Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The administration says they are targeting the worst of the worst in their illegal immigration crackdown, but the facts are, they are sweeping up lots of people whose only crime was illegally immigrating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e8hotmwsJc
“Less than two days after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to restrict immigration agents from using riot control weapons, including chemical irritants, a Chicago-area couple and their 1-year-old daughter were pepper-sprayed during their Saturday morning grocery run.
On Saturday morning, the Veraza family was on its way to Sam’s Club in Cicero, a Chicago suburb near the epicenter of the federal government’s immigration enforcement campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” Upon hearing a helicopter and car horns, which are often used by community members to signal immigration enforcement activity in progress, they decided to leave. That’s when a black pickup truck, captured on video by the car’s passenger, drove past their vehicle while a masked agent sprayed a chemical irritant through the car’s open driver’s side window. A cloud of spray hit the driver, Rafael Veraza, in the face, affecting him, his wife, and his 1-year-old daughter, Ariana, in the back seat. The video then cuts to Rafael and his wife trying to wash out Ariana’s eyes as she cries.
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In response to questions regarding the incident, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin sent a statement to the A.P. claiming “there was no crowd control or pepper spray deployed in a Sam’s Club parking lot.””
https://reason.com/2025/11/12/operation-midway-blitz-agents-pepper-sprayed-a-chicago-family-on-a-grocery-run/
“The First Amendment protects filming the police, but Berenice Garcia-Hernandez says she was dragged out of her car and detained for nearly seven hours for snapping photos of ICE agents.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/12/oregon-woman-says-ice-broke-out-her-car-windows-and-detained-her-for-filming-them/
“A federal judge in Chicago ordered roughly 600 people to be released from immigration detention…The individuals, the judge found, had been arrested in violation of a 2022 consent decree designed to ensure immigration agents have probable cause before making warrantless arrests.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/12/federal-judge-orders-over-600-ice-detainees-to-be-released-from-custody/
If you can’t humanely treat the mass of people you are arresting on immigration charges, then you should arrest less people.
“The emergency lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois’ Eastern Division on October 30, accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and ICE of denying detainees adequate access to counsel, food, water, and medical care. An emergency hearing was held on Tuesday, in which Broadview detainees described being held in a cell with roughly 150 other people, sleeping on the floor for days near overflowing toilets, inoperable showers, and a lack of hygiene products like toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap while at the facility.
One of the detainees who spoke on Tuesday was Felipe Agustin Zamacona, a 47-year-old man who was born in Mexico but has lived in the U.S. for 31 years. He said the cell was never mopped or swept, and had an overflowing garbage can, according to CBS News. He told the judge that “it smelled like a dirty washroom, like sweat, like a dirty locker,” reported The New York Times. Although detainees were given two or three cold sandwiches a day, Agustin only ate his first one after subsequently getting sick with diarrhea.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/06/federal-judge-blasts-disgusting-ice-facility-conditions-orders-basic-humane-treatment-for-detainees/
“”Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states, warns a law enforcement bulletin issued last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Dell Cameron and Caroline Haskins write at Wired. “The bulletin cites five 2025 incidents involving fake immigration officers and says criminals are using Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s heightened profile to target vulnerable communities, making it harder for Americans to distinguish between lawful officers and imposters while eroding trust in law enforcement.””
https://reason.com/2025/11/07/even-the-fbi-thinks-masked-ice-agents-are-a-bad-idea/
“To fill the roles, the Trump administration is turning to agents from Customs and Border Protection, the agency that has led aggressive immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles and Chicago.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/29/trumps-move-to-replace-12-ice-directors-could-mean-more-aggressive-and-unconstitutional-immigration-enforcement/
ICE is grabbing whoever they can because they have quotas to meet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDbtrdfYqBc
“For the past two weeks, Juan Barbosa Gomez has been in federal immigration detention, but he doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. His family says he has valid work permit and no criminal record.
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For the past two weeks, Barbosa, a 60-year-old grandfather from Mexico, has been incarcerated in the federal immigration detention system, and his family says there’s been a terrible mistake. They say he has a valid work visa and no criminal record. He’s lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, working as a welder.
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Barbosa’s family has been unable to secure his release or even find out any information on his case. He’s been transferred to three different detention facilities in under two weeks and doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. The transfers made it difficult for his family to keep track of him or keep his commissary fund filled, and more importantly, it has short-circuited their attempts to find an immigration attorney to look at his case.
Barbosa isn’t the only such alleged wrongful ICE arrest in Portland. The local TV news outlet KOIN 6 reported that another Portland-area grandfather, Victor Cruz, was arrested by ICE officers on October 14 despite having Temporary Protected Status, a valid work permit, and no criminal record.
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To handle the surge of tens of thousands of detainees, the administration is relying on a secretive network of federal, state, and local lockups. To encourage detainees to self-deport, the administration holds them in miserable conditions and shuttles them between facilities, making it hard for them to mount a legal defense. This raises massive constitutional issues: People are being imprisoned for weeks without transparency, without adequate access to legal counsel or means to challenge their detention, and without basic information on the case against them.
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“His grandson is six years old, and he’s trying to figure out how to navigate through this difficult time, with his grandmother in distress and his whole family right now really going through a hard time,” Smith-Mason says. “It’s a really, really hard time trying to deal with that and keep normalcy for him as well, especially because grandpa has been a constant in his life since the day he came home from the hospital.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/30/a-portland-family-says-their-dad-was-wrongly-arrested-by-ice-now-hes-lost-in-immigration-detention/
“Venegas isn’t the only U.S. citizen to run afoul of the increased emphasis on immigration enforcement. Just days ago, according to 16-year-old Arnoldo Bazan, ICE officers in an unmarked car and without uniform insignia beat and choked him in Houston. He was finally released but his father was deported.
Two weeks ago, ProPublica reported it had found more than 170 cases of “agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests.” In some cases, U.S. citizens were initially accused of assaulting or impeding officers, but charges were rarely brought, suggesting there was little substance to the accusations. “Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.”
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The problem with emphasizing mass arrests without warrants of supposedly foreign-looking people over targeted actions is that the government doesn’t just drive up the numbers; it scoops up many people who have every right to be where they are and do what they’re doing without being molested by agents of the state.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/31/ices-mass-arrests-ensnare-u-s-citizens-and-show-no-signs-of-stopping/