Right-wingers and other defenders of ICE decry the “dehumanization” of the immigration goon squads. Perhaps it really is true that, under all that Kevlar and cruelty, there are human beings just like us. Then again, perhaps not.
We’ve all seen those masked-up, militarized ICE goons charging through American city streets. Sure, we wonder about the future of democracy. But we also wonder: what are they carrying in all those many, many pockets?
After ICE killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, right-wing defenders of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategies blamed the victim for coming to a demonstration bearing a weapon. This is despite the state’s clear right to carry a gun openly, the Second Amendment, and the GOP’s longstanding arguments in defense of its own who did the same thing in the past.
It is impossible to imagine that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America ever envisioned that we would disintegrate to the point that we would fully embrace the militarization of American cities under civilian rule to the extent that we have built up ICE into a huge paramilitary terrorist force.Oh, well. It was a good run while it lasted.
When Allied forces, led by the United States, stormed onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, they were greeted by grateful Frenchmen as liberators. Given the face of militarization here today, it is hard to imagine that anyone will ever be happy to see us again.
President Trump claims to be an economic nationalist. But the only real jobs program he has created has been ICE and the associated gulags he is constructing for undocumented migrants to be brutalized and deported. How does he square “America First” with outsourcing the jobs of concentration camp guards to foreign countries?
ICE—which Trump has transformed into one of the world’s largest militarized forces—is already the nation’s largest domestic police force. How realistic is it to think this employment project for undereducated goons won’t turn against American citizens after completing the mass deportation of illegal immigrants?
The Vichy puppet regime in Nazi-occupied France organized a so-called “Passive Resistance” movement, akin to civil defense, to pretend that it was legitimate. Members were issued whistles rather than guns and were instructed to blow them hard if they saw something suspicious. In what passes for the American Left today, those who “resist” ICE are given whistles and told to blow them when they see ICE deportation agents in their neighborhoods.
After Renee Good was shot to death by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, right-wing defenders of the Trump administration suggested that she had brought it upon herself by failing to comply with her killers’ orders.
When widespread protests erupted in Iran over soaring inflation and high living costs, the Trump Administration openly supported the demonstrators and even pledged to launch military strikes against Iran if its security forces used violence against them. In the United States, however, when similar protests occurred — such as those following the killing of a woman by ICE in Minneapolis — the official response was strikingly different.
Ted Rall’s Latest Books:
