While protests continue in Los Angeles and across the country, immigrants and their families in Sacramento are being tortured by false social media posts about seeing ICE officers.
Now, volunteers with NorCal Resist are trying to stop it. They want people to call them before they accept everything they read.
A sighting on Tuesday made workers at a Home Depot in South Sacramento run for cover, but the report was not confirmed.
We always come here to find work, and I’ve lived here for a long time. “But the situation in Los Angeles has been too much for us to handle,” the foreign worker said.
He hopes he can keep working without any problems, but he says things are tough now that he’s seen a lot of posts on social media alerting people to ICE sightings in Sacramento.
It’s said in some posts that there was an ICE raid on Tuesday at 47th and Franklin.
Social media posts saying there was an ICE checkpoint or raid in the community have been very common, but they haven’t been confirmed and are usually totally false, according to NorCal Resist volunteer Giselle Garcia.
People can call the Migra Watch hotline to report suspicious ICE behavior; her group runs it.
She says that they got about 100 calls and various reports for the same place on Tuesday alone, and they went to about 45 different places. Not one could be confirmed.
Garcia thinks that people are taking advantage of the current political climate to make money since immigration is a hot subject.
“It’s been a while since we set off this alarm, right? This is, however, being used by some to get more fans and clicks, and we know this for sure because we’ve reached out to social media users and pages that regularly post false information, “said Garcia.
She says these kinds of posts are still being made even though NorCal Resist has asked them to be taken down. People are afraid to leave their homes or take their kids to school because of what they’re doing.
There were workers near Home Depot who ran away because they thought ICE was stopping by.
“One never knows when something that we don’t want to happen is going to happen,” said a worker.
He says the number of workers has dropped quickly from about fifty to twenty.
Garcia says this isn’t just a problem for Latinos and that their group helps people from all over the world.
It’s really a worldwide problem. In fact, Sacramento is one of the most diverse towns in the country because of integration. “As a community, Sacramento, northern California, and all of California should be so grateful for that diversity,” Garcia said.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office stated that yesterday they were called to a regular trespassing call near one of the places where people said they saw ICE. But a spokesperson for them says that by law, they can’t help with immigration enforcement with ICE or any other organization.
A group called NorCal Resist says they need more workers for their Migra Watch and immigration court accompaniment programs because they are helping more people.
Your rights can be taught at a school for both. If you go to the NorCal Resist Facebook page, you can see their plan.
