justsomeantifas:

Personally, I think it’s pretty clear what this administration is doing when it comes to the arrests and deportations coming down from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). People within Trump’s administration like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller (and others) have made it crystal clear that they don’t support immigrants of any kind. They’re testing the waters with these ICE raids, and even the travel ban, to see what they can and can’t get away with. 

Just look at some of the more unique cases that were reported this past week regarding deportations. We have Guadalupe García de Rayos, a married mother of two who has been here since she was a young teen, now 35. She scheduled and checked in with immigration agents every 6 months and was a person who would have once been considered “low risk/low priority.“ 

Then there was Daniel Ramirez Medina, a 23 year old immigrant from Mexico with no criminal record who came here as a young boy. Medina was protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) but still got arrested in a raid. He was arrested despite the fact that he had a permit to work and live in the United States, but he was told it didn’t matter because he wasn’t born here. 

Later we heard about a woman being picked up by ICE in Texas who had been granted a protection order because she was being abused. And now we’re hearing about a group of men who were surrounded at a church shelter. Men who needed shelter during the cold weather and were at risk for hypothermia. The shelter falls under ICE’s “sensitive location” policy which demands that arrests not take place at churches, schools, or medical facilities. However, the ICE agents are arguing that despite specifically targeting this church they waited until the men left and crossed the street. 

These cases are testing the limits of what they can and can’t get away with. With the travel ban, they fucked up when they included green card holders without explicitly saying in the executive order that these people will be targeted under the ban. Now they are scrapping the executive order and rewriting it, by their own admission. You think they’re going to fuck up now and be vague about who is and isn’t covered? No way, they’ve learned from their mistakes and will make sure to cover who they want barred from this country. The same goes for those being held in immigration detention centers and those being deported. They’re testing the waters to see if their executive order and their actions gets called into question and faces legal repercussions. These aren’t accidents.