On May 29, the day the Trump administration announced its aggressive anti-immigration goal of ordering federal agents to arrest 3,000 people a day, I received a tip that immigrants coming out of their mandatory court appearances at the Immigration Courts in lower Manhattan were being ambushed, arrested, and deported.
These public buildings, by definition, are open to the public. But security prevented me, a photojournalist, from entering, which was not just counter to the building codes themselves, but also a violation of the First Amendment. With the help of legal counsel and following several hours of negotiating up the ladder of command, I, along with a few photojournalists, was ultimately allowed inside.
For the next eight days, masked law enforcement officers from a whole alphabet soup of federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), played a cat-and-mouse game with us.
We were not welcomed, to put it mildly, and they did not want us documenting their actions. They refused to identify themselves or the agency they worked for. They darted in and out of the hallways and doorways, took freight elevators, and emergency staircases to avoid us. They snatched dozens of immigrants attempting to go through the opaque system to citizenship by legal means. They ignored court orders. They tackled, handcuffed, and disappeared fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. Some of these immigrants have been living in the United States for over 30 years, working, paying taxes, paying into social security (which they could never draw from), and are without criminal records. They were not spared.
READ: State-federal Tensions Rise as Trump Deploys Military to LA’s Anti-ICE Protests
One afternoon, outside the courthouse, a French journalist approached me and asked, “Why aren’t people protesting this? Where is the outrage?” Except for a few dozen New York-based activists, I could not help but wonder the same.
Turns out, the outrage was in Los Angeles, where on June 6, communities began to stand up to the dragnet tactics of arresting non-citizens following the government’s rules and procedures.
ICE agents, along with the FBI, HSI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and other federal law enforcement, who had been co-opted from their normal priorities, dressed up like they were invading Fallujah to carry out immigration enforcement work. They invaded hospitals, restaurants, car washes, and home goods stores all over the city.
The protest, as I witnessed, was primarily peaceful, met with disproportional brutal force from local police and sheriff’s departments, both of whom are also deputized by ICE to perform federal immigration arrests, and controversially, the National Guard was also brought in.
I witnessed protesters and members of the press being shot with less-lethal munitions (including myself), beaten with clubs, trampled by horses, kettled, detained, and arrested.
Protesting, like seeking citizenship or asylum, is a legal right under U.S. law. Well, until it isn’t.
