Trump Escalates the Violence Using Secret Police
National news outlets are picking up on the fact that the White House and its cabinet Dept. of Homeland Security have been sending armed, camouflaged officers to my town to harass protesters, against the wishes of state and local leaders. Video after video posted online shows civilians engaged in no illegal activity (in some cases they are only trying to help injured/fallen people and are clearly marked as medics), targeted, rushed, restrained, and then thrown into vans by these armed officers. The vans speed away and the victims are not heard from, sometimes for days.
Who are these armed, camouflaged men? The news says they are law enforcement officers from DHS agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol. But their camo military uniforms have no insignia or other agency markings, and no identifying names or numbers. Their vans are not federal vehicles; they have been rented from a local rental car company and bear no agency markings or ID. In short, there is no way to know exactly who they are or whether they generally have authority to subdue, search, seize and detain individuals. They could be anyone as far as we know.
What happens to the detainees? According to reports from detainees themselves, they are not told where they are being taken or who is taking them, or why. They are not read their rights because they are technically not under arrest. There is no warrant and no probable cause, nor even “reasonable suspicion”. They are brought to a building and a room where they are held for an unknown amount of time. They are not allowed to call or contact anyone, nor to leave the room. They are asked questions without their lawyer present. When they are finally released from the building, they figure out that they have been held inside a U.S. federal courthouse. They are given no assistance or way home. All of these things, incidentally, are illegal for any person (law enforcement or not) to do to another person (criminal suspect or not) under the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, and under state criminal and tort law.
Why are they doing this? Their “help” in managing protests has not been solicited by the City of Portland, Multnomah County, or the State of Oregon. Well….It has been correctly pointed out online that the Gestapo employed very similar tactics against those who resisted (or simply did not join in the racism) during Nazi rule in Germany, quite successfully. This type of illegal activity is intended to 1. escalate and exacerbate tension and violence, strengthening the fallacy that the brutal response was indeed needed in the first place; 2. play to the President’s voter base, who disapprove of the anti-racism protests, close to the election; 3. intimidate and deter anyone who might have been thinking about joining the protests; 4. make the Administration appear strong and invincible to the public, reinforcing a shoulder-shrug, eh-what-you-gonna-do-let’s-move-on kind of attitude among the majority; and 5. enable and encourage the illegal activity of far-right extremist vigilante/militia groups, who are known to don military-style armor and take up weapons to violently harass anti-fascist and anti-racism protesters.
What is the big picture long game here? I believe Portland is a small-scale, relatively-low-risk beta test for the Administration. If the State of Oregon’s lawsuit against DHS is successful and the White House is body slammed by the courts, it likely won’t harm Trump’s approval rating nationally or upset too many folks outside of the Pacific Northwest. But if the Trump Administration gets away with this, you can bet money that we will see similar operations spring up in New York, Chicago, LA, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, St. Louis, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC of course, and across the nation.
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