More ICE Raids Attempted In Brooklyn, Queens, City Says
More ICE Raids Attempted In Brooklyn, Queens, City Says
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have unsuccessfully tried to make arrests eight times in five days, city officials said.
By Noah Manskar, Patch Staff
Jul 17, 2019 3:41 pm ET
https://patch.com/img/cdn20/ap/22965....jpg?width=705U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers escort a man in handcuffs during a California operation on July 8. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
NEW YORK — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have unsuccessfully tried to arrest New Yorkers four times in the past two days, city officials said Wednesday.
That brings the total number of attempted ICE raids in the city to eight in the last five days, officials said, a contrast to the mass arrests that the government and immigrant-rights activists had braced for.
A staffer with Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration spotted ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials in Bay Ridge Wednesday knocking on a door looking for someone who was no longer there, Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Bitta Mostofi said.
The office also confirmed three attempted raids on Tuesday in Midwood, Sunset Park and Far Rockaway, Mostofi said. She indicated that agents in all three cases knocked on doors without receiving an answer.
City officials confirmed the attempts with photos, video and eyewitnesses, including the owner of a bakery across the street from the Midwood incident and a Sunset Park building superintendent who got a knock on his door Tuesday, Mostofi said.
The agents' appearances followed four similar incidents in Sunset Park and East Harlem on Saturday, a day before ICE was expected to start rounding up at least 2,000 immigrants in the country illegally.
City Council Member Carlos Menchaca attributed the agents' lack of success to efforts to educate immigrants on their rights.
"Our years of organizing Know Your Rights Training and community engagement with immigrants families is working," Menchaca, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Council's Immigration Committee, said on Twitter.
President Donald Trump's threat of mass immigration raids has struck fear into immigrant communities. That fear has hit people who are here legally as well as those who are undocumented, de Blasio said.
"You can have a family where one member is an American citizen, another member is a permanent resident another member is undocumented," the Democratic mayor said at an unrelated news conference. "So this is not just the 500,000 undocumented folks. It's all of their family members."
ICE declined over the weekend to provide specific details about its operations, saying only that it prioritizes the deporation of immigrants in the country illegally "who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security."
De Blasio slammed the federal government's shifting messages about the raids, which Trump initially announced last month but then delayed.
The mayor said he went ahead with a campaign trip to Iowa last weekend in part because he "did not believe the Trump administration."
"This is a charade," de Blasio said. "It's a political game and what he's doing is trying to gin people up. They're not actually doing this work."
https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-...eens-city-says
