The Check-In is WUWM’s ongoing series keeping up with changes in Milwaukee’s immigration landscape. This week, we look into what someone can do when they spot U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their community. The group Comité sin Fronteras held a training last week to equip community members on how to spot, verify and document ICE activity and presence in Milwaukee.
Raul Rios is an organizer with Comité sin Fronteras, and he facilitated the ICE verifier training and talked with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez.
This conversion has been edited for length and clarity.
What goes into being a verifier?
The role is a volunteer position, and the requirements are a reliable car and job flexibility. The second part is not really a requirement as much, [but being] bilingual is a plus. The responsibilities include traveling to the site and recording ICE activity to verify or debunk claims as they come in, and reporting to the dispatcher within 45 minutes of the initial call — optimally, as soon as possible. If ICE is present, you would call for backup and document what they’re doing.
I'm curious where this training came from — is this something that groups were doing nationally or is this something that community members were asking for?
This is something that's kind of been happening nationally. There’s a group called Siembra from North Carolina and they've been very active. There's another group in Los Angeles as well, Unión del Barrio and they've also been very active.
It's something that we take inspiration from for this type of network because it's needed everywhere [because] ICE is on the ground and fielding all of these types of operations nationwide. So it was both seeing and being inspired by these other programs, but also recognizing that we needed something like that here in Milwaukee and broader Wisconsin.
You brought up Los Angeles, and the current presidential administration is really focused on L.A., even mobilizing our own national military there. There have also been reports of a larger ICE presence in Chicago as well. What are we seeing here in Milwaukee?
So ICE has been very persistent in increasing their ground operations. We've seen them merging with the FBI and here they’ve mostly been trying to pull people out of courthouses. They've also been doing this thing now where they'll say they need to do welfare checks on families. It's definitely been an increasing presence throughout Milwaukee.
It's not easy to identify ICE because [they’ve been recorded in] unmarked cars, they're not identifying themselves, they have these violent ways of detaining people, even being likened to kidnaping folks. So how does a training like this take all of that into mind for regular people to spot ICE?
We want them to take away with them that just because these people are in plainclothes, just because they're hard to identify, they're easy to identify in the sense that they are super walled off. They'll be in little conglomerate groups, and they'll meet up somewhere and then they'll go to specific residences or the courthouse.
We want [verifiers] to leave with that ability to be able to confront them. Being able to see that they use these same cars in their operations. That's why we want to get their license plates. We want to get their identifying information as well. We want people to be able to leave with being able to identify them so that when they come in the neighborhood again, we can spot them and verify that they've been on the ground or have a presence here.
A lot of the training today is about verifying ICE, but you're also verifying them because, presumably, they’re in the neighborhood to detain someone or to pick someone up. So what do we know about the rights people have that are the targets of ICE?
The rights of the people are that people can't enter your residence — your property — without a judicial warrant. A signed judicial warrant from the magistrate. And that's really important because these people will try to catch you off guard. They'll try to get you in your home.
We've seen those videos of people knocking on doors, and they'll try to lure you out. There was an incident where they had a little girl, and they waited for the [grand]mother to bring her out that way.
It's the different ways that they've been trying to circumvent the judiciary. And the reason why we give people the information of the judiciary is because it's still a tool in our arsenal that we can use to protect our communities.
