The white racists of this country are so desperate at "cleaning out" the country of its brown citizens that they - in the form of the ICE-Gestapo police - are brazenly defying very basic laws. This is not a police force anymore, this is a state-sponsored terrorist organization whose aim is to terrorize innocent people under the pretense of searching for "illegals". Never thought I'd see scenes like this. But they are happening right here in America.
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American Police Have Turned Away From This Terrifying, Chaotic Practice. ICE Is Embracing It.
Dana Bazelon
Thu, July 24, 2025
Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has kicked into high gear, employing a set of extreme methods in an attempt to reach Stephen Miller’s unrealistic deportation quotas. Many Americans have watched in horror as masked ICE agents, sometimes accompanied by other federal agents and even local police, have appeared on their television screens, looking for and detaining immigrants in their homes, in their workplaces, and on the street.
Sometimes, small gangs of law enforcement appear in military gear and masks, resembling military police. Sometimes, a mix of federal agents and local police deploy in large groups to conduct workplace raids, in a strange hodgepodge of uniforms. In other instances, officers have confronted immigrants as they leave court or show up to renew their work permits, then take them away.
But the law enforcement strategy that may have garnered the most shock among members of the public is the jump-out squad: small tactical teams of armed officers not in uniform who jump out of unmarked cars and grab immigrants off the street with no warning, or pull immigrants over and surround their cars, suddenly, before taking them away. Described by advocates for detainees as “brazen, midday kidnappings,” jump-out squads use a combination of surprise, terror, and overwhelming force. When they stop individuals with no reasonable suspicion, they act in violation of federal law, and a court in California has enjoined this practice.
But if this particular technique—jumping out on potential suspects, searching them, and taking them away—seems entirely foreign, it should not. Nor should the overt racial profiling that always accompanies these sorts of methods. Many urban police departments—including those in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, and Washington—have used jump-out tactics as a means of crime prevention. And those are just the ones we know about.
Police jump-out squads drive around in unmarked cars, looking for people who they believe are breaking the law. Although they rarely mask, they are still difficult to identify because they don’t wear uniforms or show their badges. Like the ICE squads, they deploy overwhelming force and the element of surprise to intercept criminal activity and find people carrying illegal guns. Jump-out squads have become more taboo in the past several years because the confrontations they instigate have proved so dangerous for the people they stop: These tactical teams can spiral out of control, leading to deadly consequences. They have been responsible for countless acts of excessive force, some of which have resulted in tragedy. The SCORPION squad that killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis was a jump-out squad, as was the task force that killed 12-year-old TJ Siderio in Philadelphia.
These squads often cultivate a kind of vigilante ethos among their officers. Their members frequently work outside the typical chain of police command, reporting directly to the brass. Often, the units intentionally recruit aggressive officers and fail to properly train them on the Fourth Amendment. A group of police officers in L.A., calling themselves the Jump Out Boys, described their work this way: “Jump out boys are alpha dogs, who think and act like the wolf. … They understand when the line needs to be crossed and crossed back. They need to work hard, they need to get guns, they need to take people to jail, and sometimes they need to do things they don’t want to do.”
Over the past 30 years, jump-out squads were used first as a tool to break up the drug trade (in Seasons 1 and 3 of The Wire, Baltimore police deploy a ragtag such squad), then, more recently, during a spike in violence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, when urban police departments attempted to bring down the rate of gun violence by seizing illegal firearms. In the summer of 2020, 18 years after the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, New York City finally disbanded its infamous anti-crime unit, which frequently used aggressive jump-out tactics, but Mayor Eric Adams brought back a “modified plainclothes anti-gun unit” just a few weeks after taking office in 2022.
On the night of March 1, 2022, four police officers in Philadelphia’s South task force, a plainclothes jump-out squad tasked with finding illegal guns, jumped out on the 12-year-old Siderio and another juvenile from an unmarked police car. But Siderio, only a child, had a gun, and he fired at the car as it pulled up to him, shattering the back windshield. Glass flew into one officer’s eyes, and two others chased after Siderio, who tossed his gun and took off running. Seconds later, the child fell to his knees, his arms in the air. Officer Edsaul Mendoza shot Siderio in the back of the head from 10 feet away as the child knelt behind a car with his hands up. Mendoza later pleaded guilty to murder and is now serving eight to 20 years in prison.
Nine months later, members of the SCORPION unit in Memphis stopped Tyre Nichols for running a red light. Multiple cars surrounded Nichols as several officers approached him, pulling him from his car before pepper-spraying and tasing him. When Nichols tried to run away, they gave chase, beating him nearly to death as he lay defenseless, crying for his mother. He died from his injuries in the hospital several days later.
What quickly became clear in the wake of the deaths of Siderio and Nichols was that elite units in both Philadelphia and Memphis had made a practice of jumping out on people, creating terrifying and chaotic conditions in the parts of these cities where they operated. Nichols’ killing capped off a 14-month reign of terror in parts of Memphis where the 40 members of the elite SCORPION unit had made it a practice to jump out on mostly Black men in “high-crime” neighborhoods. The stops they made either were baseless or stemmed from minor traffic violations, but they frequently escalated to violent and excessive uses of force. Both the SCORPION unit and the South task force used a range of methods to identify their targets, including surveillance and trawling the internet for people they believed to be armed and dangerous. Then, they would pull the person over, quickly boxing in his car, or pull up next to him on the street and jump out, instigating a confrontation that often led to violence, particularly when targets ran away in terror. In Memphis, this scenario was so common it had a name: the running tax.
The squads in Memphis and Philadelphia were eventually disbanded, but they are still used in other cities. These days, it can be difficult to tell how and when police departments deploy them because, unlike ICE, they typically do not advertise it. They may even try to cover it up. A year and a half after the death of Nichols made national headlines, an 18-year veteran of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department went public after her supervisors ignored her reports that D.C. officers were using jump-out squads, despite the fact that the department had banned them. She claimed she had made 20 complaints to her supervisors involving young officers “jumping out on guys that are just standing there not doing anything,” but the department had ignored the problem.
However, while most departments downplay their use of these aggressive and dangerous tactics, ICE seems to be celebrating them. The terror they invoke is intentional—a feature rather than a bug. The agency’s brazen violation of public norms and laws in the light of day, in front of cameras, makes these squads different, and scarier. These are not quasi-secretive squads of police officers acting on the margins but a federally orchestrated terror campaign targeting immigrants. The common use of masks lends a military feel to these raids, a physical demonstration of the drifting of federal law enforcement away from democratic controls. ICE is playing for the crowd rather than hiding from it, in the hopes that if it can invoke enough fear, those people who are here without legal status will self-deport. Either that or ICE will make them disappear.
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