Unmask ICE

There are more than 700,000 state and local law enforcement officers. There are tens of thousands more who work for agencies like the FBI, the National Parks, and the Treasury Department.

Except on rare occasions, like a SWAT raid on a drug gang, almost none of these officers cover their faces and hide their identities. Why does Kristi Noem’s ICE team feel this need?

Noem claims that ICE is going after the “worst of the worst” — murders, rapists, child sex traffickers, and the like. But this is just an absurdly crazy lie, like her claim that Trump has saved hundreds of millions of lives by blowing up the boats of alleged drug traffickers.

For those who need orientation to reality, the United States has roughly 340 million people. In Noem’s counterfactual, most of us would have died in the last six months from drug overdoses if Trump had not blown up those boats.

Noem is clearly a person who is not just open to exaggerating and outright lying, she is someone who makes up absurd tales that have nothing to do with reality. This is the case with her story that ICE is going after the worst of the worst.

To be clear, some of the people ICE is looking to deport are in fact murderers, rapists, and other really bad guys. But when ICE identifies these people, it has no problem getting the cooperation of state and local law enforcement. There is no one in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago or any other sanctuary city or sanctuary state that is objecting to enforcing the law against violent criminals, whether citizens or immigrants.

The issue of non-cooperation only comes up when ICE is looking to deport immigrants, many of whom have legal status, who are working at the ordinary jobs that have brought tens of millions of people to the United States in recent decades. These are people working in construction, as housekeepers in hotels, as home health care workers, and many other jobs that are mostly low-paying and physically demanding.

The claim of the Trump administration is that, even though your average local cop can go unmasked to arrest someone charged with multiple murders, ICE agents need to wear masks and conceal their identities when nabbing a dishwasher in a restaurant. That may make sense in Trumpland, but in reality land, it’s goddamn nuts.

There is nothing resembling a legitimate reason for ICE agents needing masks to conceal their faces and to hide their identities. This is about Donald Trump creating a secret police force that is unaccountable to anyone, and which openly boasts that it is not bound by the Constitution.

If the Democrats, and really any elected official with a commitment to democracy, want to be taken seriously, they need to demand that the ICE agents take off their masks. There are many other things that need to be done to protect the country from Trump’s attacks on democracy, but unmasking ICE is a simple and essential first step. There literally is no argument on the other side.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Unmask ICE appeared first on CounterPunch.org.