Shattering Norms: Federal Immigration Agents Aren't Afraid to Smash Your Car Window
Immigration officers are using more forceful tactics to keep up with the Trump administration’s mass deportation goals.
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.
The instances compiled by ProPublica provide accounts of immigration officers smashing car windows—sometimes multiple—with various tools, including batons and sledgehammers, to unlock and open vehicle doors. "At least 10 people have said they were injured this year during broken-windows arrests," reported ProPublica. One 49-year-old woman described being pulled through the window that an ICE agent had broken, causing jagged cuts on her forearms.
American citizens have also been implicated during these forceful arrests. In a since-deleted Facebook Live video, agents pulled over Jennifer Gribben, a U.S. citizen, and her boyfriend Martin Rivera (ProPublica did not note his citizenship status), and told them they were looking for a fugitive named Garcia. Officers then smashed the car's window to arrest them. Gribben said in a Facebook post that she was hit in the head by officers and that Rivera suffered a broken arm. She was later charged with resisting arrest and third-degree assault, to which she pleaded not guilty.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended immigration officers' authority to break car windows when their commands aren't followed in a statement to ProPublica. She said that agents are trained "to use the minimum amount of force necessary."
In some instances, officers who smashed windows have been rewarded. Matthew Elliston, ICE's former Baltimore field office director, was promoted to a senior position overseeing field operations in Washington, D.C., after he told WBFF FOX45, a Fox News affiliate in Baltimore, that he would "smash the fucking window out" and drag occupants out who refused to comply with his commands.
Vehicles have fewer constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment than a home—a fact often exploited by law enforcement. During a stop, occupants who refuse an officer's lawful command to exit the car may be viewed as obstructing or resisting. And while the Fourth Amendment limits how much and when an officer can use "objectively reasonable" force to gain compliance or custody, the standard is difficult to apply. The standard—which must be judged "from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight," according to the Supreme Court's ruling in Graham v. Connor (1989)—provides law enforcement with a large degree of deference to use force.
While the tactic of shattering car windows isn't prohibited, it also isn't explicitly mentioned in the DHS' use-of-force guidelines. Training instructors and students told ProPublica the tactic wasn't covered during training either. In the guidelines, the Court's objective reasonable standard laid out in Graham is referenced, along with the department's principles of de-escalation to "minimize the risk of unintended injury or serious property damage" and warnings to "afford the subject a reasonable opportunity to voluntarily comply before applying force." But some accounts claim immigration officers have given vehicle occupants very little time to respond to commands before applying force. A video recording of an arrest in Florida revealed officers pulling occupants out of a van almost immediately after an one answered that he was undocumented, bragging about having used a stun gun to detain one of them, and celebrating the possibility of earning a $30,000 bonus.
Until now, law enforcement officers have chosen to limit window breaking based on a cultural norm rather than a hard and fast rule or prohibition, but that is changing under the Trump administration.
