Is Argentina creating its own version of the US immigration agency ICE? |
When María left her house on the morning of January 22, she thought something serious had happened.
Two blocks away from her home, in Villa Celina, a town in the La Matanza district, in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, she saw streets lined with police vehicles surrounding the local market.
“There were about 20 trucks, and over 100 police officers. The officers, who were armed, were carrying small devices and demanding that people place their thumbs on the device to check their fingerprints,” she told the Herald.
“All the people who were stopped by the police were dark-skinned,” recalled the teacher, who works at a school nearby. Villa Celina is home to a large Bolivian community, and María believes many of those being stopped were migrants from the neighboring country.
She said some people were placed in one of the trucks and driven away, something that reminded her of “dictatorship-era raids”.
What María witnessed was a different type of raid: for starters it was legal, as opposed to the clandestine operations carried out in the 1970s. But the objective was also new. This raid was not aimed at finding so-called subversives, but rather a group of people who seem to have become the latest target of the Milei government: undocumented immigrants.
Just days after it took place, Argentina’s new security minister boasted that the country has either expelled or denied entry to “a record number” of foreigners.
The raid took place the same week nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by United States Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, while he was protesting against the forced deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. He was the second person killed in protests in that city in just over two weeks.
Despite the controversy these deaths have caused, far from downplaying the operation, the Argentine Federal Police (PFA, in Spanish) posted a video of the raid on social media.
“In Villa Celina, we conducted a community outreach operation in conjunction with the National Directorate of Migration, utilizing portable biometric equipment (MorphoRapID) for the rapid identification of individuals, thus strengthening federal crime prevention efforts,” it said.
Shortly before this story was published, the New York Times reported that the Milei administration was in advanced talks with the Trump........