Denouncing federal immigration raids as a form of “ethnic cleansing,” Rep. Maxine Waters and a group of U.S. citizens announced Monday that they were petitioning the United Nations to investigate the Trump administration sweeps for potential human rights violations.
Sitting beside famed civil rights activist Delores Huerta, Waters told reporters that the crackdown was untenable and would tear the country apart if left unchecked.
“When people are targeted because of how they look or the language they speak, the government is absolutely failing,” Waters said. “We cannot rely upon the administration to police itself.”
Filed partly on behalf of four U.S. citizens, including a pregnant woman who was shackled and detained during one raid, the petition accuses federal agents of waging a campaign of ‘’ethnic cleansing against Latino minorities in the United States,” and calls on the U.N. Human Rights Council to appoint independent investigators to scrutinize “kidnapping arrests, prolonged detentions without due process of law and the brutal excessive use of force.”
The petition, which was filed by civil rights attorney Luis Carrillo, states that “the actions of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Border Patrol, F.B.I. and others have caused countless human rights violations that can only be remedied by this Council.”
Petitioners argue that domestic efforts to stop “roundups” of immigrants have failed, because the Supreme Court lifted a federal judge’s ban on “roving patrols” and found that agents can stop individuals based on their appearance, the language they speak, where they are located or their vocation.
In addition to the four U.S. citizens, the petition states that it was also filed on behalf of “millions of Latino immigrants and U.S. citizens within the United States.”
The announcement comes a day before President Trump is slated to speak before the U.N. General Assembly. Federal immigration authorities dismissed the petition as a dangerous stunt that would inflame tensions.
“Maxine Waters is a radical sanctuary politician who is fanning the flames of hatred in this country with her dangerous rhetoric,” read a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin.
“This type of garbage about ICE and Border Patrol agents engaging in an ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and racial profiling vilifies our law enforcement. This demonization is inspiring violence across the country. Our ICE officers are facing a more than 1000% increase in assaults against them. We have to turn down the temperature before someone else is killed. This violence must end.”
Huerta, a lion of the Latino civil rights movement who helped organize farm workers, told reporters Monday that the ongoing federal immigration raids were the worst she has ever seen, and that an appeal to the the United Nations was the only option left.
“I’m 95 years old,” Huerta said. “I lived through Operation Wetback when they were deporting people at that time, but I never saw any kind of abuse like was seen today when people are being kidnapped off the street, taken away in unmarked cars, when the people that are kidnapping them are masked nobody knows who they are, when people have been brutalized the way that they are.”
The often brutal immigration sweeps of the Eishenhower administration — which bore the name of a racial slur — targeted Latinos and deported more than one million immigrants. Trump hailed the effort during his campaign and said that it was a model “deportation force.”
The petition cites several citizens and legal residents who were detained, or beaten during immigration operations, including Cary Lopez Alvarado, 23, who tearfully recounted the day in June that U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped her in Hawthorne by her husband’s work. She was nine months pregnant and they were “pulling me and dragging me, handcuffing me from the back, which later turned to shackles under my belly,” she recalled as she held her three-month-old baby in her arms.
After she was released, she went to the hospital where doctors told her she had already dilated two centimeters. The petition said that “excessive use of force” by Border Patrol officers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents caused her to give birth prematurely.
“Every time I see a vehicle that looks like theirs, I’m scared that you might try to pull me over,” she said. “I still live in fear.”
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