Amnesty International calls for the dissolution of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency

Amnesty International has called for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency tasked with enforcing President Donald Trump’s strict anti-immigrant measures, according to a report published on Thursday.

The human rights organization stated that the report, titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns,” documents human rights violations during the large-scale operations carried out by the agency.

The report was released less than a week after Venezuelan migrant Wilber Garcés Pérez was shot by an agency officer in Austin, Texas, reigniting anger in the United States over the tactics used by immigration authorities.

In January, the killing of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 years old, by federal officers in Minneapolis sparked a wave of outrage across the country.

Nadia Dar, Amnesty International’s U.S. director, warned in the report that “masked and armed federal officers attacking people in the streets without accountability does not make our communities safer; it puts everyone at risk.”

The organization explained that the report is based on more than 150 testimonies collected between March and June in four major cities where the agency has intensified its activities.

Dar wrote that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suffers from a fundamental flaw and cannot be fixed,” and that “for the U.S. government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and international standards, this agency must be abolished and a new one started from scratch.”

The organization noted that its research shows the Trump administration is “implementing a system of mass detention and deportation fueled by racist, xenophobic, and misleading rhetoric, with the aim of detaining and deporting as many migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees as possible from the United States.”

Neither U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to a request for comment.