Amnesty urges US to abolish ICE amid immigration crackdown

WASHINGTON — Amnesty International has urged the United States government to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accusing the agency of widespread human rights violations during its immigration enforcement operations under President Donald Trump.

The call was contained in a report released Thursday by the rights organisation, which examined ICE’s large-scale operations in several major US cities.

The report, titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns,” documents what Amnesty described as widespread rights abuses during the agency’s operations.

Its publication comes days after a Venezuelan migrant, Wilber Garces Perez, was shot and wounded by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, an incident that has intensified criticism of US immigration enforcement methods.

The development followed the deaths in January of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, who were shot by federal agents in Minneapolis. Their deaths sparked outrage across the United States.

Nadia Daar, director of Amnesty International USA, criticised the use of armed and masked federal agents during immigration operations.

“Masked and armed federal agents attacking people in the streets with impunity doesn’t make our communities safer — it puts everyone in danger,” she warned in the report.

Amnesty said researchers gathered more than 150 testimonies between March and June from four major cities where ICE had focused its activities.

Based on its findings, the organisation said ICE was not an institution that could simply be reformed.

“ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed,” Daar wrote. “For the U.S. government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and standards, ICE needs to be abolished and we need to start over.”

Amnesty further accused the Trump administration of “implementing a system of mass detention and deportation fueled by racist, xenophobic, and false rhetoric, with the aim of detaining and deporting as many migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees as possible from the United States.”

The rights organisation said the findings demonstrated the need for a fundamental rethink of the country’s immigration enforcement system.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Africans Angle News