I have been associating ICE and their growing posse of Homeland Security Task Forces (HESTAFO) reinforcements with the GESTAPO in Nazi Germany and Poland, where my grandparents and two of their children were rounded up, transported and executed. They were considered animals, dangerous and illegal by Nazi law.
Yesterday I had a revelation that at first made me deeply embarrassed that my understandable association apparently blinded me to a parallel, more obvious and closer to my American home. The epiphany came when I heard the powerful dirge Is ICE Today’s Klan? sung by Louise, whom I don’t know, as part of the regular podcast Thom Hartmann’s Daily Take.
The parallel to the Klan was even more chilling in that the Gestapo didn’t wear masks when they did their armed roundups with governmental impunity and societal acquiescence. ICE and the Hestafo do. So did the Klan. Why? As Republicans have maintained and Fox News drives home, because their identities need to be concealed and their personal safety needs to be protected, especially in this era of social media and doxxing. But how are those arrested, harassed and rounded up supposed to know if the masked, armed, unidentified folk are authorized federal agents or marauders? After all, as Trump keeps saying and Fox News reinforces, the cities are violent, lawless, “burning hell holes,” plagued by non-stop violent crime and homelessness. Odd. Have gang bangers and drug dealers turned to using tear gas, kidnapping and disappearing community people. Maybe they get even surlier when the community chants USA, USA. At this point in Trump’s invasions, communities no longer confuse federal agents with violent gang members or drug dealers. The fear of violence in the cities is of the agents.
It is tricky, though. How are communities and their locally elected officials to document when masked or unidentified federal agents act beyond their authorization to physically abuse people or spew profanities and racist barkings? Trump and federal agents are disinclined to welcome protesting to get points across. Cameras and videos help, even in an era of deepfakes and fabricated images. Hard to tell who the domestic terrorists are. Kristi Noem has even said: “Violence is anything that threatens [agents] and their safety, so it is doxxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles.” No wonder there’s violence in America’s cities with masked, armed agents skulking about.
This is not the first time Chicago has been invaded by federal troops following orders. In 1850, in the aftermath of congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, compelling cities to help capture and return Black people fleeing slavery, the federal government deputized local officials to enforce slavery. The City Council denounced the law as “cruel and unjust,” ordering police not to assist in its enforcement, as noted by Claudia Fegan and Linda Rae Murray in the Oct. 13 Chicago Sun-Times. As they put it, “Chicago made a choice. It chose justice over compliance. It chose to defend the humanity of those the federal government deemed ‘fugitives.’ Today, that moral tradition is being called upon again.” And the Trump administration is treating it as violence.
The Hartmann report is eye opening and includes historical analogs to the Ku Klu Klan. “Both [ICE and the KKK] used legal or quasi-legal authority, masked identities, and violent or coercive tactics to carry out their missions, all without individual accountability while targeting vulnerable minorities and subverting legal norms to do so.” To this day, the masked anonymity of the KKK has kept the identities of all but a few KKK leaders hidden, with no accountability. The masks are perpetual care shields.
The societal result was that almost 20 states made it a crime for a law enforcement officer or anybody else to appear disguised and armed. Many of the laws are still on the books. Interestingly, in 1999, the Indiana law was overturned by a federal court which found that forcing Klan members to remove their hoods could subject them to harassment and impinge on their “right to anonymity when past harassment makes it likely that disclosing the members’ [identities] would impact the group’s ability to pursue its collective efforts at advocacy.”
In California, Gov. Newsom signed a bill into law recently that bans state and federal law enforcement from wearing masks on the job. Trump’s response? “We don’t need to abide by this garbage,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said on social media, according to Fox News. Seems consistent with the administration party line and attitude. In her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the committee that she was hearing for the first time about reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups.
All this registered with me, and was reinforced when I listened to the haunting dirge that the report included at the end.
Can’t get it out of my head.
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| Click here to go to Louise’s substack site |
“They knock on the doors where the weary hearts hide and the wind carries whispers of those who have cried”…
“The say it’s the law but whose law is it now? The same law that once wore a hood and a vow.
'Is ICE today’s Klan? Beneath a new command. They hide behind badges, they hide behind claims. If justice is blind, then who leads her hand?”…
'They say it’s protection they say it’s the law. But mercy’s the first thing they ever withdraw”…
'They say you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but the masked men are coming and they’re already here”…
'The mask never lifts, it just learned how to plan.”
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