18 immigrant workers and four community leaders, members of the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, sat-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New Orleans, demanding an end to a harsh new program of community raids by ICE that are tearing families apart and terrorizing the immigrant workers who helped rebuild New Orleans.
The protest targeted a harsh new program of community raids that ICE has piloted in New Orleans over the past year called the Criminal Alien Removal Initiative (CARI).
Under CARI, ICE squads—sometimes accompanied by local police—have been raiding apartment complexes, grocery stores, laundromats, Bible study groups, parks, and anywhere else Latinos might gather, making arrests based purely on racial profiling.
Under CARI, ICE agents in New Orleans have recently arrested a fathers in front of their families, pushed and handcuffed a 16-year-old U.S. citizen boy for asking questions about his father’s arrest, and joked about “going hunting” while driving around New Orleans in search of Latinos to handcuff and fingerprint even before questioning.
The civil disobedience is part of the national #Not1More Deportation campaign demanding that President Obama use his administrative powers to stop deportations. Find out more about the action here.