Some of ICE’s armoured vehicles were made in Brampton
Two US civilians were shot and killed by ICE this month, with a reported 73,000 in custody
The footage of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting raids in Minneapolis has been horrific. Last week, a five-year-old child was detained and relocated to a detention facility in Texas, over 2,000 kilometres away from his home, where he was taken from his driveway after the agency also detained his father.
Over the weekend, an ICE agent shot and killed intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, who had been recording agents with his phone. Pretti was registered as a legal gun owner. In a CBC analysis, retired FBI agent Daniel Brunner pointed out that ICE agents removed Pretti’s gun while he was on the ground and shot him ten times while he was unarmed. “He was not a threat,” said Brunner. “A group of reckless and poorly trained agents essentially murdered a man.”
Earlier this month, an ICE agent killed Renee Good, a poet and the mother of a small child, as she tried to follow ICE’s conflicting orders about how to move her car and exit a street.
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Back in December, the CBC reported on where ICE’s armoured vehicles come from. It turns out that a Brampton-based defence manufacturer was selected to provide ICE with armoured vehicles to “support agents in the field.” Government procurement records reviewed by the CBC showed that defence manufacturer Roshel had been contracted to supply a $10-million rush order of 20 tactical vehicles for ICE.
“Roshel is uniquely positioned to fulfil this requirement within the necessary time frame, having confirmed immediate availability of vehicles that fully meet ICE’s specifications,” said ICE’s office of acquisition management in the records. “While other sources were consulted, they had limited quantities available or none could fulfil the entire requirement within the required period of performance, nor meet all technical requirements.”
The Guardian reported that, as of mid-December, 68,440 people were in ICE detention, and nearly 75 per cent of them did not have any criminal convictions. More recently, CBS News reported that the number of individuals in ICE custody and facing deportation had reached 73,000, the highest number ever recorded in the agency’s history.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
