New York is creating a team of legal observers that will don purple vests to monitor and record the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement officers as they seek to detain and deport migrants, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.
The announcement follows weeks of sometimes violent tumult in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump has deployed thousands of armed, masked agents as he tries to deport more migrants than any of his predecessors.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the state’s new legal observers would be volunteer employees from her office, trained to observe, without interfering, whether Trump’s immigration enforcement “remains within the bounds of the law”.
“I am proud to protect New Yorkers’ constitutional rights to speak freely, protest peacefully, and go about their lives without fear of unlawful federal action,” James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability.“
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said James was putting New Yorkers in danger by not working with ICE.
This might seem pretty tame when we all want bolder actions, but if things work out and we get our own Nuremberg trials, we need all the reliable documentation we can get to hunt these traitors down and bring them to justice.
Personally I’d be down with using employment records and just capping them as we find them. Kinda like what Nakam and other Nazi hunters did after the war.
I think this is a great idea, but can use one little change: they should all have body cams streaming ICE behavior publicly in real-time.
I think it will change things greatly if ICE knows they are all being watched, all the time.
They should be tagged in the videos as they are identified too
They should have heavily armed bodyguards as well.
Or you could ban businesses and local government entities from helping? Without access to unmarked police vehicles or rentals things get complicated. Ban gas stations from providing gas. Make them get gas from federal pumps.
The populace is doing that already. Late to the party, but still welcome.
