Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans

This past week included frightening signs that the Felon and his lawless henchmen and henchwomen want to both transform America into a police state and to threaten and seize foreign territories into submission or yielding territory.  The justification is a manufactured "emergency" that depicts undocumented immigrants as hardened criminals and foreign terrorists and that couches territorial demands in terms of "national security" needs.  The killing of a 37 year old white woman who was an American citizen in Minneapolis by ICE agents should be a blaring siren that no one is safe in the Felon's America. In the minds of this dictatorial regime, 4th and 5th Amendment rights have been erased.  Frighteningly, on social media I see Trump voters - some of who I used to think were moral individuals - justifying the ICE outrageous actions and/or trying to deflect the debate.  Perhaps these people are refusing to admit that they made a horrible mistake in casting their vote for a convicted felon and malignant narcissist. The other explanation is perhaps darker and seemingly motivated by racism against non-whites.  These apologists ignore the reality that once rights are erased, they themselves could later become targets. A lengthy piece at The Atlantic by an author who has written about authoritarian regimes looks at the manner in which legal rights of citizens are being trampled upon even as the Felon and his regime seek to intimidate and silence critics  among the citizenry. Here are highlights from the piece that include the seizing and incarceration of an American citizen seemingly solely because he looked Hispanic: 

The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation.

[The Felon] the president and his entourage are accumulating power in ways that seem familiar to me: this is exactly how elected leaders in other countries have distorted their democracies. . . . an issue you’ve probably heard about: the transformation of America’s immigration and customs officers into a masked and heavily armed paramilitary, and the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, supposedly to defend them. Americans may think of this as a change that mostly affects illegal immigrants, but this new federal police force is also establishing standards of lawlessness, and they are operating with an assumption of impunity that is changing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

George Retes has already felt the impact.  Retes: I was driving to my workplace, where I work as a contracted security guard. When I pulled up, there’s just cars on that entire road, bumper-to-bumper—people getting out, just cars driving around each other. And I was like, All right, well, I just need to make it to work. So I make my way through, and it’s just this roadblock of ICE agents just standing across the road.

Like, You’re not going to work today. Get back in your car. Leave. So I end up getting back in my car, and they just all start walking in a line towards me, and they just surround my car. I have the agents on the side trying to pull on my door handles, trying to open my car door, yelling at me to get out, and the agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, contradicting what these other agents are telling me to do.

They end up throwing tear gas. And I’m in there choking, trying to plead with them, like, I can’t see; my car’s engulfed in smoke, and eventually they hit my window again, and it just shatters. Immediately, the moment it shatters, another agent sticks his arm through and sprays me in the face with pepper spray.

They just dragged me out of the car, threw me on the ground. They just immediately kneeled on my neck and back. There’s maybe four or five other agents just standing around us, just watching as they do this.

I was detained for three nights and three days. That Saturday was my daughter’s third birthday party, and that was probably the worst feeling ever. She’s my princess. It was just terrible.

So Sunday, a guard ends up coming up and is just like, You’re off, like, He’s getting released, and that’s all he says. That was it. They’re like, You’re free to go. All the charges had been dropped; you’re free to go. And I just asked them, “So I basically was locked up and missed my daughter’s birthday for no fucking reason?” And they just were silent. They just stayed silent. I was given no explanation, no apology, just: That’s it. . . . . Someone has to be held accountable. Treating people a certain way without dignity or respect or humanity is so fucking wrong. To not have any fucking rights, especially here in America, when that’s what we’re supposed to be all about—it’s wrong. It goes against everything we stand for. And so I hope that the justice system, even though I don’t believe it works all the time, I hope that in this case it works.

ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose.

The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law. . . . It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?

I asked two experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU what we should be doing to secure our own safety, and to preserve our democracy. (We spoke before the killing in Minneapolis this week.)

Our first guest, Margy O’Herron, has documented the transformation of ICE. I started by asking her about the George Retes story and what ICE is supposed to do when it picks up a citizen. (And we should add here that ICE did not respond to questions from The Atlantic about the Retes case.)

Margy O’Herron: When ICE discovers that somebody is a citizen, they are supposed to release them right away. I think what you’re seeing, too, is just a bigger phenomenon of unchecked, chaotic deportation and arrest that is dangerous, and it risks all of our rights.

