Amnesty International has called for the abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accusing the agency of widespread human rights violations during immigration enforcement operations under President Donald Trump.
The rights organisation made the call in a report released Thursday titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns,” which examines ICE operations in several major US cities.
Amnesty said the report was based on more than 150 testimonies collected between March and June in four cities where ICE had concentrated its activities.
The report comes less than a week after Venezuelan migrant Wilber Garces Perez was shot and wounded by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, an incident that renewed criticism of the agency’s enforcement methods.
Amnesty also cited the January deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, who were shot by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Nadia Daar, director of Amnesty International USA, said the presence of armed and masked federal agents on US streets was creating additional danger rather than improving community safety.
“Masked and armed federal agents attacking people in the streets with impunity doesn’t make our communities safer — it puts everyone in danger,” Daar said.
She argued that ICE could not be reformed into an agency capable of complying with international human rights standards.
“ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed,” Daar wrote. “For the U.S. government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and standards, ICE needs to be abolished and we need to start over.”
Amnesty further alleged that the Trump administration was pursuing mass detention and deportation of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees and said the policy was driven by what it described as racist and xenophobic rhetoric.
The organisation said its findings demonstrated the need for a fundamental change in the US immigration enforcement system.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on the report.
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