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For Immediate Release
December, 15 2020, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Rachel Cohen, Immigrant Defense Project, 917-370-8464, rachel@immdefense.org
Jen Nessel, Center for Constitutional Rights, (212) 614-6449, jnessel@ccrjustice.org
Immigrant Rights Attorneys Sue DHS and ICE for Information on Terror Tactics Used in Arrests
ICE’s Operation Palladium Sparked Wave of "Supercharged Arrest Operation[s]" in Sanctuary Cities.
WASHINGTON
The Immigrant Defense Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to demand access to arrest records and related information for a wave of ICE raids in sanctuary cities across the U.S. this year.
The lawsuit seeks to compel both government agencies to release policy guidances, memos, and trainings as well as records regarding the process ICE uses to determine "targets" pertaining to "Operation Palladium," an aggressive immigration surveillance and policing initiative that advocates say has dramatically increased the use of force and other aggressive tactics by ICE since it began in early 2020. ICE and DHS refused to release information on the program in response to an urgent FOIA request, filed in June 2020, over concerns about the program. The lawsuit filed today seeks a court order to immediately release the requested documents.
"Since this administration came to power almost four years ago, they have made it a priority to attack and try to destroy immigrant communities," said IDP Interim Executive Director Mizue Aizeki. "'Operation Palladium' is clearly another bullying tactic by the federal government against cities like New York due to policies that protect immigrants. In February and March of this year, ICE policing in NYC included not only intensive surveillance of immigrants and their loved ones but also an escalation in violent tactics by ICE. This included ICE agents shooting a witness during a raid, and brandishing an assault rifle in the street and inside an apartment building. We filed the FOIA to shed light on how DHS and ICE policing tactics threaten safety and stability in our cities. As the public, we have a right to know this information to protect our communities."
"Operation Palladium" was implemented in "sanctuary" cities across the country in February 2020. As part of the operation, the Trump administration has deployed Customs and Border Protection agents - including officers from BORTAC, a militarized unit normally deployed at the southern U.S. border - in cities to support ICE in their surveillance and arrest of immigrants. The New York Times described Operation Palladium as a "supercharged arrest operation," and today's lawsuit alleges it has led to a drastic increase in the extent and aggression of ICE arrest practices - including the shooting of a bystander during an ICE arrest in February. Attorneys say the program was coupled with the Trump administration's use of DHS personnel and technology to surveil the Movement for Black Lives protests in many cities.
In the first 11 weeks of 2020, Immigrant Defense Project has reported a 400 percent increase in the number of sightings of ICE agents and of arrests as compared to what was reported in the last 11 weeks of 2019, and since the beginning of this year, thousands of immigrants have been arrested by ICE at their homes, on the street, and at their workplaces. This escalation of immigration policing has continued despite the global COVID-19 pandemic and the dangers it poses to people that ICE refuses to release from jails and detention centers despite the rapid spread of COVID at these facilities. IDP and the Center for Constitutional Rights say that information about the policies, procedures, and data regarding Operation Palladium is of vital public interest, given concerns about privacy and other constitutional rights, as well ongoing debates about funding for DHS and ICE.
"ICE and DHS have refused to produce even one document regarding their surveillance and enforcement tactics and policies," said Ian Head, coordinator of the Center for Constitutional Rights' Open Records Project. "It should not take a court order to force federal agencies to meet their obligations under FOIA, particularly on topics of urgent importance to the public."
For more information, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights' case page.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCR is committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
(212) 614-6464LATEST NEWS
50,000 March in Brazil to Celebrate Death of Fossil Fuel Industry at COP30
"It is time to put these old fuels where they belong—in the ground of history.”
Nov 16, 2025
An estimated 50,000 people took to the streets of Belém do Pará, Brazil on Saturday to demonstrate outside the halls of the United Nations annual climate summit, holding a "Great People's March" and makeshift "Funeral for Fossil Fuels" as they demanded a just transition toward a more renewable energy system and egalitarian economy.
Organized by civil society organizations and Indigenous Peoples groups from Brazil and beyond, the tens of thousands who marched outside the thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP30) summit called for an end to the rapacious greed of the oil, gas, and coal companies as they advocated for big polluters to pay for the large-scale damage their businesses have caused worldwide over the last century.
“We are tens of thousands here today, on the streets of Belém, to show negotiators at COP30 that this is what people power looks like," said Carolina Pasquali, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil, said as the march took hold. "Yesterday we found out that one in every 25 COP30 participants is a fossil fuel lobbyist, proportionally a 12% increase from last year’s COP. How can the climate crisis be solved while those creating it are influencing the talks and delaying decisions? The people are getting fed up–enough talking, we need action and we need it now.”
