In the wake of President Trump blaming Renee Good’s death on her disrespect for law enforcement, and White House advisor Stephen Miller promising “immunity” for federal officers, it has become clear that the administration is attempting a certain kind of psychological conditioning in the blue cities its agents are now terrorizing.
What it all adds up to is a message of impunity that has not been lost on the officers stopping people on the street and asking for identification, yanking them from their cars and homes and workplaces, and roughing up protesters. The other day, for example, an officer in Minneapolis decked out in combat fatigues used Good’s death as an implicit threat against a peaceful protester.
In a widely circulated video clip, the officer walks down the street waving traffic by as he approaches a woman who’s recording him.
“Shame on you,” she says calmly as he approaches her car window.
The officer looks at her, looks away briefly, then in a patronizing tone full of faux-sadness says: “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?”
“Learned what?” she asks. “What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?”
He says something about not “following federal agents,” then grabs at her phone.
He didn’t say, “Look what you made me do.”
He didn’t have to.
On Thursday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, and put boots on the ground in Minnesota to quell the protests that have erupted after his massive immigration crackdown resulted in yet another ICE shooting. This time, according to the feds, an officer was defending himself after being attacked with a snow shovel and broom by two men who emerged from a nearby building while the officer was trying to detain a Venezuelan immigrant resisting arrest.
These clashes, however, are as inevitable as they are unnecessary. (And by the way, where ARE all those “Don’t Tread on Me” people?)
Contra the president’s campaign promises, the goal is not simply to apprehend criminals who are in the country illegally. After all, deportations reached a record high under President Obama. He was dubbed the “deporter in chief” by immigration rights activists. Yet the deportations were carried out quietly, and were focused on criminals and recent unauthorized border crossers — not the immigrants who have worked hard, created lives and families and put down roots. I can’t recall a single story during the Obama years about a violent, military-style raid, as we saw in Chicago last September during Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz.”
In his speech last fall at a gathering of top military brass (the one where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chastised “fat generals”), Trump mused about unleashing American troops for training purposes on the civilian populations of Democratic-led cities he has often described — fatuously — as “war zones.”
Now here we are, a few months later, and Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, last used by President George H.W. Bush in 1992when the city of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames and violence. The troops came after the riots began. They did not cause them, and it was a relief to see them here.
In Minneapolis right now, some 3,000 Department of Homeland Security officers have been deployed, an occupation by any definition of the word.
The show of force is gratuitous, preposterous. Last week, heavily armed agents used a battering ram to break down the door of a Liberian man whose attorney said he had been checking in regularly with federal authorities for years.
Some have speculated that these operations are providing the template for a national paramilitary forcethat could be used for voter intimidation and suppression. Last week, after all, Trump mused to a Reuters reporter that he expects big setbacks in the midterm elections. “He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.’”
I take that more as wishful thinking than a serious threat. Then again, I never expected to see a president applaud a violent insurrection and support his partisans’ talk of hanging his vice president.
The militarization of ICE raids “appears to be just intimidation and attempting to terrorize people,” said James Grant, a retired management analyst who spent eight years investigating officer-involved shootings for the Los Angeles Police Commission. “I find it extremely ironic that the president of the United States supports the people of Iran in protesting an authoritarian fascist regime, but here if you oppose his policies and his views, you are labeled as a domestic terrorist. Explain it to me.”
This is about brute force, about teaching a left-leaning population a lesson.
“Let’s be very, very clear, this long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday. “Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
Last week in a viral Facebook post, a man named Ray Richards, who described himself as a “center-right”-leaning Marine Corps veteran, penned an essay about how donning combat gear changes a soldier.
“There’s a psychological shift that happens when you strap that stuff on,” Richards wrote. “You feel different. You carry yourself different. You start seeing the environment differently. In the Marine Corps, that shift was appropriate because it’s a combat culture and organization. But these are American streets. American citizens. And we’ve got law enforcement dressed like they’re kicking down doors in Fallujah to serve warrants in suburbia.”
On Wednesday evening, a couple and their six children were driving home from a son’s basketball game in North Minneapolis when they got caught in a clash between protesters and federal agents. They were trapped as a tear gas canister exploded under their car. Their infant stopped breathing. “I had to give my baby like mouth-to-mouth, and people like pouring milk all over my other kids,” the mother, Destiny Jackson, told CBS News. “I thought I was dying, honestly, and the way I felt, I couldn’t imagine how my kids felt.”
So, America, are we safe yet?
Bluesky: @rabcarian Threads: @rabcarian
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