They’re just brutalizing people with this car tactic. It has to stop. Driving up on people because they think they spot an immigrant, stopping them, breaking their windows and dragging them out of cars and violently assaulting them is happening all the time. They even leave the cars running wide open with people’s belongings inside.
They left this woman lying in the street injured and drove off:
A woman who’s a U.S. citizen needed medical help Thursday, Jan. 29, after federal agents pulled her from her car after demanding to see her “papers,” one of the state’s largest unions said Saturday.
Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.
The woman, identified only as Maria, is a home care worker who had been on her way to pay rent and pick up a cake for her grandson’s birthday, SEIU said. The union declined to give her last name, citing her privacy, and a union spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions for more information Saturday.
Maria feared for her life during the incident, according to union statements, as she has severe asthma and worried about getting tear gassed.
[…]
At around 11 a.m. Thursday, Maria was driving alone to take care of a rent payment and buy a cake for her grandson when she noticed she was being followed for several blocks by an unmarked vehicle that did not have a license plate, SEIU’s statement said.
Maria had been driving around northeast Salem, according to Latinos Unidos Siempre on social media. The vehicle pulled in front of her and stopped, while another parked behind her. Three men and a woman exited the vehicles wearing vests saying “police,” and one “banged on her window, demanding that she show them “papers.” SEIU said.
“When Maria did not immediately respond, the agents shattered her car window, forcibly removed her from the vehicle and threw her to the ground, causing numerous injuries,” the statement said. As she was on the ground, the agents dumped out her purse, found her U.S. passport and left the scene, according to SEIU.
“She had been carrying (her passport) because her daughter had told her to carry her passport everywhere she goes, advice her daughter learned at a Know Your Rights training,” a GoFundMe set up by SEIU for her said. By Sunday morning, 206 donors had contributed nearly $12,00, the fundraising site showed.
Maria sustained a torn rotator cuff, concussion and bruised ribs during the incident and received medical treatment at a hospital, according to the GoFundMe…
Maria contacted the Salem Police Department about the incident, but was told to contact the FBI since the incident involved federal agents, the union said.
I wouldn’t expect the local police to always be sympathetic. Many of them are Trumpers and are totally on board with the assaults. (I don’t know about Salem but parts of Oregon are very red so it’s possible.)
These tactics are outrageous and while Trump has put out a tweet saying that they aren’t supposed to interact with “agitators” anymore (meaning observers and protesters” unless they’re threatening a federal building) I haven’t heard anything about them being ordered to stop this. They should not be allowed to racially profile drivers, pull them out of their cars and beat them up, immigrant or citizen alike.
In the past, ICE got warrants for known criminals, period. They didn’t roust law abiding immigrants, much less people who are here legally or, worse yet, are citizens. This whole thing is nothing but a form of ethnic cleansing and until people understand that some form of this will go on as long as Stephen Miller is running the country.
And yes, Miller wants to go after their political opposition and that includes white citizens as well. He d=is more than willing to use the full power of the state to do it. Nobody should be sanguine about any of this. It’s just a first step.
The speed, scale, flagrance and persistence of the Trump administration’s deviations from established legal and constitutional norms during his second term have been so dramatic that it bears stepping back and taking stock.
Within hours of his January 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump had pardoned hundreds of people convicted of political violence — a hallmark of aspiring autocratic regimes — and shown tacit support for violent resistance to electoral setbacks. Days later he removed legal protections from civil servants and fired 17 oversight officials charged with tackling fraud and corruption. By March the administration was in open conflict with the courts, summer saw police firing rubber bullets at protesters and the removal of the labour statistics agency chief in the wake of weak jobs numbers, and this month brought the criminal investigation into Fed chair Jay Powell and the shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
While US history is hardly free from political violence or maltreatment of disfavoured groups, this blitz on America’s citizens, institutions and — by many estimations — the constitution itself ranks as arguably the most rapid episode of democratic and civil erosion in the recent history of the developed world.
Measured using objective criteria spanning 10 domains including the use of state force against civilians, political prosecution and the independence of the judiciary and civil service, I find that the US slide during Trump’s second term stands out as the most rapid in contemporary history. It outpaces the early stages of backsliding under Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, where similar steps unfolded over several years.
