Social Media Lies About ICE Spike Amid Airport Arrests

With various ICE watch organizations around the country following ICE agents, often intervening in or impeding arrests, many videos have been appearing on social media claiming various abuses by ICE.

In most cases, critical information is omitted, such as existing orders of deportation, warrants, or sometimes even the fact that the person is not a citizen is omitted in the videos. However, the person posting the video claims ICE had no warrant and made the arrests for no reason, which, after some research, generally turns out to be false.

Many of the videos show ICE agents wrestling with or chasing illegal aliens as evidence of how cruel or violent ICE is. However, if the illegal aliens complied, there would be no need to wrestle, and the only reason ICE chases someone is that they are trying to escape. The same is true in cases where the windows of cars are smashed. For a window to be smashed, it has to be closed, which means that at the point when the window is smashed, the person of interest has refused to open the window and cannot have provided proper ID.

In some of these cases, it turns out later that the detainee was a citizen, and the posts claim ICE is harassing or attacking citizens, when in reality, if the person had just shown ID, they would have been free to drive away minutes later with no incident.

Several videos show a person shouting, “I have papers” or “I’m a citizen,” while officers struggle to put them in handcuffs. The comments on these videos suggest that viewers believe everything written in the post, such as, “Look at what ICE did to an immigrant with legal papers,” or “If they can do this to a citizen, they can do this to anyone.”

But a verbal claim of “I have papers” or “I am a citizen” is not proof of status. Once an arrest begins, according to protocol and for officer safety, officers must complete the arrest by placing the individual in handcuffs before checking ID.

Furthermore, when a person matches the description of someone with an outstanding warrant, biometric verification may be required to confirm their identity. As a result, the detainee may be taken to an office for an identity check. Citizens or legally documented individuals with no outstanding warrants will be released.

Assuming the person is found to be undocumented, they will not simply be released. If they are not already in immigration court proceedings, ICE will issue a Notice to Appear before an immigration judge, and the detainee may apply for release on bond while the case is processed.

But none of these facts, the warrants, the orders of deportation, or the reasonable suspicion, would necessarily be apparent to anyone filming the video or commenting on it. Furthermore, there are often ICE watchers in these videos demanding that officers show their ID, give their names, produce a warrant, or explain why the individual is being arrested. Officers, however, are not required to show anything or provide any information to bystanders. That information is provided to the arrestee and their attorney.

The officers’ refusal to engage with bystanders is then taken as proof that they had no warrant or no cause for the arrest, and the comments almost always reflect this assumption. It is frightening how often the comments call for killing ICE officers, hunting them down, or holding them accountable. But accountable for what? Enforcing the law is legal, and due process, a term often invoked by critics, is not violated by refusing to provide information to bystanders.

Ever since President Trump deployed ICE agents to airports, the volume of these angry, out-of-context videos has increased dramatically. Airports are large, crowded public spaces, and everyone has a phone.

A video going viral now claims to show a woman being violently assaulted by President Trump’s “Nazi” ICE agents at San Francisco Airport. The video and those commenting on it focus on the fact that the woman and her daughter are crying. As always, they ignore the fact that she is resisting arrest.

However, there is much more to the story.

The woman is Angelina Lopez Jimenez, and her daughter is Wendy. They are illegal aliens from Guatemala. Jimenez had a final order of removal dating back to 2019.

She was being escorted by immigration officials to the international terminal at the airport to board a deportation flight when she tried to escape.

The officers had to chase her, take her down, and she then became combative. What was caught on video was officers wrestling with the woman.

Both she and her daughter were shouting and crying, and liberals are blaming ICE rather than blaming the mother, who put her daughter in this situation by violating U.S. immigration law. Bystanders can be heard shouting threats and obscenities at the officers. Comments on the video claim she was arrested for no reason, and everyone on the thread seems to believe this without looking into the actual case.

Liberals love shouting “due process, due process.” Well, Jimenez got due process, and that process ended in deportation.

The post Social Media Lies About ICE Spike Amid Airport Arrests appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.