Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0
TimHauck

Remember when DHS detained an entire apartment building looking for Tren de Aragua?

By TimHauck, in The Geek Club

Recommended Posts

TimHauck    3,322

TimHauck
Posted

Stephen Miller said the building was “filled” with Tren de Aragua members, lol

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

SaintsInDome2006    668

SaintsInDome2006
Posted

>>

In tears, Rojas said these immigration operations ostensibly aimed at gangsters are tearing families apart. Her mother came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1995, she said.

 

“She has worked hard. She has paid her taxes. She’s done everything possible to make sure she isn’t a problem here,” the 21-year-old daughter said. “And she has raised me here my entire life.”<<

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

SaintsInDome2006    668

SaintsInDome2006
Posted

>>

Martínez’s wife, who did not want to be named for fear of immigration authorities, said he's lived in Illinois for 30 years. She acknowledged he’s “made mistakes in the past, but in the 10 years we have been together he had no issues with the law. He’s a good husband, a father to two teenage U.S. citizens, and a hard worker.” <<

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

SaintsInDome2006    668

SaintsInDome2006
Posted

>>Just one “verified” Tren de Aragua member and one U.S. citizen with an active warrant were among the 37, DHS said, without saying how it had verified that gang affiliation. Others taken that day, the agency said, were “illegal aliens.”

In other words, while the administration says it is disrupting transnational gang activity, the bulk of those detained seem to have no serious record. In fact, federal data shows that over 70% of detainees who were being held as of last month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement nationally had no criminal convictions.<<

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

SaintsInDome2006    668

SaintsInDome2006
Posted

Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime

>>

On the night of the raid, heavily armed federal agents zip-tied Jhonny Manuel Caicedo Fereira’s hands behind his back, marched him out of his Chicago apartment building and put him against a wall to question him.

As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited to film the raid. Next to Caicedo, masked Border Patrol agents inspected another man’s tattoos and asked him if he belonged to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group.

Until that moment, Caicedo’s only interaction with law enforcement in his two-and-a-half years in the United States had been a traffic stop two weeks earlier for driving without a license or insurance, according to the records we reviewed. Chicago police had run a background check on him and found no prior arrests, no warrants and no evidence that he was in a gang. Caicedo said he had a pending asylum application, a steady job at a taco joint and a girlfriend whose daughter attended elementary school across the street. 

None of that mattered. The U.S. government paraded him and his neighbors in front of the cameras and called their arrests a spectacular victory against terrorism. But later, after the cameras had gone, prosecutors didn’t charge Caicedo with a crime. They didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist. And after a brief hearing in immigration court, the government sent him back to the country he had fled nine years earlier.

“I lost everything,” he said in a phone interview from his mother’s home in the Venezuelan city of Valencia. “For those fools, everyone from Venezuela is a criminal.”

Caicedo’s quiet deportation contrasted with the drama of his capture during one of the most aggressive and highly publicized immigration raids carried out in a U.S. city in recent history. Shortly after midnight on Sept. 30, some 300 agents from Border Patrol, the FBI and other agencies stormed the 130-unit apartment complex. SWAT teams rappelled from a helicopter, knocked down doors and hurled flash-bang grenades. They arrested 37 immigrants, most of them Venezuelans, who authorities say were in the country illegally. Agents also zip-tied and, for several hours, detained many U.S. citizens. 

 

Soon afterward, President Donald Trump’s administration released a slickly produced videoof the operation. Officials said they had captured two “confirmed” members of Tren de Aragua, including one on a terrorist watch list. Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser and architect of the nationwide immigration crackdown, declared that the building was “filled with TdA terrorists,” that the raid had “saved God knows how many lives” and that it was “one of the most successful law enforcement operations that we’ve seen in this country.”

A ProPublica investigation, however, has found little evidence to support the government’s claims. ProPublica has discovered the names of 21 of the detained Venezuelan men and women and interviewed 12 of them. We also spoke with dozens of their relatives, friends and neighbors. And we reviewed U.S. public records databases and court websites, examined court documents and social media accounts, obtained audio and video recordings made that night, and attended immigration court hearings.

Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested. Nor have they revealed any evidence showing that two immigrants arrested in the building belonged to the Tren de Aragua gang, or even provided their names. ProPublica was nonetheless able to identify one of them, Ludwing Jeanpier Parra Pérez, from a press release that did not connect him to the raid. Parra denied that he is a member.<<

Share this post

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0
Go To Topic Listing The Geek Club
×