Personnel from the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who were deployed within Washington, D.C., will be withdrawn and return to their normal duties, officials told the Daily Beast on Monday.
The timetable for demobilization of all the unidentified police auxiliaries is still unclear, as CBP and ICE are only two components of a force that protected federal buildings during the demonstrations against the death of George Floyd in police custody.
CBP was the largest of the 1,300-strong force, with 400 personnel deployed, while 160 ICE officers were involved, according to Yahoo News.
The deployment of these forces, who neither wore visible insignia nor identified their authorities under which they operated, was controversial. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, for example, wrote a letter to President Donald Trump requesting "unidentified federal personnel" be withdrawn due to their continued presence posing "both safety and national security risks."
Lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University added the forces "violate the First Amendment because they are designed to chill protected expression and assembly and will have the direct and foreseeable effect of doing so, and because they lack any justification."
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., had also introduced legislation to ban the maneuver, saying in a statement the U.S. "would normally condemn this tactic if used by dictators of other countries, and its use here directly threatens our democracy."
The withdrawal comes after the White House started removing National Guard from the area in an action expected to be completed by Wednesday, as well as a Pentagon order to demobilize an active-duty military force put on standby outside the city, the Beast reported.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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