It is not against the law to “disrespect” law enforcement. Trump certainly believes this when it comes to his precious “January 6th hostages” who beat the shit out of the cops who showed the professional restraint that his ICE goons aren’t required to have.
Vox spoke with David Hausman, a UC Berkeley School of Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project, a database of individual-level immigration enforcement cases about the changes in ICE procedures under the Trump regime.
He assured me that none of what we’re seeing in Minneapolis is normal — and that these kinds of operations are about more than just immigration.
How does domestic immigration enforcement now compare to how it used to work before Trump?
Before this current administration and going back to at least the first Obama administration, ICE was really an agency that didn’t conduct many arrests. The vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government. And as a result, ICE arrests out in the community were very, very rare. I think it’s fair to say that ICE didn’t have that much arrest capacity, and that’s part of the reason that, now that it’s under so much pressure to create arrests, it’s going about it so indiscriminately.
How did it evolve in the Trump administration?
I think the difference between the first and second Trump administrations in ICE arrests is the sense that this administration is just not acting subject to constraints. An additional difference is that Congress recently allocated a huge amount of money for building additional detention centers, which gives ICE more capacity to imprison people after arrests now. And then one last difference is that arrests at the border are very low now, whereas they were relatively high, especially towards the end of the first Trump administration. And that also means there’s more detention capacity for people who’ve been arrested inside the United States.
I think the easiest way to see the lack of constraint is the obvious one: We just see ICE and CBP randomly arresting people, often openly, or almost openly, on the basis of race. The scale of that phenomenon is new with this administration.
It’s to fulfill the Trump administration’s mass deportation promises, right?
That’s right. ICE is under tremendous pressure from the administration to increase arrest numbers. And there just aren’t enough people who are noncitizens in jails and prisons for them to meet those numbers, which is related to the more general point that there just aren’t that many noncitizens who’ve been convicted of crimes. And that’s why, under the new administration, such a small proportion of people they’re arresting have any criminal convictions.
What effect does that have on neighborhoods, on people’s perceptions of ICE and their communities? What is this doing to our understanding of public spaces if ICE is suddenly monitoring those spaces?
Anecdotally, we’re hearing about people being afraid to go out, afraid to do normal things. There’s research from the Obama era actually showing that the intensity of immigration enforcement back then had all sorts of bad effects in communities, including unemployment and health outcomes. So there’s every reason to think that those effects would be even larger now.
It’s important to recognize that a lot of what’s happening is not about immigration. We can see that most directly in the many arrests of citizens or people with lawful immigration status in these raids. But having masked men roving the street, seemingly randomly arresting people, obviously has implications well beyond immigration.
Border Patrol is used to manhandling immigrants at he border and nobody has ever really cared about it. Recall that they were putting barbed wire in the Rio Grande and letting people die of thirst in the desert for years. But neither CPB or ICE have any training or experience dealing with protesters, traffic stops or any kind of law enforcement in neighborhoods and streets of America. Neither have they ever been granted anonymity by being allowed to wear masks and intimidate anyone who confronts them or given “absolute immunity” (largely due to the president promising to pardon them for anything they do.) They are particularly confrontational toward those who are filming them.
This is causing scenes that I don’t think anyone has seen in this country since the days of Bull Connor turning the fire hoses on protesters during the civil rights movement.
Those are all from just the last few days in Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, Trump is promising to bomb Iran for brutalizing its protesters.