Secret police

Who are these masked thugs?

Let’s call Trump’s rampaging federal agents what they are: Secret police. Some of them may have badges saying “ICE” or “Border Patrol” on their bulletproof vests; the camo and olive drab uniforms of others are marked simply “Police.” But none have badges with their names or other identifying information on them, and all of their faces are concealed by masks. They are unnamed and unaccountable.

All of these masked men are armed with semi-automatic pistols and/or fully-automatic AR-style assault rifles.

Let’s remember from just the last few weeks in Minneapolis what they are empowered to do. They have guns, and they used them to kill two United States citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As of today, no one has been charged for these murders. Trump’s secret police have asserted the right to enter private homes without judicial warrants. That means tomorrow, a gaggle of these helmeted and masked jackboot thugs could show up on your doorstep, and as they have done in Minneapolis and Chicago, use battering rams to break your front door and enter your home without providing you with a warrant signed by a judge, without showing you identification, without showing their faces, without so much as saying, “Hello, we’re from the government and we are here to search your house and take you away.”

Think about that for a moment. Break-ins and arrests by masked and anonymous Border Patrol and ICE agents have happened in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Memphis and Nashville, in New Orleans, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Las Vegas, in Brownsville and Dallas and Fort Worth, in Newark, in Detroit, in Boston, in Dallas, and in Indianapolis. Most of the people whose homes were invaded and who were arrested were alleged to be in this country without proper immigration documents, but some of them in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere have been American citizens who were required to provide proof of citizenship before they were released.

This is the nightmare that the authors of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution foresaw and forbade. Here is what the Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That is about as specific as anyone could imagine.

Agents of the federal, state, and local governments are not permitted under law to enter your home, automobile, hotel room, motor home, or any other place where you are without a warrant showing probable cause that you or others in your presence, in your home, or other domicile are engaged in or have committed a crime, and that warrant must be signed by a judge or magistrate.

Federal agents from the FBI recently showed up at the homes of James Comey and John Bolton. The agents were not secret police. They identified themselves with badges and presented legally obtained warrants before they entered the homes of the two former government officials. That’s the way it is supposed to be done. That is not the way agents affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security are operating.

The Fourth Amendment is being violated on a wholesale basis by Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs overseen by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff who has no connection to law enforcement. At least we know the names of Trump’s so-called immigration enforcement leaders. We do not know the names of practically everyone under them. The name of Gregory Bovino became known because he is a showoff who enjoyed having his picture taken and posting his exploits on social media. But everyone else in every photo of Bovino has been unidentified. The men standing around Bovino on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks could have been his college roommates or poker buddies, for all we know. They had no name tags. No identifying badges other than “Police.” But they were armed, every one of them, with guns and tear gas and cannisters of pepper spray.

What is the reason for the anonymity of these men? We are told they must be anonymous because they might be “doxed.” That means, if someone learns their name, their home address and other identifying information could be published, and they could – allegedly – be subject to harassment.

So what? Every police officer in every city I cited above is required to wear his or her badge that displays their name and identifying number at all times. If a person who is, for example, stopped for a traffic violation by one of these officers, that person can put up a social media post with the officer’s name and the circumstances of the traffic stop, if the person feels the stop was wrongful. The person can report the officer to his or her higher ups in the police force. A person wrongfully stopped or arrested by a police officer can get a lawyer and file a lawsuit against that officer for wrongful arrest or harassment.

That is the way the system works or is supposed to work. As citizens, we pay the taxes that provide the money to pay the salaries of law enforcement officers to whom we grant the authority and great power to take away the freedom of us or our fellow citizens if crimes have been committed. We give them the authority, if a citizen is caught in the commission of a crime, to detain that citizen, to search his or her person and car or domicile for evidence of the commission of a crime.

We don’t pay our taxes so that masked thugs in pretend military costumes can detain us on the street, throw us to the ground, hit and kick us, and in the recent cases in Minneapolis, kill us because we got in their way or pissed them off by yelling at them or using our cell phones to videotape or take photos of them.

All of us grew up in this country learning in school and college about foreign nations with secret police forces. We learned about Nazi Germany’s Gestapo; the Soviet Union’s KGB; East Germany’s Stazi; Iran’s SAVAK; North Korea’s State Security Department and China’s Ministry of State Security. We read in the news about Chile under Pinochet and Argentina with their secret police “disappearing” people, many of whom were never found or accounted for after decades of looking. In all these countries and in Iraq and Egypt and Cuba and, we learned that secret police were everywhere and could seize people off the streets or out of their homes and spirit them away to secret prisons and keep them behind bars or in cages without warrants, without charges, and without trials.

This is exactly what is being done in this country right this very minute. It was announced by ICE today that on Sunday, 956 people were arrested for immigration offenses. NBC News reported later that the real number was closer to 1,200 arrests, and of that number, NBC discovered that only 613 “were considered criminal arrests,” which probably means the arrestees had criminal records. On Monday, ICE made 1,179 arrests.

I think it is logical to assume that none of those arrested on Sunday or Monday were shown criminal warrants or could learn the identity of the masked agents arresting them. We do not know the names of the prisons or concentration camps where these arrestees are being held. We do know that most ICE arrestees are not granted access to lawyers until deportation proceedings begin against them. They are held in the meantime without knowing the specific immigration offense they are accused of.

Can you imagine being arrested at gunpoint by a masked man and spirited away in an unmarked car and not knowing where you are going, and further, not knowing where you are when you get there? We saw last week an American citizen of Laotian descent arrested by masked and armed men and taken away in an unmarked car wearing nothing but his undershorts and a child’s blanket. After his citizenship was determined hours later, he was returned to his home without explanation or apology. His door had been broken down and his home ransacked by the masked agents. They did not offer to fix the door, straighten up his home, or give him the money to have the door repaired.

This is what the president of the United States has ordered and what the Congress is countenancing every day. Without so much as a vote in Congress, or the presentation of anything more than a bogus “executive order” signed by Trump, we now have the same kind of secret police force that terrorized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Cuba and North Korea and the rest of the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes we once thought we were better than.

No longer. We now have secret police paid by our tax dollars committing crimes against the Constitution on a daily basis. We have seen the enemy, and he is us.