Crowd Confronts ICE Officers Inside a Fairview, New Jersey Grocery Store, Shouting 'You Do Not Have a Judicial Warrant'; One Man Taken Away
On November 6, inside the Selectos Mini Market grocery store in Fairview, Bergen County, New Jersey, a crowd of residents surrounded federal immigration officers who had entered the store, shouting 'You do not have a judicial warrant' and 'Get out of here' and demanding that they leave. The footage was filmed and posted by the New Jersey community group Estamos Unidos NJ, and Al Jazeera reported the incident on November 10.
The video shows several masked officers wearing tactical vests marked 'POLICE ICE' and 'ERO' moving between the store's shelves as residents followed and challenged them. According to Univision New York, witness Erick Ruano said the officers had been chasing a man who had just got off a bus; the man ran into the store on Anderson Avenue to hide, the officers followed him in, and in the process a refrigerator window in the store was broken and products were knocked to the floor, as described by the witness. In the end, one man was escorted out of the store and taken to a gray SUV; his identity and the reason he was taken have not been officially confirmed.
The confrontation turned on the question of judicial warrants: immigration officers may make arrests in public areas under an administrative warrant, but an administrative warrant by itself does not authorize them to enter a business's nonpublic areas without consent; entering such areas generally requires a warrant signed by a judge. The video set off heated debate on social media over immigration enforcement tactics. No public statement from ICE on the operation had been issued as of publication.
Source: Al Jazeera
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：ICE 执法与递解行动局（ERO）人员执行逮捕行动（资料图，非本次事件现场）。照片：美国移民与海关执法局，公共领域，经维基共享资源。 / Photo: ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers during an arrest operation (file photo, not the Fairview incident). Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