The report by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition last week showed that at least 1,600 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry are present at the conference, making it the second-largest delegation overall, second only to Brazil's, the host nation.
"It’s common sense that you cannot solve a problem by giving power to those who caused it," said Jax Bongon from the Philippines-based IBON International, a member of the coalition, in a Friday statement. "Yet three decades and 30 COPs later, more than 1,500 fossil fuel lobbyists are roaming the climate talks as if they belong here. It is infuriating to watch their influence deepen year after year, making a mockery of the process and of the communities suffering its consequences."
While the overwhelming presence of fossil fuel lobbyists has once again diminished hopes that anything worthwhile will emerge from the conference, the tens of thousands in the streets on Saturday represented the ongoing determination of the global climate movement.
João Talocchi, co-founder of Alianza Potência Energética Latin America, one of the key groups behind the "Funeral for Fossil Fuels" portion of the day's action—which included mock caskets for the oil, gas, and coal companies alongside parades of jungle animals, wind turbines, and solar panels representing what's at stake and the better path forward—noted the key leadership of Indigenous groups from across the Global South.
"From the Global South to the world, we are showing what a fair and courageous energy transition must look like," said Talochhi.
Ilan Zugman, director of 350.org in Latin America and the Caribbean, noted the significance of the demonstration, including the symbolism of the funeral procession.
"We march symbolically burying fossil fuels because they are the root of the crisis threatening our lives," explained Zugman. "Humanity already knows the way forward: clean energy, climate justice, and respect for the peoples who protect life. What is missing is political courage to break once and for all with oil, gas, and coal. It is time to put these old fuels where they belong—in the ground of history.”
With the COP30 at its midway point, climate activists warn that not nearly enough progress is being made, with the outsized influence of the fossil fuel industry one of the key reasons that governments, year after year and decade after decade, continue to drag their feet when it comes to taking the kind of aggressive actions to stem the climate crisis that scientists and experts say is necessary.
“We are taking to the streets because, while governments are not acting fast enough to make polluters pay for their climate damages at COP30, extreme weather events continue to wreak havoc across the globe," said Abdoulaye Diallo, co-head of Greenpeace International's "Make Polluters Pay" campaign. "That is why we are here, carrying the climate polluters bill, showing the projected economic damages of more than $5 trillion from the emissions of just five oil and gas companies over the last decade."
"Fossil fuel companies are destroying our planet, and people are paying the price," said Diallo. "Negotiators must wake up to the growing public and political pressure to make polluters pay, and agree to new polluter taxes in the final COP30 outcome."
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'National Security Threat'? 95-Year-Old Human Rights Scholar Richard Falk Interrogated for Hours by Canada
"Clearly, the international repression of the Palestinian cause knows no bounds."
Nov 15, 2025
Ninety-five-year-old Richard Falk—world renowned scholar of international law and former UN special rapporteur focused on Palestinian rights—was detained and interrogated for several hours along with his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver, as the pair entered Canada for a conference focused on that nation's complicity with Israel's genocide in Gaza.
"A security person came and said, ‘We’ve detained you both because we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada,'” Falk explained to Al-Jazeera in a Saturday interview from Ottawa in the wake of the incident that happened at the international airport in Toronto ahead of the scheduled event.
“It was my first experience of this sort–ever–in my life,” said Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author or editor of more than 20 books, and formerly the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
Falk, who is American, has been an outspoken critic of the foreign policy of Canada, the United States, and other Western nations on the subject of Israel-Palestine as well as other issues. He told media outlets that he and his wife, also an American, were held for over four hours after their arrival in Toronto. They were in the country to speak and participate at the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, an event scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Ottawa, the nation's capital.
The event, according to the program notes on the website, was designed to "document the multiple ways that Canadian entities – including government bodies, corporations, universities, charities, media, and other cultural institutions–have enabled and continue to enable the settler colonization and genocide of Palestinians, and to articulate what justice and reparations would require."
In his comments to Al-Jazeera, Falk said he believes the interrogation by the Canadian authorities—which he described as "nothing particularly aggressive" but "random" and "disorganized" in its execution—is part of a global effort by powerful nations complicit with human rights abuses and violations of international law to “punish those who endeavour to tell the truth about what is happening” in the world, including in Gaza.
