Above photo: Signs of authoritarianism on display outside a Tesla showroom. J. Zangas / DCMediaGroup.
It Will Soon Be Difficult To Claw Our Way Back.
Arlington, VA—If anything is true about Tesla Takedown Arlington activists, it’s that they’re not afraid to take on bullies. On Saturday, they went after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), slamming it for its illegal kidnapping policy and the state-created chaos the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spreading across the country.
Several protestors brought signs written in Spanish “Chinga la Migra por Vida,” translating to F— ICE forever. This message connected with many dozens of Latino motorists passing the Arlington Tesla showroom on their way to and from weekend yard work, or various labor-intensive employments, judging by the tools and equipment they carried in their truck beds. Some may have been returning home to families or going shopping. And many gave a resounding thumbs up and lots of honks in approval of the new signage critical of ICE.
By the end of Saturday’s Tesla Takedown, everyone there knew how to pronounce the catchphrase and what it meant. Apparently it originated in Los Angeles, where ICE agents have been terrorizing immigrant communities and their workspaces for months.
The Tesla Takedown tapped a torrent of support from Latinos, which the boycott line had not expected and did not know existed. And yet, it was right at the curbside, passing them by these last five months outside the Arlington Tesla showroom.
By focusing on the ICE terror in their signage, the boycott line brought out some of the most damning examples of how this regime has effectively morphed more closely into a fascist regime. The Trump regime has funded ICE $75 billion for ICE operations over the next four years to supercharge ICE into a secret police force. Its roving patrols and seizures of individuals of a particular ethnicity, all while denying them due process, will give ICE powers beyond any police force in the U.S. The regime awarded ICE $45 billion for building concentration camps in which to hold them captive in deplorable conditions. In total, Trump’s bill allocated $165 billion for immigration enforcement, seizure, building encampments, border walls, and relocation to other countries.
Taken as a whole, ICE, which falls under control of DHS, is no different than the Gestapo secret police of early Nazi Germany. When the Gestapo began persecuting Jews in post-WWI Germany, it was a gradual progression of scapegoating Jews through myths and misinformation by the Nazi party. Nazis gradually stripped Jews of rights and banned them from serving in positions of power and from the armed forces. The Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, in which Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were looted and burned, lead to the rounding up of Jews in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia once Nazis gained uncontested power in post-WWI Germany. The Nazis did this in part as a self-purported purification of their race but also, in part, out of economic envy. The Gestapo stripped Jews of their rights, dignity, religious practices and their citizenship. They separated Jewish families, removed them from society by crowding them into ghettos, then shipped them in boxcars to concentration camps.
ICE is orchestrating a similar scenario now by rounding up Latinos and other minorities under the fabrication that they are criminals, they are taking jobs from U.S. citizens, they are members of gangs, or they have come to the U.S. illegally. ICE roundups are so fragmented, misdirected, and disorganized, that they have even seized U.S. citizens who fit their arbitrary appearance standard for who appears to be a suspect. ICE has outpaced the Gestapo in that they have jumped right past nearly all the initial stages the Gestapo used to persecute Jews and have gone straight into roving patrol roundups. And ICE is implementing it at a much faster rate—attempting to seize 3,000 people a day. ICE bases its justifications for their arbitrary roundups on junk law and its grossly contorted interpretation of justice—just like the Nazis did.
U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong of the Central District of California ruled as much when she issued a temporary restraining order late on Friday, July 11, against DHS Secretary Kristi Noam and the subordinates in her chain of command whom Noem tasked with implementing Trump’s orders. In her ruling, Judge Frimpong wrote that DHS and ICE:
- cannot conduct roving patrols to detain people based on race or ethnicity
- cannot deny people legal representation
- must honor the constitutional rights of all people, including immigrants, under the 4th and 5th Amendments of the Constitution
- cannot deny immigrants access to an attorney or the ability to seek representation
- must use warrants in all cases
- must provide those being held at a temporary ICE holding cell in LA access to phones to contact families and attorneys
Judge Frimpong further wrote that since Trump began his self-described “largest mass-deportation operation in history” on June 6, “federal law enforcement arrived in Los Angeles to participate [in] roving patrols to indiscriminately round up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion and having done so, denied these individuals access to lawyers who could help them navigate the legal process they found themselves in. What the Federal Government would have this court believe—in the face of a mountain of evidence presented, is that none of this is actually happening.”
Defining ICE For What It Is: An Authoritarian’s Secret Police Force
Exposing how ICE has sharply increased roundups requires correct definitions delineating the parallels between ICE and the Nazi persecution of Jews from 1933 to 1945. Some are suggesting not to describe ICE as doing the same things the Gestapo did, because it dilutes the seriousness of the crimes against humanity for which the Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg. The Nazi party took time to ramp up its persecution of the Jews from the initial stripping of rights, to moving them to ghettos, to shipping them to internment camps, to the mass murder, and to the final chapter of the death marches. ICE just hasn’t reached that stage yet. But it could reach that stage and, based on the unrelenting speed with which it has coalesced and the whopping funds it is being provided, ICE may not be able to stop itself.
