Every day, as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation operation, federal immigration police, backed by local cops, violate the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants alike. In scenes that mirror US-backed dictatorships in Latin America, residents of United States, regardless of immigration status, are being brutalized, shot and disappeared without due process.
According to his lawyers, last Thursday in Ontario, California, US citizen Carlos Jimenez, 25, was shot in the back by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after he tried to warn them that children would soon be gathering at a nearby school bus stop. Jimenez was on his way to work at a food bank when he came upon ICE agents conducting a traffic stop near the bus stop.
Jimenez lives in a nearby mobile home with his wife, children, younger brother and mother, on the same street ICE thugs were conducting their operation. According to Jimenez’s lawyer, Cynthia Santiago, after parking his car, Jimenez approached the ICE agents to tell them to “please wrap this up” because kids would be coming out to the bus stop soon. Santiago said in response one of the masked agents pulled out “a gun” and some words were exchanged. The agent also began “shaking his pepper spray.”
Santiago said at this point Jimenez was “trying to get out of the situation” and that the immigration agents’ vehicles had blocked the road, leaving Jimenez little choice but to try and reverse his vehicle to “get away,” according to another one of his attorneys, Robert Simon.
After Jimenez, who was unarmed, began to reverse his vehicle, Santiago said agents began to shoot at him. “Then there was shot from the side, back passenger window, to the car,” she explained.
Despite being shot, Jimenez was able to drive back to his home, where he asked his younger brother, Brayan Jimenez to take him to the hospital. Jimenez’s wife told the Los Angeles Times her husband suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder. In a photo of Jimenez’s car, shared with the Times, blood is visible on the steering wheel, driver and passenger seat and the center console.
The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have yet to claim that any federal agents were injured during Thursday’s shooting. This did not stop Jimenez from being charged last Friday in federal court with “assault on a federal officer.” He was released on bond that same day.
The shooting of Jimenez was the second time in nine days that the immigration gestapo have shot and wounded local residents. On October 22, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, 44, was shot by federal agents after they boxed in his vehicle near Santee High School in south-central Los Angeles. Parias, known as Richard LA on Tik Tok, has over 135,000 followers on the platform, which he uses to livestream breaking news, including about immigration operations in Southern California.
In addition to Parias, a federal agent was injured in the shooting after a shot ricocheted and struck the agent in the elbow. A total of 11 shots were apparently fired, none by Parias. Citing a “law enforcement source, the Los Angeles Times reported that federal agents were so overwhelmed while trying to kidnap Parias, “that they pointed their firearms at arriving LAPD officers.”
Despite not shooting or injuring anybody, Parias is being charged with assault on a federal officer, which carries with it a possible eight-year prison sentence.
Empowered by the Trump administration and Democratic governors and mayors who have deployed local police forces to protect immigration officers as they are carrying out their kidnapping operations, federal agents continue to violently attack residents and immigrants.
On November 1, 10 days after Parias was shot and two days after Jimenez was also struck by gunfire, friends, family and community members in Chicago held a memorial for Silverio Villegas González, a father and worker who was murdered by ICE on September 12.
Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, while posturing as an opponent of the mass deportation operation, has routinely deployed Illinois state police against anti-ICE protests, many of which have taken place at the Broadview ICE facility, located in the Chicago suburbs.
In response to the terrible conditions inside the Broadview facility, on October 30, immigrants detained at the ICE building filed a class action lawsuit against leading figures in the deportation operation, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Acting ICE director Todd Lyons and CPB chief agent Gregory Bovino.
Named plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Felipe Agustin Zamacona, an immigrant who has lived in the US for over 30 years. He was taken on the morning of October 30 in Wheeling, Illinois while working as a delivery driver. Pablo Moreno Gonzalez, an immigrant from Mexico, has also lived in the US for over 30 years. He is a married father of four and the primary breadwinner for his family. He was taken on October 29 while walking in Chicago.
The lawsuit notes that the Broadview facility is meant to serve as a “temporary” holding place before immigrants are transferred to more permanent, longer-term centers that have more amenities. Due to overcrowding at every ICE facility in the US, immigrants in Broadview state they are being held for days, or even weeks at a time inside crowded cells where they are forced to sleep on concrete floors.
The lawsuit alleges immigrants held inside the facility are being denied “sufficient food and water. They cannot shower, they are denied soap, hygiene items, and menstrual products, and they have no way to clean themselves.”
Describing the same conditions found in “Alligator Alcatraz” and other immigrant concentration camps across the US, plaintiffs declare there is “no medical intake when people are brought into this facility.
“Detainees are denied prescription medication, even when it is dropped off by family members, and cannot obtain routine medicines like aspirin or Tylenol. The physical conditions are filthy, with poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor. Due to the overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, lack of medical care, and deprivation of adequate food, the facility is a breeding ground for illness to spread.”
According to the lawsuit, the gangster guards “are abusive and cruel. Putative class members are routinely degraded, mistreated, and humiliated by these officers.” There is no privacy in the facility and large “windows in the holding cells allow men to see the women when they use the toilet, and women to see the men.”
In addition to denying plaintiffs access to medicine, the lawsuit alleges those trapped in the facility are denied access to lawyers, including confidential calls, and the outside world in general. Under these conditions, federal officers at the facility are “coercing people to sign immigration paperwork that many detainees do not understand, and that relinquishes their rights and purports to allow Defendants to send detainees out of the country without ever seeing an immigration judge.”
“By blocking access to detainees inside Broadview, Defendants have created a blackbox in which to disappear people from the U.S. justice and immigration systems,” the lawsuit notes.
US citizens who have protested outside the torture camp have likewise been detained and interrogated by federal agents “without their counsel present.”
One US citizen taken to Broadview and denied access to lawyers was Dayanne Figueroa. On October 10, as Figueroa was driving to grab some coffee before work, she ran into a chaotic scene as immigration thugs were kidnapping landscape workers. While attempting to navigate through the street, Figueroa was struck by an unmarked vehicle driven by masked federal immigration agents.
After crashing into Figueroa, masked and heavily armed federal agents in military fatigues drew their weapons and descended on Figueroa’s vehicle. Without identifying themselves, the violent thugs pulled the young mother out of her car, over the protests of local community members, and disappeared her into their vehicle. Bystanders yelled, “You hit her! We have it on video.”
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Figueroa said she was transported to multiple “undisclosed locations” where she was denied access to a lawyer or her family.
“I was in shock and terrified. The video evidence is clear: Agents crashed into me. I was not involved in any protest or related activity, and I intend to seek justice for how I was treated,” she told the paper.
Family members were only able to locate her by using her iPhone to pinpoint her location to the Broadview facility. Teresita Figueroa recalled to the paper that despite the fact that her daughter was a US citizen, Chicago police provided no clarity on why Figueroa was arrested or where she had been taken.
“I was extremely worried because I know ICE agents are heartless and reckless. They had just killed a man in Franklin Park. I worried that they could hurt my daughter,” Teresita Figueroa told the Tribune. “Those hours (looking for her) were agonizing.”