ICYMI: ICE’s Shocking Midday Kidnappings Remind Me of Something I’ve Seen Before

Frightening times:

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has kicked into high gear, employing a set of extreme methods in an attempt to reach Stephen Miller’s unrealistic deportation quotas. Many Americans have watched in horror as masked ICE agents, sometimes accompanied by other federal agents and even local police, have appeared on their television screens, looking for and detaining immigrants in their homes, in their workplaces, and on the street. Sometimes, small gangs of law enforcement appear in military gear and masks, resembling military police. Sometimes, a mix of federal agents and local police deploy in large groups to conduct workplace raids, in a strange hodgepodge of uniforms. In other instances, officers have confronted immigrants as they leave court or show up to renew their work permits, then take them away.

But the law enforcement strategy that may have garnered the most shock among members of the public is the jump-out squad: small tactical teams of armed officers not in uniform who jump out of unmarked cars and grab immigrants off the street with no warning, or pull immigrants over and surround their cars, suddenly, before taking them away. Described by advocates for detainees as “brazen, midday kidnappings,” jump-out squads use a combination of surprise, terror, and overwhelming force. When they stop individuals with no reasonable suspicion, they act in violation of federal law, and a court in California has enjoined this practice.

But if this particular technique—jumping out on potential suspects, searching them, and taking them away—seems entirely foreign, it should not. Nor should the overt racial profiling that always accompanies these sorts of methods. Many urban police departments—including those in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, and Washington—have used jump-out tactics as a means of crime prevention. And those are just the ones we know about.

Police jump-out squads drive around in unmarked cars, looking for people who they believe are breaking the law. Although they rarely mask, they are still difficult to identify because they don’t wear uniforms or show their badges. Like the ICE squads, they deploy overwhelming force and the element of surprise to intercept criminal activity and find people carrying illegal guns. Jump-out squads have become more taboo in the past several years because the confrontations they instigate have proved so dangerous for the people they stop: These tactical teams can spiral out of control, leading to deadly consequences. They have been responsible for countless acts of excessive force, some of which have resulted in tragedy. The SCORPION squadthat killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis was a jump-out squad, as was the task force that killed 12-year-old TJ Siderio in Philadelphia.

These squads often cultivate a kind of vigilante ethos among their officers. Their members frequently work outside the typical chain of police command, reporting directly to the brass. Often, the units intentionally recruit aggressive officers and fail to properly train them on the Fourth Amendment. A group of police officers in L.A., calling themselves the Jump Out Boys, described their work this way: “Jump out boys are alpha dogs, who think and act like the wolf. … They understand when the line needs to be crossed and crossed back. They need to work hard, they need to get guns, they need to take people to jail, and sometimes they need to do things they don’t want to do.”

Over the past 30 years, jump-out squads were used first as a tool to break up the drug trade (in Seasons 1 and 3 of The Wire, Baltimore police deploy a ragtag such squad), then, more recently, during a spike in violence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, when urban police departments attempted to bring down the rate of gun violence by seizing illegal firearms. In the summer of 2020, 18 years after the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, New York City finally disbanded its infamous anti-crime unit, which frequently used aggressive jump-out tactics, but Mayor Eric Adams brought back a “modified plainclothes anti-gun unit” just a few weeks after taking office in 2022….

Source: ICE’s Shocking Midday Kidnappings Remind Me of Something I’ve Seen Before