One reason ICE may be unable to stop itself is because this regime’s power lust and it’s demonstrated inability to hold itself accountable to both moral and legal standards. It has already revealed what it is capable of doing to elected officials and others operating within the prerogative of their government offices. The recent arrests of high profile officials opposed to their immigration policies are a warning of what is to come.
They include an FBI arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly interfering with the seizure of an immigrant undergoing proceedings in her courtroom; the arrest New Jersey Representative LaMonica McIver for allegedly interfering with ICE operations when she was exercising her legal oversight of a private detention center to her district; and the ICE arrest of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander at a federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan, though he was later released. The ICE agents arrest and accuse citizens of assault, although video has confirmed they are clearly not assaulting ICE agents. These incidents demonstrate that ICE and DHS immigration actions are taking this country into the abyss of human rights abuses and stolen liberty, and it will be very difficult for us to claw our way back out. Once this becomes entrenched in practice, it will be easier for ICE to use their power to go after opponents and silence them too.
ICE is not a traditional police force, rather they operate as secret police, and by its actions, ICE is comparable to the Gestapo of the Nazi party. The agents executing the kidnappings are masked and hidden behind black face cloths and dressed as paramilitary forces dress. This is designed to instill terror in a specific ethnicity and economic class across the entire country.
Standard police forces have an elected chief, a sheriff, or a chief of police appointed by an elected mayor. As a federal agency, ICE has no defined jurisdictional zone; they don’t display or disclose names or badges to identify themselves and they do not arrive in marked vehicles representing their jurisdictional authority. They arrive in unmarked vehicles without license plates or painted logos, and they bring no warrants or charges with them to serve on specific individuals. They have operated with no grand jury impaneled by the state or locality to determine if the state’s charges are of sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution. ICE therefore operates with no definable code in a functioning republic where individual rights and liberties are respected and honored.
Detaining a person implies that people who are suspected of a crime are being afforded due process. ICE is not detaining people. ICE is violently hard-arresting people, and when they encounter resistance, throwing individuals to the ground, jumping on them and choking them. Video recordings made by concerned citizens offer proof of this. ICE is not showing warrants or evidence of any crime having taken place. They are disappearing people based on skin color and ethnicity alone.
ICE is not affording due process. The Latinos being kidnapped and disappeared are not given the opportunity to appear before a judge. They are not having any charges read to them and are not given an opportunity to respond as to their guilt or innocence. They are denied the opportunity to depose the charges against them as afforded by the 4th and 5th Amendments of the Constitution.
ICE internment facilities are actually concentration camps, not jails or prisons. Once silenced, ICE shuttles Latinos away in unmarked vans. Their whereabouts are unknown and they are housed in crowded temporary holding cells until they can be stolen away to be locked inside cages of mass camps in other states without anyone knowing where they are or how to contact them.
Conditions inside the concentration camps are inhumane. Inmates are being caged, according to State Congressman Maxwell Frost (FL-10), who gave a first-person account of what he saw on Saturday, July 12. “These people are being caged with 32 people per cage and only 3 toilets for a group of 32 grown men. Where they drink water comes from the toilet-spigot. The food portions are horrible. It was very warm and hot in the tent. I saw people sweating. People were yelling, ‘Help me, help me.’”
Up to this point, ICE has run unchallenged in cities across the U.S., confiscating people as if they were chattel and the U.S. were operating as a slave state rounding up its escaped slaves.
Will Accountability Come To ICE Leaders
The last thing anyone in the Nazi Party envisioned was that their final judgment day would come at the Nuremberg trials. The allies and Soviet Union convened an International Military Tribunal (IMT) to hold Nazi leaders accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, false imprisonment, and hate crimes. The trials began in 1945, almost immediately after WWII, and lasted two years. In all, 22 Nazi leadership survivors were accused of the concentration camp murders of millions of Jews. The defendants were afforded representation and translation of the words of their accusers into their native language. They were given an opportunity to respond to the charge, were presented with all the evidence used against them, and they were allowed to face their accusers. They were provided livable conditions during their trials.
None of those rounded up by ICE have been afforded any of these rights, and that in itself is an indictment against the ICE roving patrols and kidnappings and especially against those in its chain of command.
One of the arguments proposed as a defense by the accused Nazi criminals was that they were just following orders, but the argument did not bode well for them at their sentencing. Of the 22 defendants tried at Nuremberg, 12 were convicted and sentenced to hang, seven were sentenced to prison terms and three were acquitted.
ICE is not accused of the war crimes and organized mass murder that the Nazi party leaders committed. But the conditions ICE has created, false imprisonment, hate crimes, and deplorable camp conditions, could lead to the death of many innocent people. This is based on first-hand accounts of visiting officials from within the Everglades concentration camp.
The chain of command leaders at ICE will be held responsible for their treatment of the thousands they have seized and many thousands yet to be disappeared in their camps. Future generations will look harshly on what leaders did or failed to do to protect those who were held in subhuman conditions in the ICE camps. Following orders will not be a workable defense at their future trials. History will judge this American period harshly.
