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The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.
We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason, and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into a faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away
The photos and videos from “occupied DC” all have a stunning sameness and banality to them — large squads of masked, heavily-equipped agents from various agencies mostly standing around while making some effectively meaningless arrest or enforcement action that until August would have been routinely handled without note by any of the literally dozens of local and federal police departments that already cover and overlap across all of DC, from the DC Metropolitan Police and Metro Transit Police to the federal agencies like the Park Police, Federal Protective Service, Amtrak Police, FBI Police, Bureau of Engraving & Printing Police, Capitol Police, Government Publishing Office Police, Postal Police, US Mint Police, Smithsonian Police, National Gallery of Art Police and Uniformed Division of the U.S. Secret Service.
Each of these video shows a stupendous and entirely performative waste of taxpayer resources. I’ve even seen badges from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and the criminal investigators of the IRS walking patrols on the streets of DC. It can’t be said enough what an absurd waste of very limited and precious resources — agencies that have specialized training, unique investigative responsibilities, and federal authorities are being deployed to generally intimidate the citizens of the nation’s capital (and, perhaps, in the days ahead, other cities).
All of these agents are being pulled from their active cases and investigations — again, big-deal cases like pursuing terrorism, money laundering, drug cartels, cybercriminals, fugitives, organized crime, and smuggling — to do a job where they have no training in street beat patrol, no training in local laws, and all meanwhile blending into the same banal brown blob of federal agents. WIRED’s investigation into the role of the State Department’s DSS in enforcing immigration is a case in point; these other agents have better things to do!
I’ve previously said that this is like the New York Mets being assigned to work as ball boys in a minor league, but a reader corrected me: The Mets would know something about the game being played. This is more accurately like the Dallas Cowboys working as ball boys in Single A minor league baseball. It is as if our government has decided that there is no crime in the country worth pursuing other than immigration enforcement.
An excerpt from the Doomsday Scenario newsletter by historian Garrett M. Graff.