New Orleans In the United States there are many laws about not using military forces in domestic matters. The contentious efforts by the Trump administration to mobilize the National Guard, bypassing the legal authority of state governors, to target alleged increases in crime in largely blue, Democrat-controlled cities and states, like Chicago and Los Angeles, was a vivid example of this illegal overreach. The courts have forced a pullback on those Trump tactics, but the charge that Trump was militarizing his autocratic grudges against what he perceived as his political foes, didn’t go away.
The huge appropriations to fund Trump’s mass deportation campaign against immigrants using agents from the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) troops resurfaced the same charges, particularly for the cities targeted, and partially for the roughhouse, recklessly aggressive and militarized tactics used by the agents. On top of that, not only were they armed and dangerous, they were masked with flack jackets and kitted out within a hair of looking like regular Army troops. The killings in Minneapolis of citizen observers who still believed that accountability for these shock troops was possible, has led to some temporary reprieve, but away from the headlines, this anti-immigrant assault continues in full force, arresting more than 1000 per day, few of whom have any criminal record.
Nonetheless, if there was any remaining doubt that Trump sees ICE as his own personal militarized police force, that fiction had disappeared completely. The curtain was pulled away as Americans enter the second month of the shutdown of some DHS funding, impacting the TSA agents who handle security at the nation’s airports. Trump has now threatened to deploy ICE agents to handle airport security, unless the Democrats capitulate on their demands for ICE accountability. In a report on this threat, the president seems almost deranged,
Trump’s threat comes as airports across the country are experiencing longer wait times and delays — at the height of the spring break travel season — and as agents have called out en masse or quit. Officials have warned that some small airports may have to close if staffing levels continue to drop. Trump wrote that the ICE agents staffing airports would also conduct aggressive immigration operations, in what would be an escalation of immigration enforcement tactics for an agency already under scrutiny for what critics in both parties say is a heavy-handed approach. The president said that their duties would also include “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia,” continuing his attack on a population he has disparaged in defense of his contentious immigration operation in Minnesota.
What the heck, if you are the president and you are calling out your private police force against new targets, this time I guess spring break tourists, why not inject a little racism into the mess and take a shot at Somalians while you’re at it?
I digress. The point is that ICE cannot be a federal police force mobilized by a president or anyone else at domestic targets. It’s like ICE is Trump’s personal Pinkertons allowing him to break strikes whether by the slowdowns and sickouts of TSA workers or recalcitrant Democrats who want him to rein in ICE. Trump seems to be demonstrating in spades, exactly the problem that Democrats in Congress are resisting.
Trump never seems to understand that there are consequences to acting on his whims. Fire away and start a war with Iran, and there will be economic shocks and oil shortages around the world. Let ICE go wild, and maybe airports will slow down a bit. There has to be some accountability for ICE. The same goes for the president.