Attribution: Paul Goyette from Chicago, USA, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Geoff Carter
There is a crime wave, an epidemic of violence that has erupted in the streets of our cities. Armed gangs are randomly accosting and brutalizing innocent citizens in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities. These masked thugs are ramming their victims’ cars with their own vehicles, beating them, kidnapping them, and hauling them away to parts unknown. They are breaking down doors, kidnapping children, and waging chemical warfare against peaceful gatherings. In several instances, innocent victims have been shot, and two, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, have been murdered on the street in broad daylight by these thugs.
Who are these out-of-control maniacs, these brutal sociopaths, these masked criminals? Are they terrorists, gangbangers, cartel hitmen, or narcoterrorists? No. They are federal ICE and Border Patrol agents, members of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement working for the Department of Homeland Security. They are your tax dollars at work.
The Department of Homeland Security has brought these ICE and Border Patrol thugs into our cities to arrest and deport immigrants who they have termed “dangerous criminals”, but, apparently, the majority of these dangerous criminals they’ve arrested are fathers, children, mothers, nurses, and honest working folks.
The Trump administration is so hell-bent on implementing his deportation policies that they don’t seem to care who it is they are arresting. They are only concerned with reaching their daily quotas of arrests. These thus don’t bother following procedure or obeying the law as they do so. Multiple reports of ICE officers breaking into homes without warrants, kidnapping people from their cars, often breaking their windows and cutting their seatbelts, and arbitrarily arresting citizens without cause or warrants have raised questions about their training and suitability for this type of work.
In Chicago a few weeks ago, ICE officers have tear gassed peaceful protestors, terrorized groups of schoolchildren on their way to a Halloween party and hit a clergyman in the head with a smoke grenade during another protest.
According to a report in Mother Jones, ICE is hiring like crazy. “The agency is offering candidates signing bonuses and plans a $100 million “wartime recruitment” effort that includes geo-targeted ads and influencers targeting gun rights supporters and UFC fights attendees to bring in as many as 10,000 new hires.” Who are these guys, the thugs who beat people, kidnap children, and murder innocent people in cold blood?
In their haste to fill these positions in order to meet the White House quota of 3,000 deportations a day, underqualified and incompetent candidates are not being properly vetted before being hired. Even veterans like Jonathan Ross (the agent who cold-bloodedly shot Renee Good in the head as she drove away from him) who are veterans of Border Security and ICE, seem to have been given carte blanche to wreak havoc in our cities. And wreak havoc they have.
Immigration enforcement does not seem to be the point of this invasion. Rather, ICE and the DHS seem bent on intimidating and bullying the public, keeping them under the thumb of Trump and his cronies.
As Scott Shuchart, who previously worked at the Office of Civil Rights in the DHS says, “They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things. Violent interactions with the public aren’t surprising. That’s sort of by design” (Mother Jones). It’s bad enough that trained and experienced agents like Jonathan Ross are acting like they’re in the Wild West, but what about ICE’s huge influx of new hires? Who are these guys?
According to The Independent, in their rush to hire thousands of agents, ICE has accepted recruits who are either severely underqualified and should have been disqualified due criminal records, failure to pass entrance exams, and the inability to pass physical tests. According to Gustavo Soli from KPBS, “ICE has already lowered hiring, training, and oversight standards.” Solis further states that, “The agency waived age restrictions that previously required applicants to be older than 21 and younger than 37 or 40 depending on the role. DHS officials also cut down ICE’s 18-week training course to eight weeks, and waived Spanish-language requirements, vehicle pursuit courses and other training.”
ICE officer training has since been reduced to forty-seven days (Trump is the 47th president, after all—cute) and then further reduced to forty-five days. A vigorous online recruiting campaign has included ads reminiscent of World War II recruiting posters, implying the ICE campaign against immigrants is on a wartime footing. (X)
Experts have also voiced concerns that some of the advertising aimed at possible ICE recruits contains white supremacist imagery. One X post shows groups of white settlers headed west with the banner of “A Heritage to be Proud of, A Homeland to Defend” which seems innocuous enough until viewed through the eyes of a white nationalist. According to Professor Simi, a Chapman State sociologist, the capitalization of the words “heritage” and “homeland” are capitalized, signifying a codified reference. “In white supremacist circles, H.H. stands for Heil Hitler,” says Simi.
Simi goes on to point out that the message contains exactly fourteen words, a hidden reference to another slogan central to white supremacist ideology, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” which, according to Simi, is “one of the most central slogans among white supremacists,” Simi said. “They reference it in everything from tattoos, to t-shirts, to emails. It’s just ubiquitous among these folks.” (KPBS)
So, it seems that the folks at ICE have been targeting young white male white supremacists to round up immigrants without warrants, without cause, and without mercy. These “agents” are turning out to be nothing more than a lawless mob of violent thugs, much like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and garden variety January 6th rioters pardoned by Donald Trump on the first day of his second presidential term (BBC). This begs the question of where those Proud Boys and other white supremacists are now. Besides the fact that some of them may feel a debt of gratitude to the president, joining ICE is also pretty darn lucrative.
Signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness, and starting wages up $80,000 a year to join ICE are pretty attractive. Yet in their rush to arm persons of questionable integrity and let them loose of the streets of our cities, ICE has fumbled the ball. According to The Independent, over 200 candidates in training were dismissed for failing physical standards, academic standards, or failing drug tests and background checks. This begs the question if they caught two hundred who fell through the cracks, how many more made it through the new egregiously abbreviated ICE training program?
Who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti? We know Agent Jonathan Ross committed cold-blooded murder when he shot Good in the head. We know he fled the scene, as any criminal would. We may never know who shot Alex Pretti. These masked killers have not been held accountable. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and White House and US Homeland Security Advisor Steven Miller have not only demonized the victims, labeling them domestic terrorists, but also blocking criminal investigations of the killings by local authorities.
Almost immediately after both shootings, these two insisted that Good and Pretti were threatening agents, assertions that—when compared to video evidence—were proved to be baldly and cynically false. Yet even after these stories were debunked, Noem and Miller insisted their version of the facts was the truth, that Americans believe their story, not their own eyes. Sorry, guys, they’re not that stupid. They are shielding the guilty. They are hiding the truth. They are lying to us.
We need justice for the dead, justice for the wronged, and peace for all. ICE needs to go. This administration, from top to bottom, also needs to go.