ICE Targeting of Immigrants’ Rights Movement Leaders

(Ravi Ragbir, Executive Director of New York’s New Sanctuary Coalition)

Nick Pinto at the Intercept has written a powerful piece on ICE’s deliberate targeting of immigrants’ rights movement leaders for deportation and detention.  The article highlights the cases of Ravi Ragbir and Jean Montrevil, both of who are with the New Sanctuary Movement in New York City.  Ragbir remains detained in the US; Montrevil was deported earlier this month after being arrested at his home (From the article:  “Scott Mechkowski, ICE’s deputy Field Office director for New York, [when asked] why the agency had sent a team to apprehend Montrevil at home months before his scheduled check-in. “We war-gamed this over and over,” Mechkowski said, according to Bardavid. “This was the best time and place to take him.”)  The article discusses ICE surveillance of churches and the relationship between New York City and ICE enforcement actions.

More from the piece:

“The events in New York are taking place against a national backdrop of escalating actions against prominent immigrant rights figures. On December 20, ICE agents in Washington state began deportation proceedings against Maru Mora-Villalpando, founder of an organization that leads weekly rallies and vigils outside the gates of Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. In Colorado, ICE detained the husband of Ingrid Encalada Latorre, an undocumented Peruvian mother who has been taking sanctuary in Denver-area churches since 2016.

‘It seems like they’re trying to create an atmosphere of uncertainty where nobody feels safe,” said Nathan Yaffe, a lawyer who works with the New Sanctuary Coalition to help people file asylum applications. “At the same time, they’re trying to exile our moral leaders in order to break the movement.’

‘ICE thinks that by removing the leaders,’ Yaffe added, ‘they can destroy the movement.’”

-JKoh