Amnesty international calls for dissolution of US immigration agency ICE

Amnesty International has called for the abolition of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for leading the immigration enforcement measures under President Donald Trump’s administration.

The human rights organisation made the call in a report released on Thursday, documenting what it described as widespread human rights violations during large-scale ICE operations.

The report, titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns,” details allegations of rights abuses recorded during the immigration agency’s enforcement activities.

Amnesty International said the report highlights serious concerns over the methods used by ICE officers during operations targeting immigrants.

The report was released days after a Venezuelan migrant, Wilber Garces Perez, was shot and injured by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas.

In January, the deaths of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, who were shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, sparked outrage across the country.

“Masked and armed federal agents attacking people in the streets with impunity doesn’t make our communities safer — it puts everyone in danger,” Nadia Daar, director of Amnesty International USA, warned in the report.

The report is based on more than 150 testimonies gathered between March and June in four major cities where ICE concentrated its activities, Amnesty said.

“ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed,” Daar wrote. “For the U.S. government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and standards, ICE needs to be abolished and we need to start over.”

Amnesty said its research demonstrates that the Trump administration is “implementing a system of mass detention and deportation fueled by racist, xenophobic, and false rhetoric, with the aim of detaining and deporting as many migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees as possible from the United States.”

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

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