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SubscribedOperations Benchwarmer, Tidal Wave, Abracadabra, Dust Off, Fleur De Lis — these are just a few of the secret programs recently undertaken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has become a self appointed bouncer for America under Donald Trump, enlisting tens of thousands of federal, state, and local police and intelligence departments and agencies to not just root out “illegals,” but also exploit them for intelligence, leaked documents show.
A Border Patrol official outraged by ICE’s conduct has leaked to me this and other documents providing an unprecedented glimpse into ICE’s undeclared activities across the country. Many of these operations and their codenames have not been previously reported.
A 15-page long document, marked “LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE,” details 21 different “major” ICE operations resulting, so it says, in 6,852 apprehensions since June. From Operation Abracadarba, a covert effort to develop informants among immigrants in detention, to Operation Benchwarmer, which alone spans the deployment of 2,000 “intelligence assets” across the country, the document gives a sense of how aggressively ICE is scouring neighborhoods and developing sources to spy on immigrants and Americans alike.
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The source was spurred to action by the absurd amounts of secrecy surrounding the operations and the utter failure of Congress to make many of them public. The secrecy has concealed ICE’s transformation into a parallel FBI, a DEA and an independent police force whose mission has crept well past the deportations that media tend to focus on.
The media is telling a certain story about ICE, giving the blow by blow on the most public horrors but never quite seeing the bigger picture that it’s part of a larger war. As a military intelligence source told me, the ICE crackdown isn’t just about immigration; it’s about gathering intelligence in support of Trump’s war on cartels — as well as on Antifa, on the radical left, and those who are “anti-American,” and anyone else they consider terrorists. And since the administration has been so quick to label everyone, including Renee Good, terrorists, it’s no wonder they think they’re at war.
ICE’s work is done under a set of task forces, with the agency calling upon other Department of Homeland Security agencies, like the Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service, and even the Secret Service. DHS now constitutes the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country — larger even than the FBI. And that was before ICE had its law enforcement budget nearly tripled last year.
“Operation Abracadabra was initiated with the requirement of Interviewing 100% of individuals apprehended to gather intelligence and identify follow-on targets such as stash houses and individuals conducting illegal activity,” one of the documents, a briefing slide, reads. The purpose, it continues, is “Tying every individual who crosses the border illegally to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a Transnational Criminal Organization, and/or utilizing the intelligence to develop targets.”
Another briefing about Operation Benchwarmer reveals the employment of agents dressing in “plainclothes” to disguise themselves as ordinary people in an attempt to gather intelligence.
“Plainclothes agents have been embedded in transport vans, sally ports, processing areas, and detention cells to gather important tactical intelligence and or information,” the briefing says of this nationwide operation. The purpose? It’s “focused on collecting information not normally gained during formal interviews.”
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This national security colossus, over 20 years in the making, plays an intimate role in many of the ICE operations you read about (and many you don’t). Yesterday I reported on the deployment of hundreds of Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis, Minnesota to support ICE operations there in the wake of an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Good.
My source’s motive in large part pertains to the lack of big picture public understanding of ICE’s larger war. That’s by design, thanks to the lack of transparency on the part of DHS and a Congress unwilling to compel transparency. Things as basic as ICE’s Use of Force Policy — its use of deadly force policy — are almost completely blacked out so the public can’t see them.
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Opposition to ICE’s conduct following Renee Good’s death has spread throughout the Department of Homeland Security, as I previously reported. The discontent is also affecting the Justice Department, with several top federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigning over pressure to investigate Renee Good’s widow. Meanwhile, the FBI is itself increasingly split, the political part reportedly investigating Good’s ties to activist groups that the Trump administration labels extremist.
But other parts of the FBI, sources say, are also alarmed by ICE’s heavy handedness and its creeping takeover. One senior FBI official tells me that there is widespread concern that ICE’s actions are coloring the American public’s view of law enforcement in general. The source says that enforcing the law demands scrupulous adherence to the law in doing so and fears that ICE has abandoned such a fundamental principle, believing through masking and its belligerence towards the public that the law doesn’t apply to it.
More ICE operations are described below.
Edited by William M. Arkin
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