Martin Shaw, a British sociologist and author of The New Age of Genocide, said the treatment of Falk and Elver should be seen as an "extraordinary development" for Canada, and not in a good way. For a nation that likes to think of itself as a "supporter of international justice," said Shaw, "to arrest the veteran scholar and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk while he is attending a Gaza tribunal. Clearly, the international repression of the Palestinian cause knows no bounds."
Canadian Senator Yuen Pau Woo, a supporter of the Palestine Tribunal, told Al-Jazeera he was “appalled” by the interrogation.
“We know they were here to attend the Palestine Tribunal. We know they have been outspoken in documenting and publicizing the horrors inflicted on Gaza by Israel, and advocating for justice,” Woo said. “If those are the factums for their detention, then it suggests that the Canadian government considers these acts of seeking justice for Palestine to be national security threats–and I’d like to know why.”
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Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner Says 'Nobody Works Hard Enough to Justify $1 Billion'
"I refuse to believe that in a state like Maine where people work as hard as we do here, that it is merely hard work that gets you that kind of success. We all know it isn't. We all know it's the structures. It's the tax code."
Nov 15, 2025
Echoing recent viral comments by music superstar Billie Eilish, Maine Democratic candidate for US Senate Graham Planter is also arguing that the existence of billionaires cannot be justified in a world where working-class people with multiple jobs still cannot afford the basic necessities of life.
In video clip posted Friday of a campaign event in the northern town of Caribou from last month, Platner rails against the "structures" of an economy in which billionaires with vast personal fortunes use their wealth to bend government—including the tax code—to conform to their interests while working people are left increasingly locked out of controlling their own destinies, both materially and politically.
"Nobody works hard enough to justify $1 billion," the military veteran and oyster farmer told potential voters at the event. "Not in a world where I know people that have three jobs and can't even afford their rent."
With audience members nodding their heads in agreement, Platner continued by saying, "I refuse to believe that in a state like Maine, where people work as hard as we do here, that it is merely hard work that gets you that kind of success. We all know it isn't. We all know it's the structures. It's the tax code. That is what allows that money to get accrued."
No one works hard enough to justify being a billionaire. pic.twitter.com/Ezvf5fPLfv
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 14, 2025
The systemic reasons that create vast inequality, Platner continued, are also why he believes that the process of the super wealthy becoming richer and richer at the expense of working people can be reversed.
"The world that we live in today," he explained, "is not organic. It is not natural. The political and economic world we have did not happen because it had to. It happened because politicians in Washington and the billionaires who write the policies that they pushed made this happen. They changed the laws, and they made it legal to accrue as much wealth and power as they have now."
The solution? "We need to make it illegal again to do that," says Platner.
The comments questioning the justification for billionaires to even exist by Platner—though made in early October—echo more recent comments that went viral when spoken by Billie Eilish, a popular musician, who told a roomful of Wall Street movers and shakers in early November that they should do a better job reflecting on their outrageous wealth.
"Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me," Eilish said during an award event in New York City. "If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties."
"If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?"
— Billie Eilish clocking billionaires.pic.twitter.com/BVpRExp1GQ
— Billie Eilish Spotify (@BillieSpotify_) October 30, 2025
While those remarks took a long spin around the internet, Eilish on Friday doubled down on uncharitable billionaires by colorfully calling Elon Musk, who could end up being the world's first trillionaire, a "fucking pathetic pussy bitch coward" for not donating more of his vast fortune, among the largest in the world, to humanitarian relief efforts.
This week, as Common Dreams reported, a coalition of economists and policy experts called for the creation of a new international body to address the global crisis of inequality.
Like Platner, the group behind the call—including economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Ha-Joon Chang, and Jayati Ghosh—emphasized the inequality-as-a-policy-choice framework. Piketty, who has called for the mass taxation of dynastic wealth as a key part of the solution to runaway inequality, said “we are at a dangerous moment in human history” with “the very essence of democracy” under threat if something is not done.
On the campaign trail in Maine, Platner has repeatedly suggested that only organized people can defeat the power of the oligarchs, which he has named as the chief enemy of working people in his state and beyond. The working class, he said at a separate rally, "have an immense amount of power, but we only have it if we're organized."
No one from above is coming to save us. It’s up to us to organize, use our immense power as the working class, and win the world we deserve. pic.twitter.com/Xm3ZIhfCJI
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 11, 2025
"No one from above is coming to save us," Platner said. "It’s up to us to organize, use our immense power as the working class, and win the world we deserve."
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