[T]he Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do still apply to immigrants. They apply to immigrants in the same way that they apply to citizens. There’s no distinction in the law. So without those things, ICE is arresting people and taking people out of the country without any kind of process, without alerting them that they’re going, without allowing them to talk to a lawyer—that is not lawful; it’s unconstitutional. Those rights exist, and they should be protected.

Trump’s big spending bill, which he called the One Big Beautiful [Bill] Act, will allocate over $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement, with a significant amount going to ICE. . . . . And the money going to ICE is triple what they were authorized before. And what it means is that the types of raids that we’ve seen and the scale of detention that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to increase significantly as they start spending all of those funds.

So you see a 400 percent increase in detention and a 14 percent increase for the number of judges. We’ve also seen attacks on the immigration courts and immigration judges. The administration has fired more than 80 immigration judges, mostly for no cause. They’re claiming this is the right of the president to decide who’s an immigration judge. One assumes that they’re being fired because their positions or history or background is something that this current administration does not like. And they’re proposing now to replace those fired immigration judges with military lawyers. And although there are excellent lawyers in the military, they are not trained as immigration judges. And without that training, without that background, it suggests that there’s something else at work. And the fear will be that those judges are there to rubber-stamp the administration’s broader deportation agenda.

Of the folks that are being arrested, 70 percent have absolutely no criminal background, and of the folks that do, there is a very slim number that have any kind of violent criminal background. Most have property crimes or— Parking tickets, I read in one case. . . . And so you’ve taken your FBI agent who’s well trained to go after a drug trafficker or child predator, and instead you have them going after a landscaper or a guy who works at the car wash—to go after civilians.

. . . [T]here is a sense from the top that the agents who are taking these actions are not gonna have any consequences for those actions. For example, there was a video that circulated quite broadly of a woman who was pushed by an ICE agent outside the New York immigration office. She was shoved across a hallway, and she fell. She ended up being hospitalized. Initially, ICE came out with a statement that said that type of action was unacceptable, but a few days later, it was reported that that ICE agent was back on the job.

What we now see is a very heavy, militarized law-enforcement presence with very little oversight. You’ve got ICE agents and their law-enforcement partners using—they’re dressed like military soldiers. They are using military weapons. They are rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters. They’re using flash-bang grenades to clear out buildings.  They’re zip-tying the elderly, children as a way of evacuating a building. These are tools that are used by armed soldiers against enemies—not that we use against civilians.

[T]hey’re trying to convince people that this is a real military operation against real terrorists. They even made a recruiting video out of the raid that deployed Black Hawk helicopters, making it seem something like the Marines in Iraq. But even that raid, it was allegedly meant to target a Venezuelan gang, and yet no one who was detained appears to be a member of a gang, or even a criminal. So it seems that it’s ordinary people.

So what we’re seeing now, not only has Trump deployed the military into American cities three times in just over eight months in office, compared to 30 times in the nation’s entire history before this, but he’s also doing it in circumstances where it just hasn’t been done this way before. . . . He’s claiming he’s claiming emergency powers. There’s a very bad tradition of leaders using emergencies to do things that are illegal. I mean, it goes back to the 1930s and earlier. . . . it’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world, because emergency powers free leaders from legal constraints that they would otherwise face. And so there’s obviously a temptation to either exploit real crises or to manufacture crises in order to act without these legal limits.

When soldiers are dragged into what is widely perceived to be a domestic political fight, that this—first of all, it’s really bad for the morale of the soldiers. That’s not why they enlisted. They don’t like being dragged into politics. But also, it undermines public trust in the military. When you do that, that really weakens our military, when it cannot appeal to and draw from all sectors of the U.S. population, when it loses the public confidence.

And you have to worry about the long-term effects on the military in terms of who is going to join up and who’s going to stay in the military. . . . And that would very fundamentally and dangerously change what our military is.

[T]here’s certainly a risk that the president would attempt to deploy troops around the time of an election on the theory that people are less likely to come out and vote if they think that the streets are gonna be full of, you know, heavily armed, federal law enforcement or military troops. That’s going to dissuade some people from getting out and exercising the right to vote.

[M]y concern is that we’re moving towards a status quo in which the cities of this country really feel like police states. And to me, a police state is a place where the presence of—whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement—is so heavy and the chill on people’s exercise of their rights is so acute that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave. . . . To me that kind of chill and that kind of change in behavior is what really marks life in a police state.