‘Will Not Ever Cooperate with ICE’: Pushback Continues Even As Force Grows
New Republican budget gives agents vast new resources, but opponents have tools too
The new budget law that he signed last weekend may have juiced Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) nationwide, but that’s not stopping opponents of the campaign of lawless mass deportations.
One of the lesser-known provisions of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that Republicans muscled through Congress is a massive, $170 billion infusion into ICE and the ongoing — and largely unaccountable — campaign to deploy federal agents to snatch thousands of individuals off US streets daily.
Meanwhile, Trump recently visited a new detention facility for migrants in the Florida swamps that many observers have likened to a concentration camp. The Trump administration already also been sending migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
“We are normalizing a government agency disappearing people. We are normalizing — we‘re talking about it like it‘s no big deal that they are kidnapping people and transporting them to concentration camps, both domestic and foreign,” said Tiffany Cross, a TV political commentator.
But this new, bulkier ICE is not deterring opponents of the efforts to essentially disappear people without due process or oversight.
“You know, again, it’s unconscionable at a time in which so many working people and poor people need government to show up for them, that this administration, the Trump administration, has caused so much consternation and division,” said Brandon Johnson, the Democratic mayor of Chicago. “Look, we are welcoming city ordinance. Our local police department will not ever cooperate with ICE, whatever their constitutional authority is.”
Members of the community in Los Angeles, Calif, did not shy away from federal agents this week when the agents surged into MacArthur Park, an area home to a large number of immigrants.
And Mayor Karen Bass made it clear that they were not welcome.
“Yes, my comment is they need to leave and they need to leave right now. They need to leave because this is unacceptable.”
Rep Eric Swalwell (D-Calif) made it clear that opponents of ICE also have tools on their side.
“Americans were told that the most violent individuals would be deported, and we’re now seeing in the numbers that that is a very small percentage of who is being targeted. But, Chris, we’re not helpless,” he told MSNBC host Chris Jansing in an interview. “Democratic attorneys general in these states have their own law enforcement abilities. And I would recommend, and I have recommended to them, use those capabilities.”
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