ICE agents and their supporters portray them as big and brave. The truth is, they’re fragile snowflakes who complain about being called names, the cold in Minnesota, and having demonstrators throw empty water bottles and snowballs at them. Most absurdly, they wear masks for fear of being doxxed, while every other state and local cop and federal LEO has their identity in open view. ICE are vicious. But they’re also cowards.
After ICE agents gunned down peaceful protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the government smeared him (and previously, Renee Good) as a terrorist. In truth, he never drew, much less brandished, his gun. If he had a chance to come back to life and do it again, would he avail himself of his Second Amendment right to defend himself against random masked goons who might or might not be government agents?
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.
