America has always suffered from paroxysms of political violence from time to time and it appears we are in one of those periods The murder of Charlie Kirk earlier this week is just the latest in a series of killings and attempted assassinations of political figures and we’re having to deal with it as our national leadership and government institutions become more and more radical as every week goes by. At a time when passions are running so very high it would be very helpful to have a steady hand at the helm but that’s not what we have. President Donald Trump is making everything worse.
We have had troops in the streets of Los Angeles and Washington D.C. with almost daily threats to do more. Last week the president renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War and declared that the U.S. military has the right to murder suspected drug runners anywhere in the world. He proved his intentions by ordered the Navy to blow up a speed boat with 11 people on board off the coast of Venezuela. He posted a meme that said “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” He had been threatening to send in National Guard troops for some time but until then he hadn’t said he was declaring war on the city. It was startling to say the least.
For many people living in America right now the fear that pervades their communities isn’t coming from street crime or even the horror of gun violence, to which we have sadly become all too accustomed. It’s coming from the government.
Trump had promised to enact a mass deportation program, even featuring signs and posters at the Republican Conventions which the attendees joyously waved around on national television. So it was expected that he would sign an Executive Order to that effect which he did. The Department of Homeland Security quickly began abducting college students who had protested against Israel’s war in Gaza or, in some cases, simply written editorials in their student newspapers and detaining them in far-flung detention centers to await deportation. Travellers from all over the world were detained in holding facilities sometimes for weeks for failing to properly fill out paperwork, all at the discretion of the Customs and Border Patrol. Scientists were suddenly denied entry because they wrote something critical of Donald Trump.
It’s shocking even to write that such things would happen in the United States, but it did. What had been promised as a program to rid the country of hardened criminals was proven to be a sham right out of the gate.
Ratcheting up the terror, the government ordered a series of deportation flights to a notorious prison in El Salvador, circulating chilling videos showing shackled prisoners having their heads shaved and being manhandled by uniformed guards, again to the apparent delight of the MAGA faithful. It was soon determined that most of the prisoners had no criminal records and had just been swept up and deported on the basis of tattoos and other physical characteristics.
Last June, the Department of Homeland Security unleashed ICE on the city of Los Angeles to conduct raids throughout the area to sweep up alleged undocumented workers for immediate deportation. Immigrants from all over the world but especially Mexico and other parts of Latin America as well as all across the Pacific Rim, are so much a part of the fabric of the community that it shocked the city to the core. People protested in an area around the downtown detention center which became a flashpoint for a couple of nights. It was nothing that L.A.P.D. couldn’t handle and does with some frequency.
But Trump used it as an (obviously planned) excuse to declare yet another bogus “emergency” and he called up the National Guard against the governor’s wishes and then active duty marines to quell a non-existent riot — and initiate the new reality of soldiers on the streets of America.
ICE continued to terrorize the immigrant community and those who came in contact with it (which means nearly everyone) wearing masks and weird quasi-official garb, driving unmarked cars and violently disappearing people off the streets without any probable cause other than that they look like they might not be citizens. Many of them are. They staged highly performative “shows of force” and rampaged through fields and factories gathering up everyone they could find.
The lower federal courts have stepped in to stop these obviously unconstitutional actions and the government will usually comply. But that’s because they know that they will be back in business before too long because the Supreme Court will jump in using its emergency docket (usually reserved for things like urgent death penalty decisions) to allow them to proceed. These orders are most often given without explanation, but when they offer one it’s usually to explain that the government would suffer irreparable harm if it is not allowed to do whatever it chooses. Most legal scholars are astonished at the court’s behavior in these last few months, and that even includes appeals court judges who are constantly being rebuked by the high court for following precedent and then left without any guidance as to what they are supposed to do differently.
Last week they did it again and this one is very bad. After suffering through a harrowing summer, Los Angeles has been able to relax a bit when a judge had blocked the use of the ICE “roving raids” all over the city. The Marines and the National Guard had left and things had more or less gone back to normal. The Supreme Court once against stepped in to allow the Trump administration to menace the community by allowing these agents to resume random stops based on racial profiling. (As Mother Jones’ Pema Levy archly points out, “the Supreme courts says ICE can consider race but colleges can’t.) The government declared that ICE plans to “flood the zone” with enforcement and Los Angeles is once again under siege.
Justice Kavanaugh fatuously wrote that people who are legal have nothing to worry about because it’s a minor inconvenience to be stopped and asked for your papers. It actually is not a minor inconvenience that citizens and legal residents are being stopped at gunpoint and dragged out of their cars by these masked ICE enforcers. It’s not decent or moral that any human beings are being treated this way.
Careening from one horror to another with violence, government intimidation and oppression and partisan division beyond anything we’ve seen since the civil war, I fear that like the proverbial frogs in slowly warming water we are losing the capacity to feel just how terribly, painfully wrong all of it is.