ICE Terror Continues Across the Country

Read our editorial on mass deportations here.

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to violently attack immigrants, workers, and activists as part of the ruling class’s ongoing mass deportation drive.

ICE agents shot and wounded 24 year old food bank worker Carlos Jimenez in Ontario, California on 8/30, later arresting him after his release from the hospital. According to ICE, Jimenez reversed his car towards agents attempting to abduct another individual, prompting them to open fire on the car. His lawyer says that Jimenez stopped to tell the ICE agents that school children would soon be waiting for the bus at the spot they were conducting the arrest, and in response agents brandished their weapons at Jimenez, prompting him to flee, at which point they opened fire, in effect attempting to murder him for daring to defend school children from ICE terror.

In another ICE shooting, on October 21 in Los Angeles ICE and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers surrounded Carlitos Ricardo Parias’s vehicle to abduct him for deportation before shooting him in the elbow. According to ICE, an agent used his firearm to smash through Parias’s driver-side window to detain him after Parias tried to flee the ICE vehicle encirclement. While ICE’s usual claims of shooting due to feeling threatened by the victim’s vehicle are repeated here, they also admit the agent used the firearm to smash the window and that the gun fired accidentally, striking Parias and wounding a deputy US marshal in a ricochet.

Parias is well-known locally for his independent journalism and documentation of abuses at the hands of ICE, leading immigration activists to surmise that he was targeted because of his activism. Demonstrators gathered outside the hospital to demand his release that day. He is being charged with assaulting a federal officer, and monopoly media reports that agents would not allow his family to visit him in the hospital.

In an act of murder, on October 23 in Norfolk, Virginia, ICE chased Josué Castro Rivera onto the interstate and to his death, where he was fatally struck by a vehicle. Castro Rivera was on his way to his gardening job, where he earned money to send back home to his family in Honduras, when ICE pulled him over. ICE described the murderous arrest attempt and chase as a “targeted, intelligence-based” operation, despite authorities giving his name as “Jose” following his murder. Castro Rivera’s killing mirrors that of Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés, a Guatemalan day laborer who ICE killed by chasing him onto an expressway in Monrovia, CA, on 8/14, and Jaime Alanís Garcia, farm worker chased to death by ICE in Ventura County, CA, on 7/10.

Also on October 23 at the U.S. Coast Guard Base in Alameda, CA, Coast Guard and other law enforcement agents opened fire on a U-Haul truck that federal agents alleged was reversing toward the base’s entrance, riddling the vehicle with bullets and shooting the driver through the stomach. The driver was hospitalized and subsequently arrested. The base was the site of a day-long protest 8/23 due to its role as a Border Patrol staging area, though the shooting took place once the protest had died down and most of the agents on site left for the evening. During the protest, a Coast Guard vehicle fired flash bang and smoke grenades into the crowd.

On Chicago’s Norwest Side, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents violently attacked protesters on 10/25. In the haze of tear gas deployed against the demonstrators, agents tackled a 70-year-old man and arrested him. The attack occurred in the Old Irving Park neighborhood as families were preparing to join a Halloween parade. On October 31, monopoly media reports of ICE agents violently beating protesters confronting ICE abduction raids in Evanston, just outside of Chicago.

The ICE terror does not end on the streets, with at least 20 detainees dying in ICE’s torturous detention facilities this year alone, the highest number of deaths since 2004. An ACLU report from late October details widespread medical neglect and abuse against pregnant women held in ICE torture facilities. There are a record 60,000 people held in these torture facilities as of late October as the ruling class ramps up its terror campaign against immigrant workers, part of its campaign against the working class in the ruling class efforts to recover from its economic crisis.

Image: The bloody interior of Carlos Jimenez’s car following the ICE attack against him, photo by his brother Francisco Jimenez.

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: