Immigration Officials Arrest 50 Suspected Of Human Rights Violations
NPR reported on an immigration enforcement operation, which unlike others, is not being criticized.
Fifty foreign nationals have been arrested in several cities across the U.S. in raids this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on suspicion of human rights violations.
ICE says the “Operation No Safe Haven II” involved arrests in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, St. Paul and Washington. All the individuals taken into custody have outstanding removal orders and are subject to deportation, the agency says. It says 10 of them are also convicted criminals.
ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center investigates human rights violators who try to evade justice by seeking shelter in the United States, including those who are known or suspected to have participated in persecution, war crimes, genocide, torture, extrajudicial killings, and the use or recruitment of child soldiers. These individuals may use fraudulent identities to enter the country and attempt to blend into communities in the United States.
According to ICE, those arrested across the country included:
- an individual from South America who assisted for many years in interrogations involving electric shock torture and who beat prisoners;
- an individual from Central America—an aggravated felon convicted of multiple U.S. drug-related charges—who served as a military police officer for several years and turned over victims to a regime perpetrating documented human rights violations;
- an individual from East Africa who engaged in torture as an intelligence officer in a specific government regime known to perpetrate torture, murder, and other human rights violations;
- an individual from the former Yugoslavia who arrested and interrogated victims on behalf of a paramilitary organization dedicated to ethnic cleansing;
- an individual from Asia who performed forced sterilizations upon several female victim patients and supervised dozens of other forced sterilizations and/or forced abortions upon other victim patients.
KJ