Out of Control
(Published as the lead comment in the New Yorker magazine’s ‘Talk of the Town’ section in its print edition dated February 9, usually distributed about a week earlier, with the headline “Out of Control,” by Jonathan Blitzer, BUT STILL WORTHWHILE READING.)
“When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it.
Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics.
With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.
The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable.
For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground.
Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” These lies were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump.
Shortly after Pretti’s killing, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked D.O.J. lawyers.
On Tuesday (last week), in the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.
The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from Operation Metro Surge is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.
No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born.
A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.
On Wednesday (last week), a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”
Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.
Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country.
After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with the President to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. "
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So what are YOU going to do about it? We still have a Constitution, don’t we?
JL
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Pick a Party
It is almost impossible to pin a permanent label on our two major political parties. But I will give it a try.
With some exceptions, since the years after the Civil War and lasting until 1932, both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed to be the party of the people rather than the party of the entrenched wealthy. History shows, however, that both parties, often silently in cahoots with shady politicians, frequently veered between populism and protecting a supposedly capitalist economy, still influenced by the shadows cast by the Civil War.
But starting in 1932, after the Republicans’ pro-business philosophy nearly destroyed our economy, the Democrats estblished themselves as the people’s party when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms helped to revive it and generally, that has been the case since then, despite the often inaccurate claims of the Republicans.
While there is no guarantee that there will not be future changes in these Parties’ orientations in the foreseeable future, it is clear that the ordinary people of this country ought to be voting for Democrats, and shunning any candidate with the G.O.P. label. Even when a Republican is on the people’s side on a particular issue, in my opinion, voting for them strengthens the G.O.P., as it exists today, in a broad sense and is unwise.
The regulatory role of government in areas Democrats generally support (retirement benefits, health care plans, financial regulations, food and drug laws, workplace safety, environmental protection, unemployment insurance, etc.) clearly benefits most people.
Opposing that role does not benefit the people but pleases those in the highest income tax brackets, and those who are so wealthy that they have figured out ways of not paying any taxes at all, who claim such programs cost too much and are filled with fraud; that is where most Republicans voters can be found, preferring to stress individual choices or freedoms. That sounds good.
While the naïve or gullible might buy into that, really, that difference between the Democratic and the Republican Partys’ approaches means that the best choice for most people usually is to vote for Democratic candidates who are unafraid to support government regulations benefiting most Americans where necessary.
In addition, the argument that our nation’s historic rights should be for its ciitizens only and not be readily available to those in this country who are not citizens is no reason to mount attacks upon those rights, excuses often used by Republicans who do that.
Another reason to shun the Republican Party is that Donald Trump, clearly unfit to be president, pretends to be a Republican and has done much not only to destroy that Party, but to destroy our democracy as well, ignoring the rights guaranteed to the people by the Constitution and its Amendments. The only Party he belongs to is his personal one. He tries to do only what benefits himself. That the Republican Party has not repudiated him and separated itself from him is making most Americans leery of all Republicans. Watch and see what happens in the November mid-term elections.
Those elections are also why the President is talking about changing the rules for elections, taking power from the States and giving it to the Federal government. He ignores the fact that doing so is unconstitutional. The sooner he leaves office, the better for all Americans, and the worse for despots in totalitarian nations who enjoy doing business with him (from which he and his family profit), and whom he tries to emulate, putting his name on everything in sight. They laugh at him behind his back.
If you are the owner of a thriving business, dislike government regulations, are a shrewd investor, or otherwise have a lot of money, it is perhaps understandable that you might be voting Republican. But such voters are in the minority. Yet, Republicans still manage to get elected to office. The preceding posting on Jackspotpourri (February 7) addresses this problem. Please go back and read it and access some of the links it provides. On many devices, it follows this posting directly.
JL
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Why Party Makes a Difference
Right Now
This difference between our two major parties is of immediate significance to the nation because February 13 is the deadline for lawmakers to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct.
Some of these items the Republicans have already rejected, including unmasking federal agents and requiring judicial warrants, a sign that the two sides are still far apart on the issue. Failing to come to some agreement can result in a partial government shutdown, and jeopardize the earlier agreement which funds most other government functions, but only for the next seven months, shortly before the mid-term elections.
Past behavior suggests that the Administration’s immigration enforcement, even without renewed funding, will continue to break the law, violating the Constitution and its Amendments, with funds being illegally moved from other areas by an unscrupulous Administation.
And while we’re talking about politics, check out Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ dated February 7 and 8. Just click here or copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your device’s browser line.
The February 7 posting might make you ashamed to be an American, especially if you vote for Republicans. Read it to find out why.
And the February 8 posting, centering on the damage done to America by the late Senator Joe McCarthy, should remind American voters of the dangers of voting for Republicans. His viciouness still echoes through parts of the G.O.P.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
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More on the Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now becoming the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations.
Besides these sources, I also utilize the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
After such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than any AI summary. I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
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