Whether it’s climate change, guns, healthcare, a woman’s right over her body, poisoning our air and water, or rounding up hardworking landscapers and shoving them in alligator-protected detention camps, these bloodthirsty ghouls have proven to the world time and time again they aren’t interested in preventing catastrophes, they are interested in causing them.
And with ICE set for a huge infusion of funds, and agents, everyday society will have a Gestapo feel to it….
Meet the new national police force
The agency of mask-wearing officers who aren’t afraid to smash windows,
detain lawmakers and pluck nonviolent undocumented immigrants off the street is about to become the best-funded federal police force.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already been acting with impunity during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Get used to ICE
Video of agents on horseback and in armored personnel vehicles in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles is striking both for its demonstration of militarized power and for the total inability of the city’s Mayor Karen Bass to do anything about it.
“They need to leave and they need to leave right now,” she told reporters on the scene Monday.
But Trump administration officials feel no need to listen to local authorities in a city like Los Angeles.
“Better get used to us now, because this going to be normal very soon,” El Centro Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News on Monday, responding to Bass.
That new normal may come as a shock to Americans unused to a federal national police force operating inside the country.
The
megabill Trump signed last week will elevate ICE in the American consciousness and on American streets.
A new part of American life
With all that money and the OK to hire new agents, ICE will become even more visible.
“Most people in the United States are going to experience immigration enforcement for the first time in their lives,” predicted David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
The spectacle will be the point
The future Bier foresees looks like this:
“US citizens being interrogated on the streets about their citizenships; ICE agents in apartment buildings knocking down doors; National Guard troops on the streets blocking traffic. At your workplace, your home, your neighborhood, your park, in a very visible way and intentionally so,” he said.
Making raids and actions as visible as possible may be designed to scare immigrants out of the country and deter anyone who might otherwise come.
Bier also anticipates a “mad dash to spend all of this money in the next three years,” before the next presidential election….
ICE agents operate outside of the normal judicial system
Immigration enforcement is not criminal law enforcement, which means agents don’t have to adhere to the standards of FBI agents or local law enforcement.
“You get an agency which is primarily oriented at non-citizens, but also authorized to arrest citizens at the same time for certain violations of law,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
ICE agents have also operated intentionally in anonymity, an adjustment for anyone who expects law enforcement to identify themselves.
The masks frequently worn by agents make ICE seem like the type of secret police that operates in authoritarian regimes. But they are apparently meant to protect agents from doxxing.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, and their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” said ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons during a
press conference in Boston in June.
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The fascist look and feel will seem un-American to the extreme. Trump created “the other” the day he descended the escalator in Trump Tower, in 2015, and identified rapists and murderers entering our country. Prisons and insane asylums emptied out, all over the world, and sent to the United States.
A fascist government must create “the other”. Trump understood that; he knew he could rally the anger and hatred that would turn to him for a solution, if he created “the other” . He would become “the only person who can solve our problems”, by identifying the “scapegoats” for all of society’s ills. Hitler rounded up Jews. Trump rounds up immigrants, most guilty of just being undocumented, and seeking a better life. Doesn’t matter to fascists like Trump, Miller, Holman. Immigrants are “the other”, and sadly, there are enough citizens in our country who are 100% blind to what this is doing to our nation, to our self image, to how the world regards us. And, sadder still by a country mile, there are millions of Americans who enjoy fascistic punishment of “the other”.
And it’s not very favorable at this point, is it? Fascistic cruelty is alive and well in the United States. Miller is “requesting” that each state build concentration camp style detention centers within their borders.
See how easy it was to overcome that silly and naive belief that “it can’t happen here”? Apparently, America’s darker angels were not that deeply buried at all. Trump instinctively understood the opportunity for power he was in a position to attain, by becoming a fascist, in word and deed. And he found a receptive audience. Far too receptive.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s floundering over immigration leaves it without an opposition strategy.
www.thenation.com
Amid all the frenzied MAGA agitprop and bald-faced
lying that have marked the final stages of Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, it’s been easy to lose sight of its transformative policy agenda. Much of the controversy spurred by the sweeping legislation concerns its evisceration of healthcare coverage—a stunning
$1 trillion in combined cuts to Medicaid, the state-based program funding healthcare access for low-income Americans, and allied coverage to poor patients under the Affordable Care Act. But the bill, which emerged out of its Senate reconciliation session in a blizzard of votes to amend it on Monday, also erects a permanent immigration police state. With more than $150 billion in outlays to expand the horrific surveillance, detention, and rendition regime
created under the Laken Riley Act, the measure will carry out Trump’s pledge to make the terror wreaked by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, alongside federal and National Guard troops, in Los Angeles
the standard operating procedure for immigrant roundups going forward.
The scale of the proposed increases in ICE funding alone make for grim dystopian reading. As
Don Moynihan notes, ICE’s annual budget for detentions would skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the present fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year—a 365 percent increase, and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons. Here, per Moynihan, are some additional spending comparisons:
The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined. It is
on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars.
These massive giveaways are earmarked for an agency that’s shown a decidedly cursory regard for the fundamental protections afforded to all Americans by the rule of law. In conducting their expansive raids on workers and families that are not suspected of any overt criminal activity, ICE agents have masked themselves to
shun responsibility for their actions—an illegal abuse of power commonly associated with Eastern Bloc police states. Reviewing the agency’s recent arrest record, it’s not hard to see why agents don’t want their identities known: On an unprecedented scale, they are rounding up and detaining immigrants who aren’t accused of any criminal activity. ICE’s apprehension of immigrants facing criminal charges are up 128 percent over last year—but the agency’s detention of immigrants without criminal records has increased by more than 1,400 percent. Customs and Border Patrol agents had previously stopped most immigrants without criminal records as they turned them away from the border, by a ratio of 30 to 1. Now that ICE is carrying out White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s new directive to round up anyone who might vaguely resemble an immigrant, that ratio has disappeared. As
The Washington Post’s
Philip Bump notes, each agency is now apprehending roughly equal numbers of immigrants without criminal records. And ICE, of course, is going far out of its way to pursue its Miller-authorized directives to detain and rendition its corps of noncriminal suspects.
Building out the detention capacity of US immigration enforcement by nearly a fourfold factor would elevate the ghoulish white-nationalist policy mandates of Miller into a permanent federal legacy—at the precise moment that the Trump spending bill rolls back basic social-democratic protections from healthcare to
food security, to
education. And other arms of the federal government are already moving ahead with plans to turbocharge the MAGAfied model of immigration enforcement as a glorified form of political terror and disfranchisement. A recent NPR exposé found that the Department of Homeland Security has joined forces with the data-thugs-without-porfolio at the Department of Government Efficiency to create the federal government’s
searchable national citizenship data system. The ostensible mission behind the database is to provide state and local election officials with confirmation of the citizenship status of prospective voters, in line with Trump’s
evidence-free claims of rampant immigrant election fraud. The new data network draws on immigration records and Social Security data to produce the country’s first-ever registry of citizens. (Because, as we all know so well by now, combining DOGE and Social Security has been
a resounding success in assessing government priorities thus far.)
But the real damage here, as NPR reporters Jude Joffe-Block and Miles note, concerns the creation of a national surveillance state on steroids—without any public debate or consultation with Congress. “This level of integration among federal agencies handling sensitive personal data has never existed before,” they write, “and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens—something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been considered a third rail—especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.”
www.bbc.com
www.theatlantic.com
