ICE Agents Are Using Family Separation Tactics Central to US State Violence

This article was written by Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, Shannon Perez Darby, C. Hope Tolliver for Truthout.

“Recently, heavily armed and masked SWAT-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rolled up at a Chicago-area elementary school as classes ended for the day. Their target? A mom picking up her child. The footage is heart-wrenching: A woman in a pink sweatshirt, struggling frantically, is pressed into the pavement by armed bodies as she screams, “There is no signed warrant,”while members of an army invade her car.

Echoing Obama-era policies as well as those of the previous Trump administration, today’s ICE-perpetrated abductions separate loved ones again, and continue to shock the conscience of the nation.

But here’s an uncomfortable truth: These unforgivable community and family separations didn’t start at the border. Rather, ICE raids are one tip, and kinship and family separation one consequence, of the same carceral iceberg.”