'Happy hunting!' Immigration agents swapped cheery messages about raids, records reveal
US immigration officials planning countrywide raids targeting thousands of undocumented immigrants wrote cheerful messages about the potential arrests, wishing one another Happy hunting!, jokingly calling the initiative Operation Super Epic Mega, and saying the work was fun, records show.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) documents released Wednesday show how officials at the agency prepared for a set of coordinated raids in 2017 that aimed to detain more than 8,000 people for deportation. The agency officially called it Operation Mega and officials boasted in the documents that it would be the largest operation of its kind in the history of ICE, targeting all aliens who are present in the United States in violation of the [law]. Some documents also suggested field offices might have had specific arrest quotas.
The records, obtained by the immigrant rights groups Mijente and Detention Watch Network, were released the same week that the not-for-profit news organization ProPublica uncovered a secret Facebook group where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers posted racist, misogynistic and violent content about immigrants and Democratic members of Congress.
And their release comes as Donald Trump renewed his threat of fresh Ice raids, after calling off a coordinated action targeting undocumented immigrants across the country in late June.
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