The rules bar Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees from flying on chartered planes unless there are detainees also on the flights. So what did ICE do when Team Trump wanted tactical teams as part of the effort to violently subdue peaceful protests in Washington, D.C.? Loaded some detainees on a plane—during a pandemic, mind you—and flew them to Virginia as an excuse to bring along special response teams not involved in the detainee transfer.
More than 50 of the detainees transferred to Farmville, Virginia, tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving, and more than 300 inmates at that immigration jail ended up sick. ICE denies that the transfers were a pretext for moving special response teams, but one current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official and one former ICE official tell The Washington Post that’s exactly what happened. “They needed to justify the movement of SRT,” the DHS official said.
According to ICE: “The June 2 transfer of detainees to Farmville was made as part of a national effort to spread detainees across the detention network to facilitate social distancing and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.” But some of the detainees were moved from an Arizona detention facility that The Washington Post reports was 35% full at the time—and the Farmville facility was 57% full.
”This transfer that took place on June 2 was ordered by ICE headquarters,” the director of the private company that runs the Farmville facility told the town council in August. “I do know that the local field office pushed back and attempted to refuse the transfer, and they were overridden by officials in Washington.”
On June 2, Washington, D.C., had seen days of serious protest over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. On June 1, Donald Trump had had Lafayette Square violently cleared so he could stage a photo op outside a church. Also on June 1, “a top DHS official said in a memo obtained by The Washington Post that special response teams were being sent to the District from Arizona, Florida and Texas, with plans to arrive the following day.”
So the Trump administration bent the rules to bring in tactical teams to use against protesters, using immigrant detainees as pawns in the effort, and sparked a serious COVID-19 outbreak among people powerless to protect themselves from the virus. It’s appalling—and yet another perfect example of how evil these people are.