Regardless of whether you’re living in the United States lawfully or not, ICE doesn’t seem to care if your skin color ‘looks deportable.’ 54-year-old US citizen Julio Noriega learned this awful truth when he was walking out of a Jiffy Lube in Illinois when agents suddenly approached and handcuffed him before driving him off in a shady van to be detained. “I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in a statement, per WBEZ. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”
The shocking bit of Julio Noriega’s arrest was that the ICE agents didn’t bother to ask or check the Chicago resident’s citizenship. It wasn’t until after they detained him for almost half a day that they checked his ID in his confiscated wallet. After realizing he wasn’t legally deportable, they released him without any compensation or paperwork. Needless to say, ICE was 100% in the wrong here since Noriega is a US citizen and can’t be arrested without a warrant. That said, it is more than evident that the Illinois resident was apprehended for no reason but his skin color and appearance. Absolutely disgraceful.
“Can we rewrite the headline to “ICE kidnaps US citizen because they don’t care about following the law,” states a commenter. And they’d be totally right, seeing how the agents seem to act above the law without any consequences for their actions. A top commenter on a Reddit post about Noriega’s arrest remarks, “ICE has already been detaining citizens during raids, but grabbing random people off the streets based on looks is a new low that must not be normalized.” Unfortunately, people being snatched off the street in a dystopian manner is quite a common story that appears on the news these days, such as the international student at Tufts University.
“It is basically Germany in the 1930s and various NSDAP agents and come-bys “just doing their job,'” comments a Redditor. “‘Looking Mexican’ is nowhere near the standard for reasonable cause for arrest,” protests another. “It’s never been about citizenship, it’s about skin color,” chimes in a third. “They’ve gone after a number of citizens including Puerto Rican veterans, native Americans and so on.” Legal or not, these sorts of arrests won’t stop until the corrupt people in power are relieved of their positions.
