Kicking Down Doors, Stomping on Rights: New Report Reveals Disturbing Details of ICE Raids

Last week the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York published a disturbing study that documents ICE’s home raid operations. Constitution on ICE: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations found that over the last several years, ICE has increasingly conducted home raids, meaning that they gone to private homes to arrest people rather than doing it in public settings. The report finds a pattern of constitutional violations occurring during home raids including agents kicking in doors and forcing their way into private residences during pre-dawn hours without warrants or other legal authority. ICE agents also seize non-target residents, or “collaterals” from their homes, even if there is no legal authority to take that individual into custody. According to the report, these arrests are based on racial or ethnic profiling. Finally, the authors also found that ICE was illegally searching homes.

The stories speak for themselves…

March 2009, in Arizona, Jimmy Slaughter, himself a DHS officer, filed suit against ICE for raiding his home: “I was at home with my wife when the door bell rang. I opened the door and noticed approximately 7 uniformed ICE agents with vests and guns standing at my door . . . I opened the door to look at the paperwork and five agents entered my house . . . . The agents then told my wife to stand in the center of ‘OUR’ living room. Not once did anyone say they had a warrant.”

September 2008, in Texas, “The 68-year-old woman told Action 4 News that she heard a knock at her door Tuesday morning. But before she had a chance to get up she said U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were inside her home . . . When she asked them why they came into her home they allegedly responded, ‘Show us your papers.’ Savage complied by showing them documentation proving that she’s been a United States citizen for 40 years.”

December 2007, in Massachusetts, “eight to 10 ICE agents, with guns drawn, broke through the door of the three-family apartment building at 21 Jefferson St. about 5 a.m. Friday. ‘They came through and shined flashlights in people’s faces. They went into each room, they told everyone to lie down on the floor, they say not to move,’ he said. ‘They checked everyone’s papers. They took everybody.’” Evidence of ICE’s illegal search included “shards of the broken door frame they say ICE agents kicked through. A safe in one room lay open, its papers strewn all about. The men also showed the reporter another bedroom door they said ICE agents had kicked open.”

August 2007, in Hudson County, NJ, at 6:30am, ICE agents did not identify themselves while banging on the door. When a tenant opened the door to see who was outside, the ICE agents forced their way inside illegally, and illegally interrogated people in their home. One resident was forcibly stopped from calling her attorney.

June 2007, in Morris County, NJ, at 6:45am, ICE agents took out their guns, banged on a door, and forced their way in once the tenant opened the door to find out who was there. ICE agents illegally entered and searched the home. An ICE agent yelled at one of the residents who tried to call her lawyer. The ICE agent used abusive language

– yelling “F*** you” and “You are a piece of s***.”

The report contains five pages of such stories.

Many of the home raids are conducted by Fugitive Operations Teams (FOTs). A 2009 report by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) examined the FOTs, which were created to locate and detain fugitive immigrants who pose a threat to the nation or the community or who have a violent criminal history. MPI found that while the number of immigrants apprehended by FOTs has increased, they have netted fewer violent criminals and arrested greater numbers of undocumented immigrants with no criminal history. Specifically, MPI found that 73% of the individuals apprehended by FOTs had no criminal convictions.