The mayor of a large city in the suburbs of New York denounced on Friday a police operation against illegal immigrants – and according to him an American national – while the White House stages its policy of expulsions of illegal immigrants. -papers.
“The Trump administration has arrested 538 illegal criminal migrants” in Newark, an industrial and dormitory town in New Jersey, 25 km from Manhattan, presidential spokesperson Karoline Leavitt announced on X, adding that “hundreds » had been expelled, using army planes for the first time.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka denounced to journalists a nighttime raid carried out by officers from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in an industrial fish market. “ICE agents intervened in a business in our city without a warrant,” lamented Baraka, criticizing the arrest, according to him, of a veteran of American nationality.
“The problem is that none of these people are rapists, murderers or criminals,” added the chief magistrate of this so-called “sanctuary” city, like New York. In these localities, illegal immigrants benefit from local police protection against arrest at home, office, school, church or hospital by federal government authorities.
In Newark, “they took three guys (…) from Ecuador, I think (…) Everyone is afraid,” testified someone who witnessed the ICE raid but who did not did not give his name to NBC television on site.
-If the White House prides itself on having launched “the largest mass expulsion operation in history”, the human rights organization American Immigration Council has criticized “a pure propaganda operation”.
“Last year and years before, there were already dozens of deportation flights every week,” wrote its expert, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, on X. And for comparison, during the 2024 budget year (from October to the end of September), under the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden, the border police expelled 271,000 undocumented migrants, an average of 742 people per day.
These illegal immigrants, who contribute greatly to many economic sectors, number some 11 million in the United States, according to the Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Homeland Security.
