Maximum terror, zero accountability: Welcome to ICE’s America
This isn’t about lousy training or missing body cameras or bad apples. This is intentional. This is how ICE operates: Maximum terror. Zero accountability.
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This is what happens when people with unchecked power dehumanize an entire people and blame them for everything they deem wrong with this country. This is what happens when they give hyped-up bullies license to go into communities and intimidate and harass everyone, including American citizens. This is what happens when they feel no shame, and fear no consequences.
They shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in the head and dragged his limp body out of his car, dumping him out on the street near his home in Biddeford, Maine. He wasn’t even the one they were looking for, but who can tell the difference between these people, right? He wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last.
Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who recently voted to give these lawless ICE thugs another $70 billion of our money, is busy trying to keep her job. She took credit for convincing Homeland Security to reduce ICE traffic stops in the wake of Guerrero’s killing. It didn’t take long for President Trump to yank the rug out from under her, like he always does, to everyone.
“We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he wrote on social media.
Why would they give it up? They want tens of millions of immigrants and their families gone. And they want to please the MAGA diehards who agree that those who dare to remain here deserve to suffer. Ripping kids away from their parents, allowing detainees to die in ICE hellholes, shooting immigrants, and even the occasional citizen, in broad daylight? Well, they knew what they were getting into, didn’t they? And it all sends a useful message: Get out, or you could be next.
“We’re well past the stage of saying, ‘Well, they don’t know how to do their jobs,’” Congressman Bill Keating, a Cape Cod Democrat, said in an interview. “This is the way, evidently, they want to do the job.”
We used to have a country where Congress would sometimes defend the rule of law, and hold the president accountable for excesses this awful and deadly. But the GOP majority is showering Trump and his hateful goons with endless blank checks. Federal authorities stymie investigations into the shootings, whisking away the triggermen and refusing to name them, compromising potential crime scenes, making spurious claims that a dead driver tried to kill them, and refusing to hand over evidence for months, if at all. Local authorities find themselves begging, or suing, for basic information.
Keating was the DA in Norfolk County for 12 years. He knows that the way ICE agents are behaving — targeting people indiscriminately, getting in front of cars, shooting into them, and compromising forensic evidence — has nothing to do with policing.
“They’re trying to create chaos and fear,” he said. “They’re putting people in untenable situations so they self-deport. They want the numbers. This is an accounting game.”
Keating and his Democratic colleagues try to hold the line, but Republicans hold the power, and the extremists on the Supreme Court have supercharged the president’s power. Democrats tried to withhold funding for ICE, demanding measures that would make them more accountable, but Republicans voted through the money. Keating and others have been visiting detention facilities to meet with immigrants, but ICE has made it exponentially more difficult recently, imposing onerous new conditions on elected officials, and on the detainees willing to risk speaking with them.
“We have a role as a check on any executive,” Keating said. “It is our core responsibility. What happens when we can’t have that oversight?”
We’re seeing what happens, in Biddeford and Houston and Minneapolis and beyond.
This is not how a democracy operates.
“The difference between a democratic and authoritarian regime is that in a democracy, abuses are considered mistakes, and there are serious efforts to investigate and ensure accountability when they happen,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and an expert on authoritarianism. “That is systematically not happening.”
The government has repeatedly made claims after these shootings that blame the victims, and which are contradicted by video and eyewitness testimony. Federal authorities have derided calls for accountability as at odds with the administration’s “America First” priorities. The regime has reveled in the brutality of its immigration crackdown.
“This is performative fascism,” Levitsky said. “This is something we haven’t seen much in the world since the 1930s, which is open displays of violence.”
The cruelty may please the most ardent of the president’s fans, but it is turning off other voters. Still, the administration is so committed to its exclusionary project, or so confident in its electoral prospects, that adviser Stephen Miller and others leading the crackdowns don’t seem worried.
“They’re communicating to the entire world that this is not a place you want to live if you’re not a citizen,” Levitsky said.
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The rest of us must decide if we want to live in this America, too.
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