Mad Trump disease overtakes federal law enforcement
When Americans behave really badly, well-meaning politicians like Joe Biden cringingly tell us that it’s not who we are. But the truth is it’s who some of us are. It’s who some of us have always been going back to slavery and witch burnings. That’s why we hire police, enforce the rule of law, and live by a constitution. Our problem today is that the flag-hugging autocrat presiding over an Oval Office kitsched up with gold-painted accents from Home Depot has filled his administration with not-who-we-ares. They take perverse delight in behaving badly. They mean to terminate the Constitution with extreme prejudice, and your unalienable rights with it.
The Washington Post this morning reviews how ICE thugs violently arrested a Venezuelan food delivery driver outside a northwest D.C. coffee shop. Marisa Kabas reported on that incident on Saturday. I mentioned it on Sunday and other violent arrests by ICE in California: A Festival Of Cruelty.
A Homeland Security spokesperson dismisses by omission the violence of ICE thugs and claims Cristian Enrique Carias Torres, illegally in this country, has “repeatedly failed to appear for multiple court dates in Maryland related to a long list of traffic crimes.” White House spokesliar Karoline Leavitt naturally claims Torres has a “suspected gang affiliation.”
Leavitt trots out her gang affiliation before cameras every day while making excuses for gang behavior by masked ICE secret police. Too harsh? Behold the professionalism of ICE’s finest.
Reporting on the D.C. incident, Kabas writes:
“You guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” one bystander said to the agents at one point during the incident. An agent, ironically clad in a rainbow face mask, replied “Liberals already ruined it.”
In late June, ICE agents in Los Angeles slammed into the ground Andrea Velez, 32, a U.S. citizen on her way to work. The Guardian recounts that masked men jumped out of an unmarked vehicle and began chasing down street vendors and others. Velez froze:
Suddenly, she recalled, one of the men slammed her to the ground and placed her into his car. The men had “Police” vests, but otherwise were in plainclothes and didn’t identify themselves. She didn’t know why they had taken her.
The men, it turned out, were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) deportation officers. They were looking to question people about “whether they were lawfully present” in the US, an agent later wrote. Velez is a US citizen who grew up in downtown, not far from the incident.
“They just came out ready to attack anyone,” said Velez, in her first interview since her arrest. “I thought they were kidnapping me.”
Back in the Ice agents’ car, Velez said the officer driving appeared furious about how the incident had played out: “He was screaming in rage.”
She overheard him on the phone discussing “how many bodies they had gotten”, she said, and referring to her as an “alleged US citizen”.
This is what the Trump administration considers professional law enforcement. It’s what they screen for in recruitment: thugs and bullies drunk on power. As I keep asking, were these costumed clowns trained over Zoom or over the weekend?
Once they realized their mistake, the agents who arrested Velez trumped up (there’s a double entendre for you) a charge that 4 ft 11 in Velez had assaulted an officer. The government dismissed the charges 16 days later, but not before she spent two nights in jail.
This may not be who “we” are, but it is who Trump administration thugs are:
Two Canadian toddlers were held for weeks at a remote Texas facility that is at the centre of a court case alleging inadequate access to safe drinking water, medical care and legal assistance. One of the children was held for 51 days – more than double the legal detention period for migrant children in the United States.
This is a “to be, or not to be” moment for this country, for Americans who still (naively maybe) believe in the founding ideals behind the United States, and for those of us whose brains haven’t been eaten by mad Trump disease.
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