Feds Criminalize Aiding Protests Against ICE

Speaking on Fox News last week, a top official from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency was expanding its dragnet for arrests. 

“I think we all know that criminals tend to hang out with criminals,” ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan said. “And so when we start to build a case, we’re going to be going after everyone that’s around them. Because these criminals tend to hang out with like-minded people who also happen to be criminals.”

The pledge to broaden arrests came as an immigration sweep that sowed fear across the Los Angeles area has been met by a growing protest movement to stop the raids and arrests.

“This appears to be a targeted, political attack on resistance to a military incursion on our communities.”

In addition to arresting hundreds of immigrants across Southern California, the government is targeting a mounting number of people who are responding to the raids or helping protests. Some of those targeted have provided supplies to protesters or tried to identify ICE agents conducting raids in masks and plain clothes.

The remarks from Sheahan, the ICE official, came three days after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop indiscriminate ICE raids in LA. In the order, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong condemned the administration’s use of a person’s characteristics — like their appearance, accent, or occupation — as a basis for arrest.

“Roving patrols” operating without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers violated the Fourth and the Fifth Amendments, the judge wrote. “What the federal government would have this Court believe — in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case — is that none of this is actually happening.”

Now, those accused of helping the anti-ICE movement are facing prosecution or investigation. Earlier this month, a federal grand jury indicted a man after he handed out face shields to people protesting ICE in Los Angeles two days after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard.

Alejandro Orellana, 29, pleaded not guilty to a charge of conspiracy to aid and abet civil disorders. According to a grand jury indictment, the face shields were “advertised as designed to protect from chemical splashes and flying debris.”

“Alejandro Orellana’s arrest for distributing supplies is an outrageous violation of civil rights and should be a wakeup call to people everywhere,” said California attorney Thomas Harvey.

“This appears to be a targeted, political attack on resistance to a military incursion on our communities,” Harvey said. “Distributing supplies to protesters is not a crime. It’s a critical role to help keep people safe — especially in the face of some of the most violent police repression I’ve seen since the Ferguson uprising.”

In Orellana’s case, an agent from the FBI made a claim similar to the one the ICE deputy would later make to Fox News — that it was assigning criminality to people based on assumptions, not on evidence.

The agent claimed in an affidavit that wearing such gear like the face shields, designed to protect against law enforcement using pepper spray or tear gas, “is not common amongst non-violent, peaceful protesters.” Instead, he argued, the face shield was “the kind of item used by violent agitators to enable them to resist law enforcement and to engage in violence and/or vandalism during a civil disorder.”

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Chilling Dissent

Identifying Masked ICE Agents

As part of expanding its definitions of criminal activity to include forms of protest responding to ICE, the government ramped up its efforts to investigate people suspected of providing identifying information about ICE agents.

On July 11, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem released a statement condemning “anarchists and rioters” in Portland who posted flyers with identifying information about ICE agents and said the department would prosecute “those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”

Last month, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced a bill that would make identifying ICE officers a federal crime.

In another case in May, ICE agents raided the home of a family in Irvine, California, on a criminal search warrant. They were investigating the source of flyers that had been posted around LA earlier this year with identifying information about ICE officers. The government suspected the family’s son was responsible.

Rep. Dave Min, D-Calif., issued a statement after the May raid saying he was “deeply concerned” with news of the raid and had asked federal law enforcement for more information. Min’s office did not respond to questions about whether they had yet received any such information.

Several of the efforts to further criminalize protest flyers or mutual aid have also been used against pro-Palestine student protesters, Cop City activists in Georgia, and people providing water to migrants.

Police charged protesters opposing the construction of the so-called Cop City police training facility with felonies for posting flyers in 2023, The Intercept reported. The activists had posted flyers in a neighborhood where a police officer lived, naming him and alleging that he was connected to the killing earlier that year of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. Police shot Tortuguita 57 times, killing the activist during a multiagency raid on the Atlanta Forest protest encampment.

In 2023, prosecutors brought charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law against 61 activists for their participation in organizing bail funds for Cop City protesters. Prosecutors dropped charges against three of the activists last year, and others are still awaiting trial.

In a slew of other high-profile cases, elected officials have been arrested for aiding migrants being pursued for arrest by ICE agents. Earlier this year, the FBI arrested a judge accused of helping a man use an alternate exit from a courtroom when ICE agents were waiting outside the main door.

“It should be terrifying to every person that the U.S.”

In Arizona in 2018, prosecutors famously slapped humanitarian volunteers offering food, shelter, and water to migrants in the desert with federal criminal charges. Border Patrol targeted their faith-based group as a criminal organization. In 2005, activists with the same group faced criminal charges for transporting migrants to receive medical care; the charges were later dismissed.

“It should be terrifying to every person that the U.S., which has long held political prisoners, is ramping up its oppressive tactics,” said Harvey, the California attorney. “And now, with the new funding, ICE will have more money than any policing force in U.S. history to build a gulag system filled with localized versions of ‘Alligator Alcatrazes’ to cage immigrants and political dissidents.”

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