Secret Police chic
One supposes keeping a sense of humor is important as the United States of America devolves into dictatorship. Not seeing it yet? The world is.
Alexandra Petri offers snarky fashion advice for thugs asking how to look the part when “seizing someone’s mom and hurling her into an unmarked van without reading her her rights” (The Atlantic):
How are the people we thrust into our vans supposed to know that we are, in fact, acting under color of law and not just kidnapping them? Can I really do this job while wearing either an Army uniform that I have assembled myself in a confusing, over-the-top way or the same T-shirt I just wore to my failed custody hearing?
No uniform required, Petri suggests:
If you’re wearing a uniform, people will be disappointed when you fail to show them an arrest warrant before entering their place of work. If you’re not wearing a uniform of any kind, they won’t know whether to be disappointed until it’s too late!
If you decide to wear some sort of uniform anyway (Army Surplus? January 6 Surplus? Your choice!), you can still send the message that you intend to be accountable to no one by wearing a face covering.
You get the idea.
The sick irony is that these masked agents aren’t even asking to see people’s papers as a uniformed Nazi thug might. If you don’t look American enough (whatever that means), ICE will pile out of a vehicle armed for war and grab you off the street (or off a lawn) without asking such questions.
The ICE kidnapping scenes coming out of Los Angeles should disturb all freedom-loving Americans, left or right.
This chaotic scene from a Los Angeles Walmart is all too typical of ICE raids in the city. Watch for the masked man in the gray t-shirt at timestamp 0:48 (image above, video below).
A couple of comments on the video. First from an MSNBC opinion:
“We’re seeing the rise of secret police — masked, no identifying info, even wearing army fatigues — grabbing & disappearing people,” California state Sen. Scott Weiner wrote on X Monday before calling it “antithetical to democracy & harms communities.” Weiner and another Democratic colleague, state Sen. Jesse Arreguin, have introduced a bill called the “No Secret Police Act,” which Weiner said “can help end the fear & chaos” that police wearing masks “creates in communities.”
I don’t know that a California state law could restrict how federal law enforcement officials present themselves publicly; even so, a bill that generally restricts local and state law enforcement officials from covering their faces is a necessary, if symbolic, rebuke of the encroaching police state.
Second, claims by ICE that agents are hiding their faces for their own safety because of “a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them” is nonsense, or else “cooked.” Philp Bump notes that ICE did not respond when asked where that figure came from. And besides, how would a face mask prevent an assault?
“ICE didn’t provide me with any examples of immigration officers being identified, targeted and assaulted outside of the context of an arrest,” Bump writes.
“That’s assault! That’s assault!” an unmasked agent claims after (possibly) one agent bumps into the videographer and another shoves him [timestamp 2:04 above]. The videographer was later arrested for that “assault.” The U.S attorney alleges that that video shows Adrian Andrew Martinez “punching” a border patrol agent.
Something else to note. Only the nonuniformed “agents” seemed to be carrying accessorized long guns. As if they’ve got something to prove. One advertised that with his t-shirt.
In another incident, ICE arrested an American citizen, Job Garcia, after shoving him:
“A split second after that is when he lunged at me. I was still recording, so he pushes me, puts both hands on me, and I pushed his hand off. And then, he didn’t like that, so he grabbed my left hand,” Garcia recalled.
Garcia, who is a PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, said the officers seemed surprised when he told them he was a U.S. citizen. He says he was first taken to a holding area at Dodger Stadium, where he heard agents boasting about how many people they had grabbed.
“Like, ‘How many bodies did you guys get today?’ And one of them said 31, and they started like, ‘Yay! It was a good day today.’ And they were like, high-fiving each other,” Garcia said.
He said the officers also debated about what they could charge him with.
So yeah, about that 413 percent….
As Marcy Wheeler suggested on Friday, Stephen Miller must get moist and erect watching these scenes of rough handling of alleged undocumented workers.
(h/t HDP)
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