Raid:
ICE employees arrest a man in Los Angeles
Photo: Charles Reed / ICE / AFP
The US immigration service ICE has set up billboards in the state of Pennsylvania to warn of the alleged danger posed by criminal immigrants.
The campaign is directed against
cities of
refuge, so-called
sanctuary cities
, which do not cooperate with ICE and protect
undocumented
immigrants from access by the authorities.
For example, the cities do not detain convicted offenders without a residence permit after they have served their sentence, in order to then hand them over to ICE.
The Ministry of Homeland Security and President Donald Trump have repeatedly criticized these policies of liberal cities.
The poster campaign is now the most drastic step in the dispute so far.
Illegal immigrants are shown on the posters.
"Wanted by ICE" is written next to a photo, next to it in capital letters the crimes for which the men were convicted.
According to ICE, the posters include men from Ecuador, Kenya and South Korea.
Their names are also mentioned in the press release.
The posters also show the police station that released the convicts.
This policy is a "real danger", it says on the posters.
"I've never seen anything like it"
Former and current ICE employees criticized the campaign to BuzzFeed and CNN.
The posters are political.
It is also no coincidence that they were set up a month before the US election in the hotly contested Swing State of Pennsylvania.
According to surveys, Donald Trump is currently behind Joe Biden.
The government apparently regards almost the entire Department of Homeland Security as the arm of the Trump campaign, an ICE employee who wanted to remain anonymous told BuzzFeed.
Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School, also believes that the campaign serves political purposes and should scare citizens.
For the people passing by, the posters conveyed only one message: immigrants are dangerous.
"I've never seen anything like it," she says.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel PlusIcon: Spiegel Plus With illegal immigrants in Mississippi: A life in fear of Trump's deportationBy Katrin Kuntz
Since the beginning of his term in office, Donald Trump has kept his election promise and hunted down migrants who live in the country without papers.
If he has his way, ICE should find and deport as many as possible.
He
threatened budget cuts in
sanctuary cities
such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Washington and New York.
In recent years, numerous courts have banned local law enforcement agencies from detaining undocumented criminal immigrants longer than necessary so that ICE employees can arrest them after their sentences have been served.
According to the rulings, this would violate the constitution.
Trump, however, insists on it anyway.
"These heinous cities of refuge are a grave threat to public and national security," he once grumbled.
That is exactly the argument on the billboards.
Icon: The mirror
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