The first Trump administration was a horrible blur for a lot of us, so it's easy to forget that a lot of what we're facing now isn't actually that new.
In the first 100 days of Trump's first, we saw the Muslim Travel Ban and Executive order 13768, among other things. This executive order attempted to deny federal grants to sanctuary districts (oh, familiar), and was one of the hints that ICE was ramping up for mass deportation that Trump had promised within days of the election. People protested, the ACLU sued, Trump struggled to get things going.
But ICE in Washington was still kidnaping well known immigrant rights organizers, and the administration was separating parents from children at the border. (Later the administration adopted out those separated children to other parents, which is both an act of genocide and similar to Russian kidnaping and adopting Ukrainian children to Russian parents in that ongoing genocide.) The ramp up was a *lot* slower, met a lot more resistance last time, and was not as well planned in advance, but the goal wasn't actually different.
By May 2019, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto introduced S.1591 which was titled the "End Mass Deportation Act" that attempted to rescind EO 13768. (Parts of the EO had already been declared unconstitutional by November 2017, but it wasn't completely rescinded until 2021 by Biden.) In June, ICE was working on the logistics of mass deportation. Deporting "1 million people" as promised (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/19/politics/trump-mass-deportations) was just technically difficult. Coming in to July of 2019, Trump's ICE was openly talking about carrying out mass raids. They had busses ready. They started carrying out mass raids throughout the country. Within a few days of the first raids ICE had completely suspended operations and operations remained suspended for several weeks. (This part is from memory, so clear numbers are a bit hard). Even after they did resume operations, they scaled up slowly. By May 2020, the George Floyd uprising was in full swing and Trump had a full on rebellion to deal with. By fall Border Patrol contractors were kidnaping activists off the street and terrorizing people in Portland, but the protests didn't stop until Biden's election was confirmed.
What happened to stop ICE? On July 13, Willem van Spronsen was killed fire bombing an ICE private prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_immigration_detention_center_attack). He managed to damage a few vehicles, IIRC, and directly hindered operations at that specific facility. ICE officials completely stopped operations for several days citing safety concerns. ICE and Trump officials had been in the news talking about how they would fulfill the promise of mass deportation. After Willem, that stopped.
Willem's statement is always worth reading, and is only more relevant now than it was before (https://itsgoingdown.org/on-williem-van-spronsen/).
CECOT was built in 2022, which has given Trump a more terrifying place to send people. But ICE is fundamentally the same. They remain cowards who can be slowed and stopped with sufficient resistance.
They wear all their kit to intimidate people, in the hopes no one will actually stop them. Their kit is for show. It's a costume they hope will protect them because they are, in almost all cases, not trained to *actually use it*.
And a this point, we actually don't know how many of the kidnapings are carried out by ICE at all. Mall cop fash love to cover their face and wear kit. It's not uncommon for them to deputize themselves as border guards, imagining themselves to be revolutionary war minutemen or something. In any given incident, masked people in kit could just as easily be ICE as any vigilante right-wing death squad. (Oh, I'm sorry you have to know that RWDS is absolutely a thing.)
Comedian Cliff Cash pointed this out as well (in his, as he notes, least funny video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_naItk8Egc
Trump has escalated authoritarian terror faster than any authoritarian of which I'm aware. He's doing a speed run of Hitler's rise to power. Usually authoritarians, like Hitler, take years to threaten to send citizens of their own countries to death camps. Trump isn't even through his first 6 months and he's already doing that. As ParkrosePermaculture (https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture) has pointed out in several videos that these threats don't show the strength that Trump is trying to project. Threats, kit, it's all the same: these people are afraid. They know they are weak, and they're trying to project power. Trump brings in other people to blame for the policies he's trying to see rolled out, because he's a coward. These "agents" (if they even are that) wear masks because they are afraid of people knowing who they are and holding them accountable. Musk is trying to buy the illusion of distance from Trump to save himself from the consequences of his actions.
Resistance is working. It's important to keep going and to keep escalating. They are afraid to be seen doing the evil things. If you want them to stop, it is necessary to make them afraid to do the evil things at all.
#USPol #ICE #MassDeporation (re: Cliff Cash #WeAreTheFlood #50501Protests)
