NYC ICE Watch calls for multiple 'fronts' across US to 'distract' feds

In a recent meeting of the New York City-based group Rise and Resist, an ICE Watch member said that the more "fronts" that are opened up against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown efforts across the country, "the less capacity they are going to have."

In footage obtained by Paul Rossi, the ICE Watch member said, "One of the things that we have really going for us is that the United States is a really big country. And in other places where authoritarian dictators have taken over, they have been much smaller than we are. And so the more fronts that we open up, the less capacity they are going to have."

"Right now they're really concentrating on throwing everything they can at Minneapolis, which is why it's really important for us to build up as much ICE Watch as we can, to have as many people show up as possible, to open up another front. And so if this can happen in five or six different places around the country, they won't be able to deal with it.

The man, who said he’s part of an ICE Watch group that covers neighborhoods in southwest Brooklyn, added, "it's really starting to get rolling. And so the more that we can have a presence going out there, the more that they see that there are a lot of people, we can distract them, bring people out of Minneapolis to other places."

During the same meeting, a member claimed that Rise and Resist "has struggled with embracing terminology" such as "Abolish ICE," "fascism," "fascist," and "Gestapo." She added, "look where that is now. The most mainstream pundits are using these terms. And now we’re gonna start—we’re gonna lead with: this is ethnic cleansing. Call it what it is."

ICE Watch groups have popped up across the US, in which agitators track agents and show up where they are conducting operations, attempting to impede them. Two anti-ICE agitators who have recently been fatally shot by federal authorities, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were involved in ICE Watch efforts.

The groups tend to organize on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform. FBi Director Kash Patel has said that his bureau has opened an investigation into anti-ICE Signal chat networks in Minnesota after a reporter. Some reports have indicated that officials in the Minnesota government were also involved in the Signal chats.