ICE Roundup: Please Don't Shoot The Ambulance Driver
ICE goons are a little jumpy these days.
Quite a bit of ICE news this week! In Portland, public records show that a nervous ICE thug threatened to shoot and arrest an ambulance driver earlier this month for the crime of trying to get an injured protester to a hospital. A whole bunch of airports are refusing to play Homeland Security Theater Secretary Kristi Noem’s shutdown video blaming Democrats for flight delays. And in Chicago, a priest warned worshipers at a Spanish-language mass Sunday that a squad of ICE gestapo had been spotted in the neighborhood, after which neighbors and activists showed up to form a human chain outside to protect parishioners leaving the church.
Plus a whole lot more! Let’s dive right in!
Portland ICE Goon Scared Of ‘Ambulance,’ Threatens To Shoot Driver
Willamette Week reports that late on October 5 — the same Sunday that a federal judge issued her second ruling telling Donald Trump he couldn’t send National Guard troops to Portland — ICE officers refused for about 20 minutes to allow an ambulance to leave the ICE Haus where protesters have been protesting. The account is taken from confidential incident reports written by both members of the ambulance crew, one to the ambulance company, and another to their union.
The ambulance had been called to transport a protester who had a broken or maybe dislocated collarbone, according to public dispatch records. It’s not clear how the injury happened, but after the patient was loaded onto a gurney and then onto the ambulance, a line of ICE agents blocked it from leaving while ICE goons argued that an agent should be allowed to ride along to the hospital. The ambulance crew told them nothing doing, because law enforcement is only allowed in ambulances if the patient has been arrested. The ambulance crew thought the ICE jerks agreed to just follow them to the hospital, but the line of agents wouldn’t budge.
The driver wrote in their report that the ICE goons began
walking away from me whenever I spoke. At that point, a group of 5-8 civilian-dressed men walked into the garage and just stared at me. No identification on any of them. I walked back to the ambulance and got into the driver’s seat. I flipped the emergency lights on and put the car into drive. I inched forward slowly out of the garage.
Then a masked goon in civilian clothes stepped in front of the ambulance, ordered the driver to stop, and yelled that the ambulance might hit officers the driver could see were a good 15 feet away. The officers were in front of the exit gate, and looked like they were ready to make a path for the ambulance, but then more agents in battle gear crowded in front of the ambulance. One told the driver that now the ambulance couldn’t leave because of “violent protesters” outside — even though dozens of armed feds had blocked protesters from the exit and the street outside.
The crew member in back, with the patient, wrote that they got out of the ambulance to try to talk to the officers. The driver put the vehicle into park and took their foot off the brake, but that made the ambulance move a tiny bit forward, at which one of the ICE officers lost his shit completely, accusing the ambulance driver of trying to run them down. After all, maybe that protester infected the ambulance crew with antifa terror cooties.
An agent, the driver recalled, “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.’”
Eventually, after much drama and renewed demands to ride with the injured but unarrested terrorist (who appears not to have been arrested afterward, either) the ICEholes agreed a second time to follow the ambulance to the hospital and the crew was allowed to transport its patient. Good thing it wasn’t a heart attack, huh?
Multiple Airports Refuse To Show Noem Propaganda Video
Several US airports have said hell no, they won’t show Kristi Noem’s partisan videos telling travelers to blame evil Democrats for screwing up air travel during the government shutdown.
In the video message, meant to be shown at TSA checkpoints, Noem says “It is TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe. However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.”
The federal Hatch Act is supposed to bar federal employees from doing partisan politicking while on the job, but it’s the Trump administration, so trolling actually overrides federal law. There was probably an executive order on that.
New York City’s three major airports — JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty — are operated by the Port Authority of New York, which cited “longstanding policies” barring political messaging at its facilities. Same deal for the Chicago Department of Aviation, which operates O’Hare and Midway. The agency said the guidelines “help ensure the airports remain welcoming and neutral spaces for all travelers,” as if that’s even legal.
Other airports opting out of the Noem video propaganda include Portland International in Oregon, Phoenix Sky Harbor in Arizona, Seattle-Tacoma in Washington, Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cleveland Hopkins in Ohio, and Charlotte Douglas International in North Carolina, which not only cited city and airport policy but pointed out that TSA doesn’t even own video screens in its TSA checkpoint areas.
Chicago: Don’t Cross The Priests; They Can Cross Themselves Just Fine
In the Rogers Park neighborhood, a priest at a Catholic church on Sunday warned that ICE agents were in the area, and urged parishioners to leave cautiously. Neighbors and activists lined the sidewalks to put themselves between departing congregants and any ICE agents who might show up. One parishioner said she believes ICE has been casing the church, and that Mass attendance is down as a result. Here’s additional coverage from ABC 7 Chicago; just don’t read the uniformly evil comments at YouTube.
Also, on Saturday, two Jesuit priests and a group of protesters held a eucharistic procession from Saint Eulalia Catholic Church to the ICE facility in Broadview, just outside Chicago, where they requested permission to give communion to Catholic detainees in the facility; they were turned away by state troopers and federal goons who perhaps feared that if Jesus the Christ, in the form of the consecrated Eucharist, saw what was going in there, He would never stop throwing up.
“I’m sure they heard us singing,” Father Daniel Hartnett told the local CBS News affiliate. “I’m sure they heard us talking, so hopefully they get strength from our presence.”
You Say You’re A Citizen? You Don’t ‘Look American’ To Masked ICE Fucks
After Chicago resident Maria Greeley, 44, finished a double shift at a bar earlier this month and was walking home, masked ICE goons surrounded her and zip-tied her with no warning and interrogated her for an hour. Greeley even had her passport with her, but the ICE thugs told her that she had to be an undocumented immigrant, and her passport forged, because she didn’t “look like” someone named Greeley, in their expert opinion. Greeley, a Latina born in the US, was adopted as a child, which was apparently just too incredible a story for the federal “law enforcers.”
“I am Latina and I am a service worker,” Greeley said. “I fit the description of what they’re looking for now.... They said this isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” she told The Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.”
She was eventually released, so what’s the big deal? Racial profiling made this country what it is today, after all. You should watch what you say and watch what you look like, even if you have a passport. Maybe especially if, if you don’t look like what a fascist thinks someone with your name should look like.
BRB filing court papers to rename myself Oldnerd McWhiteguy.
OPEN THREAD!
[Willamette Week / Oregonian / NBC Chicago / TNR]
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