This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 21 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Protests erupted across Austin, Texas, on Sunday, after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and seriously wounded a Venezuelan man as he was delivering food.
According to Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez’s lawyer, an agent shot the 28-year-old in the back after ramming his car. He entered the country as an asylum seeker through a parole program and was not known to have any criminal history whatsoever.
Video from the scene shows that after Garcés Pérez was shot, before he got any sort of medical attention, officers handcuffed him. His lawyer says they then took him into ICE custody, with the bullet still in him and without giving him anything for the pain.
The mayor of Austin and the local press have expressed outrage over the shooting. And the people of Austin have been out in force, demanding answers from the federal government.
Also on Sunday, this time in Evanston, Illinois, Donald Trump’s ICE agents badly beat a U.S. citizen and then drove away, leaving him lying in the street, bloody and injured and writhing in pain. Somebody then called the Evanston police, who showed up and called an ambulance for the man. He was taken to the hospital with injuries to his head and neck and teeth.
This weekend in Concord, California, neighbors rallied to get a local woman released from ICE detention center. She is not known to have any criminal record at all. She’s a mother and a nurse, and she’s been in the Bay Area for decades.
On Saturday, across the country in Boston, tons of people turned out outside the Museum of Science to embarrass the heck out of the robot company Boston Dynamics. Among other things, Boston Dynamics makes those creepy robotic dogs that — if you’re like me — have been giving you nightmares since you first saw video clips of them years ago. They’re still as fricking creepy as ever. But now, Boston Dynamics has planned to sell those robot dogs, in quantity, to ICE.
Boston Dynamics says any weaponization of their robots is “strictly prohibited,” but given that it’s probably also technically strictly prohibited to shoot DoorDash drivers in the back, we can see how that works out in practice. So Boston Dynamics is now going to find itself on the butt end of ongoing protests.
This weekend in Richmond, Virginia, local residents protested at the airport against the hundreds of ICE flights that are routing through their state. They want the Capital Region Airport Commission, which owns and operates the Richmond airport, to stop ICE from using that facility. The commission says it can’t block the flights, but residents in Richmond are demanding they do something about it.
In Florida, three Democratic members of Congress, Reps. Maxwell Frost, Bennie Thompson and Robert Garcia, just released photos they say they received from a whistleblower showing the conditions people are being held in by ICE in Miramar, which is in the northern suburbs of Miami. Photos show immigrants being forced to use overflowing portable toilets and sleep on concrete floors or in chains.
The three congressmen are now demanding answers from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, saying these are abusive, life-threatening and illegal conditions that they’re trying to keep secret from the public.
This comes after an inspector general report on the so-called Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida, which has now been shut down — but not before ICE used tiny cages to hold people inside that facility. It also comes as a bunch of clergy were just arrested in Williston, Vermont, after protesting an ICE facility in that community. And it comes as every week we see residents in the El Paso, Texas, area protest outside Camp East Montana, the largest of all the Trump detention camps. East Montana has been set up at the Fort Bliss military facility, where, incidentally, the U.S. government during World War II also set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans.
These protests all across the country make it clear Americans don’t like what Trump is doing. They don’t like any of it, and they’re willing to stand up and show it.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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