While there has been some good news this week in terms of enduring democratic institutions in the United States, we cannot forget what is happening right in front of our noses. To wit, via the Chicago Tribune: Chicago woman dragged out of her car after colliding with ICE demands accountability.
Dayanne Figueroa was on her way to get coffee before heading to work when she encountered a chaotic scene in West Town: heavily armed, masked federal agents making arrests on a residential street.
People yelled as vehicles honked their horn — a sign now used to alert neighbors that immigration federal agents are in the area — and witnesses said federal agents had arrested several landscaper workers presumed to be in the country without authorization.
As Figueroa tried to drive through the 1600 block of West Hubbard Street on Friday, Oct. 10, an unmarked vehicle driven by federal agents collided with Figueroa’s as it tried to speed away from a hostile crowd, multiple videos reviewed by the Tribune show.
If you watch the video, the unmarked car that the ICE agents are driving hits Figueroa, not the other way around. They are behaving recklessly, and unlike, say, a clearly marked police car running lights and sirens, there is no reason for drivers to know to get out of their way.
The collision itself is bad enough, but the military assault on her vehicle and person should be unacceptable, even if Figueroa were at fault; this is not the way to deal with the situation. Worse, she was taken into custody for hours, during which her family did not know where she was.
For hours, her family couldn’t locate her. Only after coming across a video online did they realize that Figueroa had been taken by masked federal agents through video circulating the web. They were able to ping her through her iPhone location at the ICE processing center in Broadview.
Her mother said she was shocked and “desperately worried.” Figueroa had kidney surgery in August, and the way agents pulled her out of the vehicle and threw her on the ground “deeply concerned me,” her mother, Teresita Figueroa, told the Tribune.
But what stunned Teresita Figueroa the most was that despite her daughter being a U.S. citizen, the family couldn’t locate her. She said no authorities, including the Chicago police, were able to give them clarity on why her daughter was arrested.
To top it all off, DHS has blatantly lied about the event.
The Department of Homeland Security later released a statement claiming that Figueroa was at fault, saying “she crashed into an unmarked government vehicle and violently resisted arrest, injuring two officers.”
First, they crashed into her. Second, she is clearly panicked and puts up some natural resistance to being dragged out of her care by masked gunmen. Third, where is the violence?
The sad thing is, this is just one example among many.
All of this demonstrates that having ICE tool around urban centers is a bad idea; they are clearly not trained as to how to operate in such an environment. That citizens become collateral damage in their tough-guy games is not making the country safer; indeed, it manifestly is making it more dangerous.
Note that ICE was in the process of rounding up landscape workers suspected of being in the country illegally. I would submit that leaving them to their landscaping would have made Chicagoans safer than having ICE agents, armed for war, wildly driving around in an unmarked car.
