Responding to criticism of migrant family separations at the southern border, Acting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan recently defended his agency, saying, “We’ve got to have the rule of law in this country.”
But in our experience, ICE has stood for the opposite. In Brooklyn, it brazenly disrupts law enforcement and undermines the rule of law, all for the sake of prioritizing the President’s interest in civil immigration law above all else.
We now work in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation that discourages victims and witnesses, both documented and undocumented, from coming forward to report crimes.
A report last week by the Immigration Defense Project identified over 50 ICE arrests in and around Brooklyn’s courthouses over the past year — a finding that matches our experience.
At the District Attorney’s Office, we have had to reduce charges significantly against violent defendants because victims have expressed fear of participating in the justice system.
In one case, a man who was robbed at gunpoint was unwilling to testify against his assailant because he fears ICE will come seize him in court.
Another victim robbed at knifepoint would not testify because, in his words, “I’m not a U.S. citizen,” forcing us to reduce the robbery charges to a misdemeanor.
In a recent assault case, we had no choice but to dismiss the charges because the eyewitness refused to testify, again citing his immigration status.
In another recent case, a domestic violence survivor described pressure to withdraw the complaint against her assailant, lest he — the father of her son — disappear from her child’s life forever.
In another case, an elderly woman was assaulted and had property stolen by her son, a green-card holder who has a drug problem. She understands that he needs treatment, but is reluctant to move forward because she does not want to trigger his deportation.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the Special Victims Bureau is prosecuting a case involving an undocumented single mother who witnessed the sexual abuse of her adolescent daughter. The mother struggled with whether to come forward because she feared her daughter would be worse off if her mother were deported after cooperating with law enforcement. The girl herself then reported the abuse.
At Sanctuary for Families, a citywide nonprofit serving victims, we are seeing this first-hand with our clients, over 75% of whom are immigrants. Many women, often with small children, describe staying in dangerous situations because they fear ICE.
One woman, who describes her U.S. citizen abuser as her “owner,” reports that he has threatened to have her deported if she tries to leave him — so she won’t try. While a movement is spreading across the country to bring the abuse of women out of the shadows, ICE’s actions are having the opposite effect. Instead of women, it is traffickers and abusers who are emboldened.
In fact, criminals can now weaponize ICE in court. We know of cases in which the alleged abusers called ICE on their victims when they had a Family Court hearing. This is shocking: Family Court is no longer a place of refuge but instead another place where a woman’s abuser can assert control over her.
The presence of ICE in our courthouses grotesquely impedes the administration of justice. We call on ICE to designate courthouses as locations safe from immigration arrests and to rethink its aggressive tactics and priorities. Now.
Gonzalez is Brooklyn district attorney. Kluger is executive director of Sanctuary for Families.
