yustyoking

Winter Wunderland

A bitterly cold winter, the people of Minneapolis are battling snow and ICE.

It turns out we libs have been afraid of the wrong bogeyman. We have feared MAGA, when the real blackguard is the Department of Homeland Security being converted into a domestic thugocracy.

There are 3,000 Department of Homeland Security agents deployed across Minnesota at this time, some from CBP, Customs and Border Protection, and others from ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They are making daily arrests and sometimes they shoot people.

What surprises me is the lack of discipline among the ICE troops. When I see a video of an ICE agent approaching a vehicle, exclaiming “Open the door! Open the door! Open the fucking door!” I am appalled. This angry profanity is not standard police procedure. I have been yelled at by a police officer for exiting my vehicle at a traffic stop, but I have never been cussed out.

When a fellow ICE officer on that icy street in Minneapolis then unholstered his pistol and shot Ms. Renée Good dead, this strikes me as an unnecessary escalation of a situation which— had cooler heads prevailed— could have been resolved in a very different fashion.

Once upon a time, I was a U.N. peacekeeper. We encountered annoying sniper fire and constant disappointment, which got on our nerves. We were sent to carry out a specific mission and we never seemed to reach our goal. Occasionally in our brigade, one of my fellow soldiers would spit out a hate-filled rant over one or another of the combatants whom we had been sent to pacify. It always caught me off-guard to encounter so much anger, but professional soldiers, we never let our emotions color our actions. That may sound like a categorical denial of human nature, but it’s true: Angry and disgruntled, we still treated our contact with the locals with utmost caution. The last thing we wanted to do was get in a firefight with those people.

In Minneapolis, seventeen days after the Renée Good debacle, there was a second killing. This time it was a dude named Alex Pretti, a male intensive care nurse employed by the Veterans Administration. When he went to help a female demonstrator who had been knocked to the ground, a hodgepodge of agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit piled atop 37-year-old Alex. Disarming him of his legally licensed handgun, two agents of the Border Patrol then fatally shot him, firing ten or more rounds within five seconds.

Gaslighting the voters, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed Pretti was an assassin who tried to murder the federal agents. A half dozen videos taken from various angles show something completely different. A scrum in rugby perhaps.

“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, defending the actions of the government agents. Noem blames Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for using inflammatory rhetoric to fan protest in the state. She also claims that Renée Good committed an “act of domestic terrorism.” The videos show Renée was driving away in her car at 5 mph, her wife Becca next to her in the front seat and her dog in the back, which makes it hard to understand exactly what kind of terrorism Kristi Noem has in mind.

According to mainstream media, Department of Homeland Security officers have fired shots 16 times since July, either while making arrests or at people protesting their operations.   

ILHAN OMAR, member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota’s 5th district, has called for Kristi Noem to be impeached and for ICE to be abolished.   

Since everybody and his brother is writing reams about ICE in Minnesota, I want to raise two issues that seldom get mentioned. Where are the ICE agents housed? Barracks bitching often leads to gross public behavior. Angry soldiers don’t exit the airplane angry, their frustration and anger is a boots-on-the-ground reaction to daily confrontation with an unruly public. The antisemites of my youth got infected with that attitude every evening at the family dinner table. Hearing their fathers badmouth the Jews, they felt empowered to beat the crap out of us Jewish kids.

The ICE agent jumping in his van in the morning has spent an evening listening to complaints from his fellow ICEmen, stoking his anger and giving him a very negative view of his urban environment. At what motel or National Guard depot are these people staying? Where do these people go to eat? What kind of leadership are they being given around the dinner table and what are they being told regarding the day’s events? Is a total trainwreck being met with a pat on the back and a reminder that DHS agents have total immunity from prosecution while carrying out their duties?

Noem complains that ICE agents are being harassed at their hotels and in local restaurants. She also claims that their families have come under threat. Well d’uh? You run around all day in masks, carrying guns, arresting people, then you find the locals have a negative view of your activities? Gee, I wonder why.

My second question regards the protesters. Who are these people and how do they have so much time on their hands? We had a major snowfall in the Washinton, DC area last Sunday. Even worse, the snow was followed by rain and sleet, forming a crust of ice atop the snow. This makes for great “snowcrete,” blocks of ice perfect for building an igloo. Unfortunately, they weigh a ton. Hacking these ice blocks on my driveway into manageable chunks and piling them in my yard, my back is killing me. Listen, any of you demonstrators in Minneapolis are welcome to grab a snow shovel or an axe, jump a plane and join me here in Maryland! I’ll supply the hot coffee and the overnight stay.

Yes, I understand why the demonstrators are recording the ICE agents’ nefarious activities. I applaud their civic engagement. They are providing an invaluable record of the heinous b.s. being perpetrated by ICE. I am just curious about their domestic situation. How do they manage to free up time in the middle of the day to engage in civil disobedience? They can’t all be nepo babies or night workers.

Without wading into the debate about fascist brown shirts within ICE or whether Kristi Noem is a danger to American democracy, I will simply say that 90% of ICE activity in Minneapolis looks suspiciously unconstitutional. If the video record is any indication, the right to gather in public protest, the right to free speech, constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure as well as the sanctity of the home are all being violated. The Trump administration’s smoke and mirrors pseudo-justifications do not change the facts on the ground: White American protesters are getting shot dead by federal agents in a hail of bullets.