ICE took their papers—and won’t give them back
LAPD officer who claimed disability is arrested after being caught skydiving
California: Passenger killed, two injured as police chase over traffic violation leads to wreck
Over traffic violations, Colorado cops chase driver into 2-fatality wreck
DC police lure immigrant crime victims to police station, where ICE waits to attest them
Excerpt: When 37-year-old Jose Argueta reported his car stolen in Maryland in November, he did not realize he had set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to him spending Christmas at an immigrant detention center.
But, he recently alleged as part of an ongoing lawsuit, that’s what happened.
Argueta said that in early December, he received a call from someone claiming to be with D.C.’s police department, telling him they had found his stolen car and asking that he pick it up at a station in Northeast Washington. After he walked in to the police station, he said he was handcuffed and taken into custody by officers, one of whom had the word “ICE” on his shirt. They told him they had used information from the stolen vehicle report to determine Argueta was in the country illegally.
“They tricked me into coming to the station to arrest me,” he said. “I was just trying to get my car back, but it was all a lie.”
Georgia cops find black man hanging from tree, say it’s suicide
Excerpt: Since 2017, Jefferson has been compiling records of Black people found hanging across the country, concentrating on Mississippi. According to her, many of those deaths were ruled suicides, even as families insisted they were lynchings.
‘There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,’ she said. ‘When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.’
New Jersey: Newark mayor says ICE operation caused multi-vehicle crash with injuries
New York: Blind refugee who doesn’t speak English is abducted and abandoned by ICE, then found dead
Full text: When 37-year-old Jose Argueta reported his car stolen in Maryland in November, he did not realize he had set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to him spending Christmas at an immigrant detention center. But, he recently alleged as part of an ongoing lawsuit, that’s what happened.
Argueta said that in early December, he received a call from someone claiming to be with D.C.’s police department, telling him they had found his stolen car and asking that he pick it up at a station in Northeast Washington. After he walked in to the police station, he said he was handcuffed and taken into custody by officers, one of whom had the word “ICE” on his shirt. They told him they had used information from the stolen vehicle report to determine Argueta was in the country illegally.
“They tricked me into coming to the station to arrest me,” he said. “I was just trying to get my car back, but it was all a lie.”
Me again: They’re lying. ICE, CBP, DHS, the entire immigration Gestapo are always lying.
Back to the article: Argueta was detained for about a month in various detention centers before being released on bond in early January, he said.
Argueta’s account — filed as part of a lawsuit over warrantless arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is one of two recently surfaced examples of immigration agents arresting people at D.C. police stations, renewing concerns from some advocates over the local force’s ongoing cooperation with the federal agency. That relationship was part of the focus of a D.C. Council hearing Wednesday examining the police department’s performance.
The Trump administration has worked to expand partnerships with law enforcement agencies across the country, attempting to enlist local police in its mass deportation campaign. In liberal jurisdictions, those efforts have met resistance, either through long-standing sanctuary policies or new bans on cooperation.
The new accounts have fueled skepticism about whether D.C. police are complying with the letter and spirit of the city’s sanctuary law, which prohibits local police from providing federal immigration agencies with a person’s custody details, location, address, personal identifying information or criminal case information absent a warrant signed by a judge.
“These examples are people that would not have entered federal immigration detention if it were not for [D.C. police] actively assisting ICE,” said Austin Rose, an attorney for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. “I don’t know if the collaboration is formalized or whether it’s just happening, but either way, I think it’s violating D.C.’s laws.”
D.C. police spokesman Tom Lynch said the department was investigating the claims in the sworn declarations.
Asked about Argueta’s situation at Wednesday’s council hearing, interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll said he did not want to speculate until he learned more about the incident and his department’s involvement. “Obviously it sounds not good, but we need to investigate that to find out what happened,” he said.
In another example cited in the lawsuit, a man said a D.C. police officer pulled him over on Jan. 2 because his motorcycle plates were expired. She handcuffed him and took him to a police station, he said. Another man not in a D.C. police uniform was with her, the declaration states.
“I wasn’t sure who he was,” the man said in a sworn declaration submitted to the court. He used a pseudonym — “Benito Lopez” — in the court filing for fear of retaliation in the United States and Venezuela.
The man said he was in the process of applying for asylum and until recently, had been working as a delivery driver in the District.
He recalled being at the police station for about three hours, given a court date and then told he was free to go. But as he was preparing to leave the station, the man testified, two officers wearing green vests walked in, one of whom had earlier accompanied the D.C. police officer.
When he asked why he was being arrested again, they responded: “You are done with them but not with us.” They handcuffed him and told him they were with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.
“At no point was I presented with a warrant or told how ICE knew to come get me at the police station at that moment,” the man said in the declaration.
He has since been ordered to be deported, the court filing states. He said he had never been convicted of any crime, and had not missed deadlines or court appearances related to his immigration case.
