The Trump administration claims its immigration policy is primarily aimed at deporting criminals, “the worst of the worst.”
That is a lie. And the face exposing that lie is Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old Babson College student, who was arrested at Logan Airport on Thanksgiving morning — the day we commemorate the convivial gathering of Native Americans and immigrants who landed here without permission, settlers who arrived uninvited from England and established the great European tradition of stealing everything from indigenous people they could get their greedy hands on.
The cruelty, the cynicism, the utter soullessness of the Trump administration, and its goon squad, ICE, is laid bare in the case of Lopez Belloza and ongoing occupation of Minneapolis.
They are not focusing on criminals, on people who carry guns and prey on immigrants and native-born Americans alike.
They are grabbing anybody they can to make some arbitrary quota, and they don’t care if US citizens and others who are legally entitled to be here get caught in their web of unlawful incompetence.
They are not following the law. They are breaking it by entering houses without judicial warrants, by stopping people without probable cause, and, in their signature act so far, shooting a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis who dared to challenge their authority.
Aside from a few crackpots, very few Americans, not even those whom Trump and his apologists would dismiss as “left-wing radicals,” have a problem with deporting those who sneak into this country and commit violent crimes.
But don’t insult our intelligence by claiming that deporting a college kid like Lopez Belloza, who has been here since she was a little girl, who had nothing to do with coming here in the first place, is a good use of resources better directed at real criminals.
Lopez Belloza’s first name, Any, perfectly captures Trump’s cynical deportation policy: any body will do. The least threatening, the better. Why risk arresting some thug carrying a gun when you can lug some college kid carrying a book?
These guys running around Boston and the rest of the country, their faces masked, toting guns, locking up college kids, shooting suburban moms who mouth off to them, challenging the citizenship of people who look foreign to them, should be ashamed of themselves.
But they aren’t. Their boss, their commander-in-chief, is using them as pawns in a long game. Trump is spending tens of billions of dollars to create a deportation force that will be second in size and budget only to the various branches of the US military.
To quickly raise the ICE ranks by 10,000, Trump has dramatically lowered the standards of education for agents, so instead of five months of training, they get 48 days. US Park Rangers do a mandatory 11 weeks of training, while most do even more, from an additional four weeks to up to 18 weeks. Do the math.
Besides unleashing poorly trained people with guns and masks on civilian populations, the Trump administration is offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 for many applicants who couldn’t get a job as a real cop.
What could possibly go wrong?
While many of these new ICE agents are demonstrably less disciplined and trained than veteran agents, Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent in Minneapolis who shot Renee Good, had years of experience. And yet he violated every established tactic in law enforcement by standing in front of a vehicle, approaching it while holding a cellphone in one hand and a gun in the other, then fired into a moving vehicle, killing a mother of three while causing a vehicle to careen out of control down a residential street. A recording of the fatal encounter from Ross’ phone that the White House believes exonerates him revealed that he or another agent nearby called Good an unpublishable misogynistic obscenity.
So it isn’t just the paucity of training ICE agents get, it’s what they’re apparently being told they can do without accountability, which is grab anyone who looks foreign to them. Doesn’t matter if they’re US citizens, if they have green cards, if they have every right to be in this country and free of government harassment.
Every day, ICE violates the civil rights of people, masked bulls in a china shop of a country that is supposed to be ruled by laws, not lawless lawmen.
It’s been amusing to listen to the claims of the regime in Washington and various federal officials that people like me in the media are putting ICE agents in danger by encouraging people to challenge their authority and interfere with lawful operations.
I’m not encouraging anyone to defy law enforcement. Ordinary citizens who are upset by what they’ve seen ICE do over the last year don’t need journalists to encourage them to oppose ICE or engage in civil disobedience.
By refusing to show their faces or identification, by baselessly stopping or roughing up “suspects” who often turn out to be guilty of nothing, by breaking windows in cars because they can’t tolerate having their authority challenged, by knocking cellphones out of the hands of people who are legally filming their public actions, by shooting suburban moms to death, by singling out cities run by Democrats while ignoring places run by Republicans, by operating like thugs without any accountability, ICE is doing a pretty good job of undermining its credibility on its own.
In any real constitutional republic, what happened in Minneapolis, after what happened in Chicago, what happened to a college kid in Boston, would lead to, if not prosecutions of ICE agents, at the very least a time out, a moment of reflection and introspection, maybe an acknowledgement that the current path the government is on is the wrong one. They might want to consider that they are losing the confidence of a growing majority of Americans, not just the “radicals” they imagine behind every sign, every curse, every middle finger, every challenge to their authority.
The wheels on this totalitarian bus are coming loose. In Minnesota, a bunch of federal prosecutors, including the one who gave Trump the pretext to invade Minnesota in the first place by indicting a bunch of Somalians for fraud, resigned rather than take part in a sham investigation into the killing of Renee Good.
In Boston, a prosecutor admitted the government screwed up by deporting the Babson College student in violation of a court order.
In Vermont, the prosecutor who presided over the cases of two college students who were arrested not for things they did but things they said, broke down in tears at his confirmation hearing for the Vermont Supreme Court and distanced himself from ICE’s actions.
The ICE, it appears, is melting.
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