When La Migra reaches the bottom of the barrel, they pick that barrel up and they start digging.

Shared Article from Jezebel

ICE Agents Target Hypothermia Shelter In a Church to Arrest Home…

Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an …

jezebel.com

Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an individual protected by DACA, and a victim of domestic violence who was in court seeking a protective order. Now ICE has moved on to target people seeking safety from deadly weather.

NBC News 4 reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials surprised a group of men leaving a hypothermia shelter in Alexandria, Virginia early on Wednesday morning. The shelter is part of Rising Hope Mission Church, and thus falls under ICE's "sensitive location" policy. The policy demands that arrests not take place at churches, schools, or medical facilities. Agents reportedly waited until the men had crossed the street before surrounding them.

–Aimée Lutkin, [ICE Agents Target Hypothermia Shelter]
Jezebel (February 16, 2017).

Shared Article from Washington Post

!!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;This is really unprecedented': ICE detains woman …

"It really was a stunning event," said the county attorney. "It has an incredible chilling effect for all undocumented victims of an…

washingtonpost.com

A hearing in El Paso County in Texas went from ordinary to "unprecedented" last week when half a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at a courthouse where an undocumented woman was seeking a protective order against the boyfriend she accused of abusing her.

The woman, a citizen of Mexico who was living in El Paso had been driven to the courthouse by a victim's advocate from the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, a shelter for victims of domestic abuse where she had been living.

She left under arrest. . . . It was the first time in her 23 years at the courthouse, [El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne] Bernal said, that she can remember ICE agents making their presence known during a protective order hearing. The agents had come to stake out the woman, identified by her initials I.E.G., because, Bernal speculates, they likely received a tip from the only other person who knew the time and place of the hearing — the woman's alleged abuser.

–Katie Mettler, [This is really unprecedented]
Washington Post (February 16, 2017)

Shared Article from Washington Post

Memos signed by DHS secretary describe sweeping new guidelines …

The documents detail plans to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents and expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal.

washingtonpost.com

If these guidelines are enacted, it will be an appalling escalation of this already-terrible situation. It will be a brutal use of state violence to separate families, punish the weakest and the most vulnerable, to destroy livelihoods and literally endanger lives. And all for what? To enforce a ridiculous system of international segregation. To hell with that.

End 287(g). Stop deportation. Abolish ICE. Abolish DHS. Abolish the Presidency. Open the borders, and free the people who cross them.

Despite constant siege-mentality rhetoric, constantly invoked as a reason for police to be ever more aggressively controlling, ever more trigger-happy, ever more insulated from criticism in the name of officer safety, as a matter of fact, there has never been a safer time to be a police officer in the United States.

Shared Article from the Guardian

FBI data showing drop in police deaths undermines 'war on cops' …

Preliminary data show a 20% decrease in number of officers intentionally killed in the line of duty and the second-lowest total in the past 12 years

Jamiles Lartey @ theguardian.com

See also.

• GT 2011-02-01: Siege Mentality (cont’d)
• GT 2010-01-23: Siege Mentality

To-day in Auburn there was a protest in front of the Auburn Police Department headquarters. About 40-50 of us gathered at the intersection of Glenn and Ross to call for justice for Melissa Boarts, to call for a serious investigation into the police’s role in the death of Recco Cobb, to protest police brutality and the unchecked use of force by Auburn police. The Boarts family was there; the family of other victims of police shootings were there; Bishop Arthur Dowdell was there. I heard about it from my wife who saw the beginnings of the protest around 3:00; I headed down and picked up a sign and we protested until about 5:30.

We want the unedited bodycam and dashcam footage released. We want the names of the cops who shot Melissa Boarts released. We want cops held accountable and an end to the culture of secrecy and impunity around the police’s use of force.

Here is some early coverage of today’s protest from the OA News. For more about the story, see also GT 2016-04-04: Auburn police killed a woman yesterday and GT 2016-04-13: Auburn Police Standards and the Shooting of Melissa Boarts. There’s a few photos from the protest below.

