Any excuse to bust heads
ProPublica’s report from October documented more than 170 American citizens arrested and held by ICE. “More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.”
Also, “Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.”
Charging protesters with felonious assault for any, even inadvertent, contact with an agent is the ICE equivalent of regular police yelling “Stop resisting!” while beating detainees already complying. It’s as though officers have been trained to use the phrase as legal cover. For ICE, it’s threats of up to 20 years in prison.
Harry Litman contends at The New Republic that violating American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights “is very likely ICE’s general M.O.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile and in spite of evidence, claims no Americans — zero — have been arrested or detained in the ICE sweeps of neighborhoods (Chicago Sun Times):
“There’s no American citizens that have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true.”
Thus saith the puppy shooter. Litman counters with the ProPublica report:
ProPublica’s report chronicled a series of ICE arrests that would be hard to believe if they weren’t backed by official complaints and eyewitnesses. In one, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper-sprayed, and punched a young man whose only offense was filming them as they searched for his relative. In another, they tackled a 79-year-old car-wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. The man, who had just undergone heart surgery, was left with broken ribs and was denied medical attention for 12 hours. In a third case, agents handcuffed a woman on her way to work and held her for more than two days—without any contact with the outside world.
All Americans, even those for whom immigrants are instinctively “other,” should be disgusted by these abominations, which make clear that there is no foolproof protection for anyone, Americans included, from ICE’s rabid tactics.
At least 50 of the cases were never charged, Litman observes. He outlines “three core limitations” the Fourth places on police behavior. “These three guideposts mark the difference between a democracy and a police state. And yet, in case after case, ICE agents are blowing through those guardrails.”
One might see these abuses as “tragic anomolies,” Litman offers, but:
They are not. They are the predictable consequence of a political project that conflates law enforcement with warfare and citizens with suspects. Each time a citizen is wrongly detained or beaten by federal agents, the injury extends beyond the individual: It erodes the shared understanding that government power must answer to the Constitution.
But the fish rots from the head, the saying goes, and we all know whose rotting, blow-dried head that is: the one repeatedly sneering at court orders and encouraging police violence.
Tax cuts may not trickle down, but authoritarian followers need little encouragement to follow the king’s lead.
In North Carolina, for example:
Three North Carolina Republicans are asking the governor to send the National Guard to Charlotte, embracing President Donald Trump’s use of the military for local law enforcement.
Reps. Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, and Chuck Edwards all signed the letter asking Gov. Josh Stein to deploy the North Carolina National Guard to the state’s largest city. The Republican lawmakers’ letter to Stein is in support of a request from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police.
The police union wrote a letter to local leaders last month asking the city’s mayor, Stein and Trump to send in National Guard troops “due to the ongoing failure of city and police leadership to address the severe staffing crisis within the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, which we believe has led to a violence crisis in Charlotte.”
Violence crisis? What violence crisis?
Crime in Charlotte and North Carolina at large has been a consistent focus of these three members since a man fatally stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the city’s public transit in August. Zarutska’s death gained national attention, and her death was often cited by conservatives as a reason for Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda.
[…]
The Republican House lawmakers’ letter cites a 200 percent uptick in the murder rate in Uptown Charlotte. The Charlotte Police Department reported that there was a 8 percent drop in overall crime citywide and a 20 percent decline in violent offenses during this year’s third quarter.
But any excuse to bust heads.
Litman offers this warning:
A government that flouts the Fourth Amendment and then lies about it to courts and the people has already crossed a moral and legal frontier. The question is whether the country will fight back before the border between law and lawlessness disappears altogether.
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