What you can do to stop ICE’s mayhem
Friends,
ICE and Border Patrol agents must be reined in. I’ll tell you how in a moment.
Since Renee Good’s death, clashes between ICE and the residents of Minneapolis have escalated. On Wednesday night, an ICE agent shot and wounded someone who, ICE claimed, was fleeing arrest. (Sure, just like Good supposedly was trying to run them over when she turned her car away from them and said, moments before an agent fired three bullets into her chest and head, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”)
I’ve always loved Minneapolis. Its people have midwestern common sense. They also have a deep sense of fairness and justice.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened that if Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota didn’t stop the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT … and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
Let’s be clear. The problem is not the protesters. It’s the armed thugs who are shooting and murdering them. (Trump seems capable of seeing a similar dynamic playing out in Iran and vows to protect the protesters there, but not in America.)
A friend who knows a lot more than I do about America’s armed forces recently wrote:
“There are four kinds of people who join the armed forces: those from a traditional military family, true patriots who want to serve their country, those with no other prospects who need a job, and psychotics who just want to kill people.
The armed services do a pretty decent job of screening out the fourth group, but that group is now the prime recruitment pool for ICE. Racists, haters, gun nuts, and cage fighting fans who want to shoot anyone the least bit different from them. They are becoming America’s Gestapo. That is no exaggeration. We’re slipping into Nazi Germany.”
He’s exactly right.
ICE is reportedly investing $100 million in what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed.
It has lowered its recruitment standards to meet the deportation targets set by Stephen Miller (Trump’s deputy chief of staff for promoting bigotry and nativism), thereby increasing the numbers of untrained and dangerous agents on the streets.
ICE’s recruitment is aimed at gun and military enthusiasts and people who listen to right-wing radio, have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races.
It’s seeking recruits who are willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”
If I had my way, ICE would be abolished and Border Patrol agents sent back to the border. But this isn’t going to happen under Trump and his Republican lapdogs in Congress. Too many Democrats are almost as spineless when it comes abolishing ICE.
But Congress can still take action to rein in ICE. At the very least, it must disarm ICE.
The Trump regime is allowing ICE officers to use lethal force in self-defense. But we’ve seen how readily ICE and Border Patrol agents claim self-defense when they’re shooting our compatriots.
How do we disarm ICE?
Congress is now considering the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out at the end of January.
Please demand — call your members of Congress and tell them in no uncertain terms — that the DHS spending bill prohibit ICE and Border Patrol agents from carrying guns and that it unambiguously declare that agents do not have absolute immunity under the law if they harm civilians.
Do this as soon as you can.
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ICE was designed to be mainly an investigative agency, not a militarized arm of the presidency. ICE agents are not adequately trained to use deadly force.
In addition, ICE agents prowling our streets in unmarked cars, wearing masks, clad in body armor and carrying long guns, are a clear provocation to violence — both by them and by otherwise law-abiding residents of our towns and cities who feel they must stop their brutality.
Trump, Vance, and Miller want to provoke violent confrontations so they can justify even more oppression — including invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to call in the regular military. “I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump said in October, referring to the act, “and the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved, and I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted.”
Robert Reich nails it here: the ICE and Border Patrol’s terroristic activities need to be reined in.
