Immigrants

 amNY -  An amNewYork article reporting on ICE intimidating the press sparked outrage from the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and prompted the organization to send letters to federal authorities and the Mayor’s office.

On June 26, amNewYork reported on federal agents using intimidation tactics inside 290 Broadway as photojournalists documented ICE detainments. The report detailed threats made against media members observing agents arresting immigrants. Agents also photographed reporters’ city-issued press credentials and sought to prohibit photographers from accessing public areas.

In one incident, not disclosed in the original coverage, two masked agents surrounded an amNewYork reporter and took a mocking selfie before laughing to themselves.

In response, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an American non-profit organization founded in 2012 to fund and support free speech and freedom of the press, along with a slew of press rights organizations — such the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, and more — compiled several letters to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and Federal Protective Services asking them to address the intimidation tactics.

New Republic -  On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded the private company Acquisition Logistics a contract to build the largest immigrant detention facility in the United States—giving $1.26 billion, as Bloomberg reported this week, to a Virginia-based company that “doesn’t appear to have any experience with detention.” The proposed camp, meant to hold 5,000 people in tents adjacent to an airstrip, sounds more similar to the new ICE concentration camp in the Florida Everglades than to most other existing ICE detention facilities. With such facilities, dangerously inadequate and quickly erected, ICE is entering a new phase of rapid mass detention.