Shared Article from OANow.com

Protesters call for transparency in Auburn

Friends and relatives of Auburn shooting victims are asking the Auburn Police Division for more transparency regarding recent and past deadly incident…

oanow.com

No justice, no peace. Abolish the police.

#JusticeForMelissaBoarts #AbolishThePolice

See also.

• GT 2016-04-04: Auburn police killed a woman yesterday
• GT 2016-04-13: Auburn Police Standards and the Shooting of Melissa Boarts

Fifty-three years ago today, — one day after the start of the Children’s Crusade marches, — black youth were in the streets in Birmingham to march on City Hall and protest Jim Crow in one of the best-known protest marches in American history. They stood up against Mayor Art Haynes and Public Safety Commissioner Eugene Connor and his police and his fire department and the whole violent system of Jim Crow. They filled the jails and they kept marching. Desperate, Bull Connor ordered police and firemen to turn police dogs and water cannons on the kids in the street.

In the end, the kids in the street won, and the white power establishment, the segregationist politicians and the Public Safety Commissioners and the police lost.

This photograph is from Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. It was taken by Bob Adelman.

I picked up a copy of the most recent Plainsman the other day on my way to an appointment on campus. Behold the most predictable headline in the history of newspaper headlines.

It’s a reference to the Auburn police who followed, confronted and killed Melissa Boarts on the highway last week. The police were following her because her parents called 911 out of fear that Melissa might be suicidal. The police followed her for miles until she stopped, then they saved her from harming herself by confronting her and shooting her to death.

The headline is more predictable than Dog Bites Man. If you programmed a Police Shooting Response robot that took police shooting reports as input and produced a claim of justification 100% of the time, only filling in the blanks with facts taken from the input and not adjusting the template in the slightest, you’d get the same headlines that you actually get from local police statements. Based on the extremely limited information that has been released so far, it’s possible that the police went overboard even by their own standards; it’s also perfectly possible that when the dash cam and body cam footage is released, it will turn out that the killing meets the police’s internal standards for justification — but if so, the police standards themselves are the problem. We don’t know how much police officers knew about how she was armed. The weapon that La Jura keeps talking about, always as a quote-unquote weapon without further clarification, was actually a small knife. Melissa’s parents and their lawyer say that they told the 911 dispatch that she had a knife; police claim that when she got out of the car they didn’t know what weapon she had in her hand. It may be that she brandished the knife in a way that would meet the police’s policies for using lethal force against her. But if so, then morally I think the problem with police procedures is that they take no real account of who initiated the confrontation, who escalated it, what other less-forceful options were available. We have here a case in which police pursued a woman who had committed no crime, followed her car for miles out of their own jurisdiction and into Macon County, cornered her when they were told she was upset and panicked and lightly armed, and then shot her to death when, they claim, she charged them. For ordinary people like you or me, a claim of self-defense requires that someone else is the aggressor; but police standards never take that into account.

Stories on the police shooting, what the police claim they knew, and what the family says they know about what happened, have appeared in the Huntsville Times (April 4), the Montgomery Advertiser (April 5), and The World According to Vladimir Putin (April 5). According to the Opelika-Auburn News (April 7), the family was desperately trying to reach Melissa’s car on the highway but the police cornered her and shot her before they could arrive; the OA News story also reports that there is both dash cam footage and body cam footage of the confrontation and the shooting. But the footage was given to the Alabama SBI, so that state police can investigate local police, and will not be released to the public until or unless the Macon County District Attorney decides that it should be. (The Macon County DA is putatively in charge of this decision because Auburn police followed her out of Auburn and pursued her on the highway into Macon County, where they shot her.)

See also.

• GT 2016-04-04: Auburn police killed a woman yesterday.
• GT 2015-11-10: Opelika police shooting questions.