While I like the idea of people having integrity, it does seem like the government is being purged of people that want to do the right things, to be decent people. This government is corrupt and is run like a crime syndicate with a mob boss wannabee at the top. I think how fast these people took over the government and turned all the good that government can do upside down so that government has become the very engine of harm in our country. Hugs
It is clear they are not going after the worst of the worst but simply they are white supremacist trying to remove non-white people from the country. How is this making anyone safer? Hugs
Organizers say ICE agents have been targeting African nationals amid surge focused in Portland and Lewiston
A woman films a Homeland Security Investigations agent in Portland, Maine, on Friday. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP
Three days into its immigration crackdown in Maine, the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens”.
In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said some of those taken into custody were “the worst of the worst” and had been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes”, but cited the same four examples it released earlier in the week.
Speaking to Fox News, Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency had compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it intends to target.
White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest
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Immigrant rights groups have been on alert as ICE concentrates its operation on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have been targeting African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, many of them asylum seekers who have made the coastal state home in recent decades.
On Wednesday, a local ICE sighting hotline – organized and run by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase in calls from the previous day. Immigrants in Maine represent only about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the US, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute.
At a press conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration had not returned her calls since the operation began. She added that her office had received reports of people with no criminal record being detained and urged homeland security to be transparent in its actions, saying she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement located 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.
“If they have warrants, show the warrants,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”
Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces and businesses that are losing employees who have either been detained or are not showing up, despite living in the state legally.
Earlier this week, a video by 28-year-old Cristian Vaca – an Ecuadorian immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 18 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said that he approached the officers when they were taking pictures outside his house.
When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the agents telling him that they will “come back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.
“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status … the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”
Local authorities also decried the scope of the federal immigration dragnet this week. The Cumberland county sheriff, Kevin Joyce, said that on Wednesday evening one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents.
“This is an individual that had permission to be working in the state of Maine. We vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit.
Joyce was one of more than 100 national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, last year. “The book and the movie do not line up,” Joyce told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”
Later, Joyce said that ICE officials contacted him to say all detainees held at the Cumberland county jail were being moved on Thursday. In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, he said “about 50” people were removed from the jail. The DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment about where detainees are being held as Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.
The Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition’s advocacy and policy manager, Ruben Torres, said that family members are now finding it “extremely difficult to be able to find their loved ones once they have been picked up”.
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization said it had received several fearful calls as the crackdown continues. This includes a pregnant woman who reached out to ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment”. Another person called and said someone had “pulled the fire alarm in her building, desperately trying to save people from ICE”. ILAP said that they received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school who had agents follow them and push their way into an apartment building lobby.
“It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”
In Lewiston, it was “hard to overstate the level of fear within the community”, according to the Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace the outgoing US representative Jared Golden. “I have heard that as many as 20% of students at certain schools did not show up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.
He added that the community response to the ICE surge – from ensuring immigrants know their rights to sharing where agents have been spotted – has been hugely encouraging. “It’s important to just know the community that they’re coming after won’t stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.
At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree state. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?,” she said, adding that state officials have reached out to the Trump administration but still “have no answers”.
Very interesting report. Seems that Noem and her boyfriend wanted wide spread round ups to create a spectacle because they felt it would look good for them on TV. Others wanted to prioritize criminals which is what tRump kept saying. Let’s be clear, Noem and that crew are die hard racists who want to terrorize nonwhite people and make sure that everyone understands that in their minds it is a white country with white people in charge. They don’t see nonwhite people and immigrants as humans. Hugs
Hey there! So I’ve been juggling with this idea for some time, and I think now is the best time to launch it, a little more than one month before back-to-school.
As a former elementary school teacher, I know how limited classroom budgets are, but as someone who grew up trans, I also know how important it is for trans youth to be in contact with positive trans fictional characters. So here’s my idea :
I made this children’s book titled “A Girl Like Any Other” about four yearsago, about a young girl’s transition and her family and friends. It’s basically the book that launched my career as an author. It allowed me to meet some of the most amazing families that I know, and gave me the background setting for my comic.
As it’s almost back-to-school time, I want to send copies of the book for free to elementary teachers that are willing to have it in their classrooms. All they will have to do is to message me their school’s address on Tumblr or by email before August 15th. I will also send them a link to download my “Genderific Coloring book” for free.
The goal is to get the budget to print 200 copies as well as enough money to cover shipping fees for all over the world. I’ll adjust the goal if I see that the demand is higher than that.
It costs around 8$ to print one single copy, and we can estimate a 4$ median for the shipping (it’s 2.50$ for Canada – where I live, – 3$ for the US and 5.50$ worldwide). We need to add 7% for the handling of the money by GoFundMe and Paypal, so that’s 12.84$ per copy – and 2568$ for 200 copies.
If there’s any money left from the campaign, it will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.
“Want to watch coverage of the politicians encouraging fascism or the politicians doing absolutely nothing to stop it?”
Conservatives had zero problem with Dylann Roof killing nine church goers. No cries for DOJ to investigate. The fake outrage for Don Lemon is clear white supremacy.
Imagine cops buying Don Lemon Burger King?
The pastor is an ICE agent. Jesus would have flipped every table in that church.
Christianity is about welcoming the immigrant and foreigner. It’s about how you treat ‘the least of me’. Loving thy neighbor.
Conservatives get their religion from FOX and Russia, a failed godless communist backwater of civility
You can not reform this level of sadism and white nationalism. You can not reform an agency infiltrated by neo-confederates and fascists and run by pedophile protectors.
You can can only dismantle and abolish. Then prosecute and incarcerate the ICE goons.
I worked as an axillary sheriff’s deputy. We had to be trained on everything we carried and we carried pepper spray. There is a distance you must maintain to keep it nonlethal. Directly in the face is lethal. Plus we had to have all those nonlethal tools used on us. I can tell you that pepper spray is debilitating. Many of my fellow officers needed medical support after being sprayed. Tear gas is a military agent and much stronger than pepper spray. I got that in the military. What this is clearly a private military force with no restraints who are only accountable to Stephen Miller. Hugs
Bash asks him straight out if Pretti had brandished his gun and Gregory Bovino dodges the question instead falling back to the talking points that they have all decided looks good for them. They claim he was interfering, nope he was filming them with his phone. They did not like that and attacked him for doing it. They killed a person in anger for that person filming their illegal actions. They want to be called police and pretend they have police powers but watch the videos again, one ICE thug lunges at a woman knocking her back and down for no reason except he wanted to feel tough and Pretti was trying to help her when another ICE thug peeper sprays him in the face at point blank range. Remember that at that close it can stop the breathing. Then they dog pile on him beating him while on officer steals his lawful gun. Then they shoot him repeatedly. Bovino wants to pretend that anyone filming ICE is interfering. He keeps saying ICE police and police action but that is not true ICE has no police powers. It is all lies to protect their need to remove nonwhites while he keeps saying they were there for a violent offender but they don’t say what offender, and then Bovino calls him a suspect and saying that just being there he was interfering. It makes no sense what he is saying. Well worth her questioning him to see how he shifts and lies. They want people to disappear and obey like, the victim he claims are the ICE thugs there. Damn. And they don’t want people to believe their eyes. Hugs
