The week just past in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been one of the most watched in perhaps all of American history. Aware that massive protests against the invasion of ICE were likely to occur, every news organization that could afford plane tickets for a film crew sent whatever they could spare. As a result almost no foul deeds went unrecorded. This surveillance must have driven the masked, cosplaying goons crazy.
In addition, protesters were encouraged by local leaders to keep their cellphones charged as much as possible in the bitter cold, and to film interactions between the agents and the citizenry. Thus, in addition to being denied service in some fast-food establishments and the use of gas station washrooms (I’d like to know how they solved that one. You can always skip a meal or two, but when you’ve got to go…), the camouflage-clad hard cases were serenaded most of each night by noisy pot-wallopers outside their hotels and shouted at most days by crowds of outraged Minnesotans holding up big signs and various iterations of cellphone cameras. Rarely does xenophobia get so openly expressed, except, perhaps, by the architects of the deportation surge sitting snugly in the White House.
Third, it’s been cold! The polar vortex kindly lent us a huge dollop of super-cooled air, which has lingered near our northern border even as another, warmer chunk has been dousing the South with snow, sleet, freezing rain, and ice. Those poor “federal agents,” wherever they’re from, have been finding the second half of a northern January quite a bit cooler than what a number of them experienced on their last outing, to hang the vice-president during the first week of January, 2021.
Every so often you come across a program, an agenda, or an idea so stupid and tin-eared that you can’t help but wonder what the hell they were thinking of. This surge into American houses, cars, and sidewalks has to rank up there with the stupidest. I suspect that the lack of significant physical pushback against Administration policies by the mass of American citizenry and a supine Congress led some well-insulated policymakers to conclude that a sort of reverse Underground Railroad, carried out in a rush with the consequences to be sorted out later, might be a brilliant idea. It’s easy, I suppose, when you’re surrounded by white men and women who agree with you and, whether they express it or not, fear the Great Replacement, to assume that the rest of us white folks feel the same way. Wrong.
So you start out with a propaganda campaign that labels immigrants, documented or otherwise, as trash, and claim their ranks are riddled with felons, active or would-be. Then you advertise that you are getting rid of the “worst of the worst,” assuming we all know of some of them (actually, most of us don’t). And then you send your agents into blue-state communities with fewer undocumented immigrants than others in red states – ones that need “punishment” for voting against you in the last election.
It’s where the rubber meets the road that the Administration has really screwed up. With money apparently not an object (witness how many jets they have flying all over the place, conveying, in one recent “arrest,” a 5-year-old and his father to Texas), they advertise very generous bonuses and salaries and manage to scrape the bottom of the social and economic barrel. We’ve seen them, masked and unidentifiable, standing in ranks with their weapons at the ready, staring at yelling protesters across the street. Their frustration is almost palpable. How do these civilians dare to berate them, and tell them in simple language to beat it?
If they’ve had training, as allegedly they have, it no doubt went a bit easy on the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees all of us – even those of us who can’t prove citizenship – to be secure in our homes without a warrant signed by a judge. This last item has seemed to be but an inconvenience for many door-busting goons. But if you give a legal illiterate a battering ram, what’s he to do? We shouldn’t be surprised. The same is true of firearms.
But there’s some good news mixed in with the calamitous. The Administration, sensing that its campaign is not going well, has threatened to send in more agents, even less qualified than the first. But the Minnesota National Guard, which has been activated by Governor Walz, is handing out hot coffee, cocoa, and donuts. And tonight’s news has Commander Bovino being underbussed (I’ve waited weeks to use that verb!) and replaced. I can see him starting a band called Greg and the Bovines.
