The Trump administration has been snatching delivery drivers off the street mid-order as part of their sweeping federal effort to make Washington, D.C. “safer,” as multiple residents have reported.
“Yesterday, my UberEats driver got arrested by ICE while he was delivering my food. I walked downstairs to pick it up and I noticed his location hadn’t changed in two or three minutes, and it was like two or three blocks away from my house,” said D.C. resident Tyler DeSue in a TikTok he posted on Sunday that went viral. “I stepped into the streets and I saw police lights … he was being questioned by eight or nine ICE officers.”
The officers claimed that they had pulled over the delivery driver—whose name is “Sidi” on the app— because his moped plates didn’t show up in their index, before conceding that there wasn’t a single issue with the vehicle. The driver’s first language was Arabic, and when they asked how he arrived in the United States, he struggled, and the ICE officers arrested him.
“He doesn’t understand what you’re saying bro, just use Google Translate on your phone, it takes two seconds,” DeSue can be heard saying on video as two officers confront the clearly distressed driver. Then they cuff and arrest him.
This is just one of many recent anecdotes, as residents who were told that the city would be cracking down on “violent crime” report they have observed several people being detained with no probable cause..
D.C. residents are reporting that they’re seeing fewer delivery drivers out and about, and Trump’s crackdown is also having a larger impact. The popular Irving Street corridor in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, usually bustling with vendors and drivers, is now quiet. And restaurants across the city saw a 25 percent drop in reservations in the days immediately after Trump federalized the city’s police forces and deployed FBI, DEA, HSI, ATF, and the National Guard — even as the president claimed business was booming.
“People who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington D.C. in two years are going out to dinner,” he said on Monday. That was an outright lie.
This federal takeover was supposed to make residents feel safe.However, for many, it’s had the inverse effect.
“What I am seeing, personally, is widespread fear amongst community members,” Atenas Estrada, deputy program director for theAmica Center for Immigrant Rights told NBC Washington.“People [are],you know, making decisions or avoiding places that they perhaps would not otherwise avoid or leave.”
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