ICE stands for the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11 to keep us all terrorized and afraid. The following video describes the government’s illegal, unnecessary, unconstitutional, unsuccessful, violent, destructive and idiotic terrorist raid on innocent citizens in Davis, California in April, 2011.
Here’s the Sacramento News10 story about this raid by heavily armed federal agents on a house in Davis, California.
The story made front page news in the Davis Enterprise on June 17, 2011. This follows the May 29, 2011 Op-Ed by Davis home owner Linda Clark.
You can download the Davis Enterprise Op-Ed as a pdf file from this next link: 540 Oak Avenue raid
The search warrant in this case was addressed to “any authorized law enforcement officer” and gave 14 days to carry out the search. ICE carried it out the next morning at 6:00 a.m. without doing any research, gathering any intelligence about who was in the house. They did not even know who they were looking for. The irony is that the alleged crime took place 13 months prior to the raid, so that ICE cannot claim that time was of the essence or was any factor at all. It would be very interesting to see the affidavit(s) filed with the Court in order to get this warrant.
ICE did not arrest anybody, did not file any charges, and has been utterly unheard of on this subject since April 26. It appears that something went very wrong here and it is not clear what. There is no reason to suspect that the allegation of child porn was valid or that it was the real reason for the raid, since no evidence has been produced. Why waste the government’s time 13 months after the fact on a false allegation? It may be the prosecutors made false statements in an affidavit thus causing the judge, Edmund F. Brennan, U.S. Magistrate Judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, to issue an overly broad search warrant.
The question of what procedures ICE follows in carrying out its raids is another question that ought to be answered. Is there anything on the books that ICE uses to guide its own raids and searches? And did ICE follow them?
This reminds me that in November of 2003, the Sacramento City Council passed a Resolution “affirming civil liberties and opposing the infringement of such liberties by the federal government.” “Sacramento joins 209 cities in opposition to the Patriot Act” was the headline in the story written by Dan Bacher on this achievement by many in the Sacramento peace and justice community.
Description: At 6:00 on the morning of April 26 7 to 12 heavily armed agents of the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surrounded a house half a block from the University of California, Davis. They barged in, yelling and screaming, bashed down doors with a battering ram, put guns to people’s heads (except for the white residents), handcuffed the residents, held them for 5 hours and ransacked the entire house. They were there with a search warrant and a list of computer equipment to take. They were there allegedly because somebody living in the house last March or April visited a website called liberalmorality that contains child porn.
This is a direct result of the national 9/11 myth in 2 ways. DHS would not exist without the national 9/11 myth. Neither would the attitude that has swept across American society including law enforcement, the attitude that we should be angry and afraid, that there are evil people out to get us (there are and they work for DHS / ICE, but that is not what the national 9/11 myth says) that the Constitution and Bill of Rights no longer apply, and that the government can stomp the citizens any time it wants. This is an outrage and it has to stop in Davis, in California and in every state.
