses cash! As Hylton noted (and shows on a map in the video clip above) you can draw a straight line from where the arrest took place and the kiosk, then a short distance to the ICE office!
Basically, some agent decided to steal the kid’s phone and sell it. I hope he choked on whatever fancy dinner he bought with his ill-gotten money. However what he did is a felony. Not that ICE will do anything to him and don’t kid yourself. He no doubt nudged his buddies back at the office and showed them the cash. I’d also be curious as to whether there is a video camera at the kiosk. I suspect there was because they need to cover their own butts for when someone does what happened here – pawn off a stolen phone. I wonder if the agent had taken down his mask and there’s a good shot of his face.
I makes me wonder how many time agents have done similar things. After all instead of going into gang controlled places they much prefer going into people’s homes or pulling them out of their cars. How many items of value that can be pawned have ‘disappeared’ during their operations? Now THAT is something I hope will start an investigation because I have a feeling it’s a lot more common than this one incident. Let’s face it, if you’re a family member who didn’t get rounded up and deported would YOU go to the feds and say “There was a valuable item(s) in the home before your agents came in and when we cleaned up the mess it was GONE. Did your agents take it for some reason?”
Hell yes ICE and a lot of DHS is clearly made up of agents who would take advantage in situations like this. I might find them breaking down MY apartment door for writing this but my laptop and TV are the only items of any value. I’m pretty sure my renter’s insurance would cover the THEFT I’m convinced some of them are quite willing to do.
For now we are faced with yet another family that’s been ripped apart, and this time a group of kids, the oldest of which are in their teens trying to pull together to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. U.S. citizen children. Meanwhile, in Houston and other cities where local LE can give ICE good information on where gang members and likely actual criminals, the ‘worst of the worst’ can be found and the billy-bad-ass-tough-guy ICE agents want NO part of trying to go and arrest THOSE people. It’s a lot easier to beat on (and steal from) folks like those I’ve talked about in this story.
I just hope that the statute of limitations on the felony of stealing and selling off this kid’s iPhone hasn’t expired when a new and Democratic President is sworn in and can replace a Trump flunky U.S. Attorney in Houston with one who will prosecute this asshat.
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Kidnapping. Assault. Theft. The whole damned country needs to go on strike. First they came…….and now they’re going after kids. ENOUGH!
There was a time not too long ago when I would have read this post and thought, “What a clever parody! I wonder if it originally appeared in The Onion.” That time is long past. The nation got along just fine without ICE for 227 years, and we can get along without their larcenous thugs today. Time for all Democratic Senators and Representatives to grow some spines and vote to abolish this monstrosity. The public will thank them for it…
The FBI has long had teams of agents with specialized training to locate and arrest fugitives. They don’t get attention because they quietly do their jobs, working with state/local LE to plan how to take a fugitive into custody in a place/means that minimizes the chances of things getting ugly and/or the public being at risk.
When it comes to immigration enforcement it was determined a similar force was needed for those who had final removal orders and actually had been shown to have felonies/violent crimes on their record (in other words, actually dangerous) to be located and arrested. Then deported. So, like the FBI there were agents that got training specifically for enforcement/removal. It makes sense to have people specifically trained for this when you think about it. Given upticks in the population of people without documentation to be here it also makes sense the number of agents tasked specifically to ERO work would increase or decrease as needed.
When DHS was formed someone got the bright idea that since this was a long-term ongoing issue the Immigration and Naturalization Service should have a permanent entity dedicated solely to enforcement/removal operations and ICE was established. It didn’t really need to be but with all that new money a ‘What the hell, let’s create a NEW government agency’ mentality won out. For a long time, other than having that name ICE didn’t get much attention. I think it always had some people who joined who were racist P.O.S. types that with proper psychological screening would have been rejected/weeded out. Still, ICE didn’t make all that much news because it mostly operated consistent with the way things were before it became an actual agency. Like the FBI they worked with state/local LE to keep what they did carefully planned and as low-key as possible in actual takedowns.
Deportations under Obama and even Biden were greater than under Trump. It was simply done more cooperatively and professionally because making a big show of toughness and cruelty was NOT the point. As you know, Trump wants things to be as cruel as possible AND to make a big public spectacle of the cruelty. As you also know even considering the child separation policy that got going when Kelly was as DHS before becoming Chief of Staff things are worse in the second Trump term.
There is a need for what ICE, if functioning the way it originally did (when there was no real need for it to be it’s own agency in the first place) so that has to be taken into consideration. ICE needs to be changed and SHRUNK back down to a size consistent with actual needs. It can be what the agents who used to be properly trained for the specific enforcement/recovery mission were called. Turn ICE into a (much) smaller ERO division within INS/CBP. Thousands upon thousands of ICE agents need to be fired. I shudder to think how many should face charges and would if it wouldn’t be so difficult to obtain convictions that would stand up on appeal. LE of any type being cruel assholes are almost never charged or convicted. However in some (too rare) cases where use of force results in life-altering injury or death, or significant property loss it does happen. For the most part however we’d have to settle for most of the asshole just losing their jobs. Perhaps administrative proceedings could be taken that strip them of any benefits from their “service.”