Körperkameras sind ein freihändiges Tötungswerkzeug für ICE. Eine Koalition aus fast 30 Technologie- und Justizorganisationen fordert KEINE Abstimmung über die Finanzierung des ICE-Pakets

I hadnt thought about that before, that body cams are worthless if the footage stays within DHS who clearly isnt interested in fairly investigating anything. 

We have three murders on camera and it isn’t helping

Having read the letter, the argument here is that ICE body cams are a greater threat because of surveillance than they are a check on ICE abuses.

I think that is disingenuous. Surveillance is a threat, but the surveillance is already happening via means that are completely out of the purview or control of anybody in congress. We know about ICE’s database of protestors who are now deemd „domestic terrorists,“ by the Trump Administration. I don’t think there’s anything stopping ICE from recording every interaction with protestors or during an immigration raid, as there is, they have mobile cameras and can record and can keep that data for themselves already.

Congress requiring body cams on federal agents like this is at least another opportunity for some amount of oversight that currently doesn’t exist at all. As is, DHS can reject any inquiries for footage of an ICE assassination, because they can lie — „we don’t have any footage“ — and it’s difficult to prove otherwise after a lengthy legal battle.

From the letter,

***“The murders of Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good were recorded. We do not need more video footage of ICE’s evil behavior.“***

I disagree.

There are at least two well recorded civilian executions performed by ICE, both of which occured in the last 2-3 weeks. There are probably more executions performed by ICE since January 2025, but we don’t have as much (or any) footage of them. Knowing that *there is footage of an event* makes it possible to, with enough pressure, get the footage and use it not just as evidence in court, but also to turn public opinion against this government-run terrorist organization.

Without that video footage of those executions, public sentiment would not have dropped as much as it has in just the last few weeks. The administration lies about every one of these events, they slander the victims and lie through their teeth, and without video evidence of the events, it’s hard to combat the Trump Administrations slanderous lies. I think that the risk of greater surveillance is balanced by the benefit that video evidence can provide in getting ICE out of our communities. What we also don’t have as much footage of is the *routine* or even is „successful“ enforcement by ICE, the things that don’t come out in public. I liken that to the Abu Ghraib footage from the war on terror. There was some evidence that the US was committing war crimes by torturing alleged terrorists in the middle east, but there wasn’t a tremendous public outcry, there was plausible deniability and the Bush Administration might have had some evidence of it, but because the programs were deemed successful, they weren’t going to release the details about it. And then the photos were leaked/posted of the Abu Ghraib torture and put a huge maginifying glass on what the US was doing oversees, and then there was more demand for disclosure from the government, which came slowly but did influence public opinion on the wars. We really only have footage of the most grievous actions by ICE, them breaking into people’s homes, terrorizing communities, murdering Americans in cold blood, abducting children, we don’t have any video of what they consider a „successful raid,“ which the public would think very differently about if we knew that there was reliable footage somewhere and it could be subpoened.

Most police shootings don’t have people standing around filming the interaction. Before body cameras there was commonly no video footage at all of police shootings. Adding body cameras to police departments was seen as a major civil rights win just a few years ago. And now you want to get rid of them?

Would you rather have body cameras…or not have them? Yes, there’s sometimes shenanigans about releasing the footage, but I can’t count the number of times the public is able to get a better understanding of a police shooting because the body camera footage exists.

This is some dumb shit right here. Surveillance is already ubiquitous. The footage is stored by policy and discoverable in court later. There is no world in which placing ICE under LESS surveillance is a good thing.

This is what a government official was always meant to be. Bravo for standing up for the people.

Body cams should live stream to publicly managed servers.