The declarations come more than six months after President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C., seized temporary control of the city police department and surged federal law enforcement into the city.
While residents of D.C. are used to police cooperation with federal agencies, the city had in the past maintained policies that barred officers from assisting with civil immigration enforcement. For many in the deep-blue city, seeing D.C. police alongside ICE and HSI at traffic checkpoints and delivery driver stops after the surge was jarring. A Washington Post-Schar School poll in August found that 70 percent of Washingtonians thought the local police department should help federal deportation efforts either “not much” or “not at all.”
D.C.’s former police chief issued a policy in August, allowing her officers to share information about people not in their custody with federal immigration agencies. A federal judge, in a lawsuit filed by the city to maintain the chief’s authority over the department, said the Trump administration was likely allowed to compel D.C. police to help enforce immigration laws during the month-long federal takeover.
Even after the emergency expired, residents say they have continued to see D.C. police working alongside immigration agents, at times patrolling in the same vehicles. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and members of her administration have stressed that immigration enforcement is not a focus of the city police department, but have acknowledged that federal authorities who are part of a joint task force can enforce immigration laws.
Bowser previously said she would work to remove homeland security officers from the task force, but that has not yet happened, according to documents the police department submitted to the D.C. Council on Tuesday. The department also said the chief’s order allowing information-sharing between D.C. police and immigration authorities was still in effect, according to documents submitted as part of the council’s annual performance oversight process.
The department did not answer the council’s questions about how many times its officers had shared information with immigration enforcement, saying it does not track that data.
Rose, with Amica, said federal immigration arrests anecdotally appear to have fallen significantly since the spike in the summer and fall. The federal government reports warrantless immigration arrests to Amica as part of the lawsuit — and while there were 30 such D.C. arrests reported in December, that number had fallen to 11 by January, he said.
Amica and a coalition of advocacy groups still want stronger enforcement of a federal judge’s order limiting warrantless immigration arrests in the city.
In his sworn declaration, Argueta said he had never been arrested “in my entire life” before his December encounter with immigration agents in D.C. After he paid his bond, he said, he went back to his home and job in Maryland, where he has lived for more than a decade.
“I am very angry and traumatized from what happened,” he said. “I don’t want this to happen to other people.”
Manhattan DA charges 2 NYPD officers with covering up another’s DWI crash
New York: ICE arrests Columbia student, after lying to gain access to University-owned residence
Snowball fight in New York City turns chaotic after police arrive
New York’s Finest make first arrest of dreaded snowball terrorist
Excerpt: The man, Gusmane Coulibaly, was taken into custody early on Thursday morning at his home in the Bronx and charged with assaulting a police officer, obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct, according to the police. The Police Department was still seeking three other men, two of them believed to be between the ages of 18 and 20, who were also wanted for assault.
Ohio: ICE agents pepper-spray Columbus mom, three kids inside moving vehicle
Former Pennsylvania officer accused of child rape fatally shot in a gunfire exchange with police
Pennsylvania: Teens charged with aggravated assault after police riot at protest
Excerpt: The teenagers who were arrested had been taking part in a protest of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that began at Quakertown Community High School and moved off campus to Front Street. Witnesses have said that a confrontation erupted there, in front of Sunday’s Deli and Restaurant.
McElree, the police chief, who was dressed in plain clothes, grabbed a teenage boy and placed a teenage girl in a chokehold, they said, prompting other students to intervene and a larger scuffle to break out.
Angelo said the central allegation against his client is that she struck McElree during the melee, an accusation she denies. He contended that students reacted in confusion and fear when a man rushed into the crowd.
He said McElree “put himself smack in the middle and created a melee” when he charged up to the teenagers while out of uniform and without announcing who he was. “I think he owes the community and these teenagers an apology,” the lawyer said.
Pennsylvania: Private prison falsified records in detainee’s death in ICE custody
Excerpt: Staff at a for-profit Pennsylvania immigrant prison serially falsified detention records about a man who died in 2023, according to a federal death review obtained exclusively by The Intercept earlier this month.
Despite these findings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to punish the facility’s politically connected operator, GEO Group. Instead, records show the agency gave GEO even more money to run the facility after the man died: $4 million in additional funds, just three months after the death review was completed. After an April 2024 visit at the facility, ICE’s acting director called GEO a “valued partner.”
Me again: They’re lying. Even the freelance feds are always lying.
Border Patrol hired IT specialist, and when he showed up for work ICE detained him
Trump’s ICE is quietly stockpiling weaponry—and it should alarm us all
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it’s not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they’re investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers’ names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with ‘law enforcement experience’ and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It’s called “Wandering Cops.”
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: “testilying.” Yet it’s almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don’t, they aren’t cops for long.
The legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past ‘qualified immunity’ is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That’s the solution.
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