Amnesty International Calls for ICE Abolition for the First Time, Citing Killings in Chicago and Minneapolis

Amnesty International issued a call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on September 24, 2026 — the first time the organization has taken that position — in a report titled “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns: Human Rights Violations in U.S. Immigration Enforcement Operations and the Case to Abolish ICE.” The report documents alleged human rights violations in federal immigration enforcement operations in Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., based on interviews with 154 people directly affected between March and June 2026. It documents racially discriminatory enforcement, unjustified use of force, unlawful killings, repression of protest through tear gas and pepper spray, unlawful surveillance, and inhumane detention conditions — naming the killings of Silverio Villegas González during Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” and of Alex Pretti and Renee Good during Minneapolis’s “Operation Metro Surge.”

All three named killings are already independently documented in the corpus: Villegas González’s death was ruled a homicide by Cook County after bodycam footage contradicted DHS’s account (2025-09-12–silverio-villegas-gonzalez-killed-franklin-park-homicide-ruling); Pretti and Good were separately named by 154 Episcopal bishops as victims of state-sanctioned violence (2026-01-31–episcopal-bishops-letter-good-pretti-state-violence); and federal investigators blocked Minnesota’s own state investigators from evidence in the Pretti case (2026-02-16–fbi-denies-minnesota-bca-evidence-pretti-case). Amnesty’s report is significant less for new facts than for institutional position: a mainstream international human rights organization moving from documenting individual abuses to calling for the agency’s abolition marks an escalation in institutional posture that the corpus has tracked building since the January bishops’ letter.