ICE Abducts Disney Cruise Staff Right Off of Ship in Horrific Raid |
ICE Abducts Disney Cruise Staff Right Off of Ship in Horrific Raid
At least 10 staffers were detained, some of whom were zip-tied as they were led off the boat.
Disney likes to say it makes dreams come true, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement is making life a nightmare for its workers.
At least 10 crewmembers aboard a Disney Magic cruise were detained by ICE after the ship docked in San Diego late last month, according to immigrant rights groups. The federal agents “stormed onto the vessel” following the five-day trip, wrote The Independent on Wednesday.
While disembarking the ship with her family, passenger Dharmi Mehta said she was stunned to see the ship’s head waiter led away with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
“We got to know him fairly well,” she said at a news conference Tuesday. “He had actually been serving us probably 45 minutes to an hour before he was in restraints.”
Mehta witnessed crewmembers being taken into custody while still wearing Disney uniforms and without their belongings. She said the head waiter had told her he had two daughters, and he was excited to see them once ashore. She called the experience “disheartening and unsettling,” and expressed concern about what would happen to the staff.
The harbor police department told a local NBC outlet it had no part in the raid.
Two days after the raid on the Disney cruise, immigrant rights groups said four crewmembers aboard the MV Zandaam, operated by Holland America, were captured by ICE.
“This is not an isolated incident,” Benjamin Prado of the advocacy group Unión del Barrio said at the Tuesday news conference. “It has become a growing pattern, not only here in San Diego, but throughout this country.”
Prado alleged that the crewmembers were being denied due process and access to their national consulates, crimes the Trump administration has been accused of before.
ICE has alleged the detained individuals are suspected of serious crimes. On Wednesday, spokesperson Sandra Grisolia sent CBS the following:
“HSI San Diego arrested twenty-three crewmembers from multiple cruise ships at the Port of San Diego as part of Operation Tidal Wave. The arrests targeted individuals suspected of involvement with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), based on information received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The arrestees were transported to Los Angeles for processing, and their visas were revoked.”
Iran Can Survive Blockade Way Longer Than Trump Insists
Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted Iran is on the brink of collapse.
An analysis from the CIA has seriously undermined President Donald Trump’s claims about Iran’s economic resilience.
A confidential CIA analysis delivered to policymakers this week found that Iran can survive three or four months of the U.S. military’s blockade before facing more severe economic hardship, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
Iran also retains significant ballistic missile capabilities, three U.S. officials familiar with the report told the Post.
Despite weeks of bombing by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran still has 70 percent of its prewar stockpile of missiles and 75 percent of its mobile launchers, one official said. Iran has also been able to recover its underground storage facilities, repair damaged missiles, and assemble new ones.
The analysis suggests that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for another 90 to 120 days, casting serious doubt on Trump’s repeated claims about Iran’s supposedly crashing economy.
“They’re failing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday. “They’re currency is worthless, their inflation is probably 150 percent, the real number is 150 percent, they aren’t paying their soldiers, they can’t pay their soldiers, their money is worthless.”
In fact, Trump has been claiming Iran’s economy is in shambles for weeks. “I think Iran is in very bad shape. I think they’re pretty desperate,” he said last month, a week after the blockade was first installed.
The White House has touted the combination of the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports and the so-called Operation Economic Fury, a series of sanctions on Iran, as rendering serious damage to the country’s economic situation.
But “it’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one person familiar with the CIA’s analysis said of Iran’s economic situation. Tehran has been storing its oil on tanker ships that would otherwise be empty, they told the Post.
Another U.S. official suggested that Iran could extend its economic resilience even further by smuggling oil through overland routes. “There’s a belief they could begin moving some oil via rail through Central Asia,” the official told the Post.
This news comes as Trump has paused Project Freedom, the U.S. military’s plan to help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, after losing the support of Saudi Arabia.
Florida in Secret Talks With Trump on Closing “Alligator Alcatraz”
Florida says the detention center has become a gigantic money pit.
Florida is moving to close the infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in the Everglades because it has grown too expensive to operate, according to The New York Times.
The embattled facility—which has cost the state of Florida $1 million a day to run—has been beset with allegations of unsafe living conditions, abusive treatment, and protests from Native American groups over its environmental harms. Now the facility that was framed as a huge success by President Trump and Governor DeSantis may collapse in failure.
Homeland Security officials have also deemed the facility too costly to keep running, according to a federal official who spoke with the Times, although no official decisions to close it have been made.
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