Earlier this month, heavily armed ICE agents conducted operations in the Chicago area targeting elementary schools during dismissal. In one case they abducted a mother while she was picking up her child. At an apartment complex in Chicago, ICE agents separated minors from their communities, parents, and families.

Truthout reports that ICE has been separating minors from adults under the guise of ensuring their "safety” until they can be put in the hands of a “safe guardian or the state.” Besides the horror of separating a child from their family, Truthout’s editorial team emphasizes that “state care” has been shown to be “unsafe” and potentially severely harmful to children.

Resistance actions are ongoing, as “hundreds of community members” in Chicago participate in Whistlemania: “this ICE watch of orange whistles alerts and defends people at schools, parks, and community centers.”

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) concluded “that family policing system investigations are harmful, and less than 10 percent of all reports are substantiated.” In response to this the AFT has joined other organizations in advocating for a switch from Mandated Reporting to Mandating Supporting, a system meant to “support the caregiver to access material and necessary resources instead of reporting to the family policing system.”

ICE’s increasingly militarized actions and rampant family policing have shown that there is a need for more than just reform. Instead there is a dire need for reallocation of the billions of dollars the government uses to “investigate caregivers who are living at the margins, and to hire people to be masked ICE agents” towards actually supporting people in need of “housing, health care, food, and support for communities.”

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)