ICE is the MAGA militia of Trump’s dreams

Photo: Mother Jones

I received a notice in my newsfeed this morning that included links to videos of ICE agents arresting, and in several cases, viciously beating American citizens. These videos are hard to watch.

Here is something else that’s hard to do: putting a name on what’s happening in this country right now with ICE arrests and demonstrations against them. It’s tempting to say that the Trump administration, in the name of enforcing immigration laws, is waging a war on citizens. But it’s not all citizens of America. It’s only those in blue states like Minnesota and Oregon and Illinois and California.

Trump is the first person in the 250-year history of this country who doesn’t believe he was elected to be president of all the people. He says, and he acts, as if he is the president of those who voted for him. Everyone else, such as the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota, are enemies. They may as well be living in Iran or Venezuela, or be riding in open boats with multiple outboard motors racing through the Caribbean Sea. It’s open season on everyone who didn’t vote for Donald Trump, especially those who are showing up on the street to protest ICE efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants.

A great protest is taking place right now, but it’s not like any protest we have seen before, such as those at the time of the killing of George Floyd or the mass protests against the Vietnam war. The protests are taking place one by one, against ICE agents, as they move in groups around cities in roundups of immigrants. American citizens are showing up, as they did the other day in Minneapolis, to protest the tactics of ICE. There is good reason for this, because what ICE is doing is clearly and inarguably unconstitutional.

Vice President Vance said at least twice over the last few days that ICE agents will be “going door to door” in their roundup of undocumented immigrants. The Fourth Amendment states that, without exception, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The Constitution does not say that the Fourth Amendment applies to these persons, but not those. It says, “the people.” Everyone in this country is supposed to be protected from what ICE has been doing every day.

Under the Fourth Amendment, ICE was not entitled to enter the apartment building in Chicago and kick down the doors of every apartment and detain everyone they found. The Fourth Amendment does not permit ICE to go “door to door” into places of business such as restaurants or laundries or tailor shops to round up anyone inside because of a suspicion that they may not be citizens or have documents like a green card allowing them to be in this country legally.

So, there is good reason to protest ICE roundups, because they are breaking the supreme law of the land. If ICE can storm into the business or home of immigrants, they can storm into your home or mine. Lawlessness such as that which is being perpetrated by ICE needs to be protested, or this will cease to be a land of laws and become a land of the whims of one man, Donald Trump.

He has already turned Venezuela into such a place. He has done the same to the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. You don’t have rights in those places, if Donald Trump decides to shoot missiles at your boat or send Delta Force soldiers into your streets to arrest and deport a Venezuelan citizen such as Nicolas Maduro. He is threatening to do the same thing in Greenland. He is threatening to attack Iran with missiles and drones, allegedly because Iran is violently putting down demonstrations and killing people.

It is not just ironic but unacceptably illegal that Trump thinks it’s okay to violently put down demonstrations and kill people in this country, but it’s not right that Iran’s government is doing the same thing in their country. People who are demonstrating against ICE in this country are being told they must “submit” to or “comply” with the orders of ICE agents, or they risk being beaten, arrested, or killed.

Renee Good and her wife thought that they were exercising their right under the First Amendment to protest and speak out against the repression by ICE agents who, as Vance explained, were “going door to door” in their neighborhood. Good paid for her innocent belief with her life. Others are paying with their freedom. ICE has repeatedly arrested U.S. citizens who have shown up to protests their roundups of immigrants. ICE arrested two citizens inside a Target in Minneapolis on Thursday. Both were employees of Target and were wearing the kind of reflective vests employees wear when they go out into the parking lot to collect carts. ICE refused one of the employees’ attempt to produce his passport to prove his citizenship.

To simply say that these ICE agents are thugs misses the greater point. The ones I have seen in multiple videos forcing citizens to the ground and in some cases beating them joined the ranks of ICE to do exactly what they’re doing. Who do you think is responding to the ICE recruitment videos that are all over social media and sometimes even on TV? These people are not volunteering to serve in the U.S. military, where they would be given extensive training and issued uniforms so they can defend the United States of America from foreign enemies. They are given quickie-training and issued combat gear and told they can conceal their identities with face masks, and they are being used to detain and arrest people on the suspicion they are in this country illegally, based on the color of their skin or their accented speech.

Now the ICE agents are being told by Kristi Noem and JD Vance that they can arrest anyone who fails to “comply” with their orders to disperse. According to what members of the Trump administration are saying publicly, ICE agents are being told they are authorized to shoot to kill if they feel that their life is threatened by as little as a car moving less than two miles per hour.

Trump and Vance and Noem know what they’re doing. They are setting loose an ill-trained, publicly-funded private army of “enforcement agents” on the rest of the American public, or at least that portion of the public who live in states and cities controlled by Trump’s enemies, the Democrats.

If we wondered what a civil war would look like when it happened in this country, we have our answer. We are being forced under tax laws that apply to all of us to pay for a uniformed, armed, masked army that is rounding up our friends and neighbors, and when we exercise our rights under the First Amendment in protest, they are beating and arresting and killing us.