Former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security staffer Miles Taylor, who first became famous for authoring a New York Times op-ed about resistance from within and now heads up the peaceful resistance group DEFIANCE, told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on Friday that his group has made a massive investment into a simple measure to help communities protect themselves from President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement attacks.
“The Trump administration has sent thousands of ICE agents into [Minnesota],” Taylor told anchor Nicolle Wallace. “They’re accusing people of domestic terrorism, including a woman that they killed. And now you’ve got Stephen Miller in the past 24 hours saying the word ‘insurrection’ over and over and over. Let’s remember how all of this started. This started with Somali-American kindergartners that allegedly had accounting discrepancies and were taking federal tax dollars. That’s not something you send thousands of agents in for. You send accountants in to look at that. You send investigative auditors.”
“These guys are not trying to de-escalate,” Taylor continued. “They are trying to escalate, Nicolle, by design. That’s why the administration is doubling down. They want to foment the circumstances for the president to ratchet up his crackdown. This is 10 years in the making. They’re trying to make Minnesota the example for executive power.”
“So pull that cord for me, Miles, what should people do understanding what their intentions are?” asked Wallace.
“Well, look, I would go back to this,” said Taylor. “I mean, I think it’s very important there’s a people power aspect to this that helps expose them. I mean, we just held a meeting on this this week with our organization, DEFIANCE.org. We brought together thousands of members to say, what can we do? And we decided to go fund more efforts in Minnesota and elsewhere to train people to document these abuses, but also to do know-your-rights training, because these agents are consistently blowing past constitutional guardrails. People need to know what they can and cannot do.”
“We’re also now the biggest buyer, or one of the biggest buyers, of literal whistles around the country,” he continued. “And I think a lot of folks initially last year when they saw people buying whistles for these communities said, well, what’s that going to do? Why someone going to literally blow the whistle on ICE? That can mean the difference between life and death is communities notifying people, hey, ICE agents are here. Get your phones out. Protect yourselves. Know your rights.”
The bottom line, he concluded, is that “The more those things are exposed, the more outrage there is, the more likely there is to be the mass nationwide pressure. We need to push the White House to change these policies. And we are already are getting some hints that the administration is getting nervous about the optics. That should have happened a year ago, but the pressure is starting to have some impact.”
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