After President Trump blamed Renee Good's death on his lack of respect for law enforcement, and White House adviser Stephen Miller promised “immunity” for federal agents, it has become clear that the administration is attempting some kind of psychological conditioning in the blue cities its agents now terrorize.
What all this means is a message of impunity that has not gone unnoticed by officers who stop people on the street and ask them for identification, remove them from their cars, homes and workplaces, and mistreat protesters. The other day, for example, an officer in Minneapolis dressed in combat fatigues used Good's death as an implied threat against a peaceful protester.
In a widely circulated video clip, the officer walks down the street signaling traffic while approaching a woman who is recording him.
“What a shame,” she says calmly as he approaches her car window.
The officer looks at her, looks away briefly, and then, in a condescending tone filled with false sadness, says, “Haven't you learned from the last few days? Have you not learned?”
“You learned what?” she asks. “What is our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?”
He says something about not “following federal agents” and then grabs his phone.
He didn't say, “Look what you made me do.”
I didn't have to do it.
On Thursday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops to Minnesota to quell protests that broke out after his massive immigration crackdown resulted in 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 who was resisting arrest.
These confrontations, however, are as inevitable as they are unnecessary. (And by the way, where ARE all those people who say “Don't tread on me”?)
Contrary to the president's campaign promises, the goal is not simply to detain criminals who are in the country illegally. After all, deportations hit a record high under President Obama. Immigrant rights activists dubbed him the “deporter in chief.” However, the deportations were carried out quietly and focused on criminals and people who recently crossed the border illegally, not on immigrants who worked hard, created lives and families, and put down roots. I don't remember a single story during the Obama years about a violent military-style raid, like we saw in Chicago last September during Trump's “Operation Midway Blitz.”
In his speech last fall at a meeting of top military leaders (the one where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chastised the “fat generals”), Trump reflected on the deployment of U.S. troops for training purposes to the civilian populations of Democratic-led cities that 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 HW Bush in 1992, when the city of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames and violence. Troops arrived after the riots began. They didn't cause them and it was a relief to see them here.
About 3,000 Department of Homeland Security agents are currently deployed in Minneapolis, an occupation by any definition of the word.
The show of force is gratuitous, absurd. Last week, heavily armed agents used a battering ram to break down the door of a Liberian whose lawyer said he had been communicating regularly with federal authorities for years.
Some have speculated that these operations are providing the blueprint for a national paramilitary force that could be used to intimidate and suppress voters. After all, Trump told a Reuters reporter last week that he expects big setbacks in the midterm elections. “He boasted that he had achieved so much that 'when you think about it, we shouldn't even have an election.'”
I take it more as an illusion than a serious threat. On the other hand, I never expected to see a president applaud a violent insurrection and support his supporters' talk of hanging his vice president.
The militarization of ICE raids “seems to be just intimidation and an attempt 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 their protest against an authoritarian fascist regime, but here, if you oppose his policies and views, you are labeled a domestic terrorist. Explain it to me.”
This is about brute force, about teaching a lesson to a left-leaning population.
“Let's be very, very clear: This has long ceased to be an immigration enforcement issue,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday. “Instead, it is 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, wrote an essay about how putting on combat gear changes a soldier.
“There is a psychological change that occurs when you put those things on,” Richards wrote. “You feel different. You behave differently. You start to see your environment differently. In the Marine Corps, that change was appropriate because it's a combat culture and organization. But these are American streets. American citizens. And we have law enforcement officers dressed like they're kicking down doors in Fallujah to serve court orders in the suburbs.”
On Wednesday night, a couple and their six children were driving home from a basketball game in north Minneapolis when they became caught in a confrontation between protesters and federal agents. They were trapped when a tear gas canister exploded under their car. Your baby stopped breathing. “I had to give my baby mouth-to-mouth, and people like to pour milk on my other children,” mother Destiny Jackson told CBS News. “I thought I was dying, honestly, and the way I felt, I couldn't imagine how my kids would feel.”
So, America, are we safe yet?
Blue sky: @rabcarian
Rags: @rabcarian
