The practices deployed by federal immigration officers to implement President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, such as making arrests at immigration proceedings and agents wearing masks and plain clothes, have come under scrutiny and raised due process concerns. Now, a new tactic has come to light: smashing car windows.
An investigation by ProPublica has revealed nearly 50 instances of officers shattering windows while conducting immigration-related arrests in the last six months. Although not comprehensive and hard to verify without government statistics, only eight occurrences were found in the decade preceding Trump's return to office. The uptick in window destruction coincides with growing uneasiness around how federal agents conduct themselves—and how aggressive behavior may even be rewarded within the Trump administration.
"There's been an emphasis placed on speed and numbers that did not exist before," Deborah Fleischaker, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief of staff under Joe Biden, told ProPublica. The Trump administration increased the immigration arrest quota from 1,000 to 3,000 arrests per day in May.
