Amnesty International: ICE must be disbanded

Human rights violations

Amnesty International: ICE must be disbanded

Fatal shots, degrading treatment, arbitrary arrests: Amnesty accuses the US immigration authorities of serious violations of human rights – and calls for the abolition of ICE.

The human rights organization Amnesty International demands the USA to disband the controversial immigration agency ICE. The demand is based on a report published by Amnesty on Thursday that shows an increase in human rights violations by ICE since the second administration of President took office Donald Trump documented in January 2025.

Trump’s policies are aimed at mass detention and deportation of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, according to the report, and are “implemented in deliberately cruel and harmful ways” to incite fear. “Human rights violations by ICE already existed before Donald Trump took office. Our report shows that these abuses have been taking place systematically and on a completely new scale since 2025 and are shaped by racist narratives,” says Julia Durchrow, Secretary General of Amnesty International in Germany.

For the report, Amnesty examined the four large-scale ICE operations in ChicagoMinneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans and WashingtonDC The organization documented “remarkably consistent patterns” and spoke of “racially discriminatory immigration enforcement practices.” Accordingly, masked and heavily armed officers from ICE and other federal agencies often travel without identification and arbitrarily arrest migrants, asylum seekers and refugees based on skin color or accent. US citizens and members of indigenous peoples are also affected.

Amnesty documented killings by federal officials, such as the fatal shooting of two Americans in the state of Minnesota earlier this year. In recent months, there have been deadly operations in Houston and the state of Maine. Just at the beginning of the week, ICE officers shot and killed a man in the Texas city of Austin.

Other documented human rights abuses include illegal solitary confinement, possible cases of enforced disappearance, degrading treatment, the suppression of protests, and inhumane prison conditions that “must be investigated as torture.”

The “repeated occurrence of these practices” in four different locations shows “that the human rights violations were neither isolated cases nor exceptions.” Rather, they are characteristic of ICE. This cannot be remedied through “selective reforms” such as training, revised operational guidelines or disciplinary measures against officers. Amnesty is therefore calling for the “fundamental institutional dismantling” of the immigration authority in order to bring the US immigration system “in line with its international human rights obligations”.

Deporting undocumented people in the United States is a priority of the current administration. There have long been loud protests in the USA against the authorities’ sometimes brutal actions.