The lies of the Customs and Border Protection agency

The Customs and Border Protection is an agency whose members were ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the last election. So it should be no surprise that it too plays fast and loose with the facts to advance Trump’s and their agenda by trying to portray undocumented immigrants in the worst possible light in order to deflect attention from their harsh treatment of them. Debbie Nathan exposes the latest CBP attempt to further the Trump agenda of hyping hatred against undocumented immigrants by inflating statistics about the number of border patrol agents assaulted by them.
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Publicly exposing the ICE thugs

One feature of human nature is that if you give anyone unquestioned power over another human being, they will be strongly tempted to abuse it and become sadistic tormentors. This is true of parents, teachers, priests, nuns, boy scout leaders, military officers, you name it. The chances get even worse if the abusers have anonymity since the shame of exposure is removed, giving them an even greater sense freedom to exercise their vicious fantasies.

This is what we have been seeing with the ICE thugs. These people, many reportedly poorly-trained, poorly vetted, and ignorant, the kind of people who could not get proper jobs in regular life, have suddenly found themselves given powerful weaponry, allowed to wear masks and other disguises, cover themselves with body armor to prevent any harm to themselves, remove any identifying markers, and promised the full backing of the government so that they are free of fear of any repercussions for whatever they do. Is it any surprise that they have turned into roaming bands of goons who feel that they can harass and threaten ordinary people and even injure and kill them for little or no reason?

Since most people cannot fight back with equal levels of force, the public has resorted to the kind of resistance that is available to them, which is develop techniques using social media and even old-fashioned ones like whistles, to quickly gather en masse whenever and wherever ICE appears to document the abuses and to identify them. They also tag and follow their vehicles and create protests wherever they happen to be staying or eating, even preventing them from using gas-station restrooms. This has had the effect of turning much of public opinion against ICE
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Trump is finding out that murdering white Americans is unpopular

The invaluable news source Drop Site has obtained video that clearly shows Alex Pretti being murdered by a CBP agent while being pinned to the ground by other agents.

On Saturday, U.S. federal agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shooting him multiple times at point blank range while pinned down prone on the ground and surrounded by officers along Nicollet Avenue. The Saturday killing—committed by a Customs and Border Protection agent—is the third shooting by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP in as many weeks, and comes just one day after tens of thousands of Minneapolis residents took to the streets in subzero temperatures to protest the federal raids in Minnesota.

Close-up video footage, obtained by Drop Site, shows one agent push a person to the ground and then deploy a chemical irritant twice on the 37-year-old Pretti, who had gone to help the person pushed. Around eight agents then swarm and wrestle him to the ground. One of the officers then visibly unholstered his gun and fired around four point-blank gunshots at Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was reportedly on the scene as an observer. There are ten gunshots heard in all—at least five of them were fired at Pretti from a distance, while the person holding the camera shouts, “What the fuck did you just do?”
…

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both CBP and ICE, alleged the man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” and released a photo of the purported firearm, which appears to be a Sig Sauer Emperor Scorpion. No video has surfaced showing Pretti approaching federal agents with a brandished gun.

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Just when you think ICE and CBP brutality cannot get worse …

The stories of brutality and violations of people rights by the thugs that now make up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) forces keep appearing daily. It is now apparently the case that those groups are attractive to violence-prone individuals who relish the chance to throw their weight around while wearing masks and assault anyone they dislike knowing that what normally would have landed them in prison is now fully protected by the Thug-in-Chief in the White House and his minions who occupy most of the high levels of government, including the attorney general Pam Bondi

(Non sequitur)

(Doonesbury)

But even through this dense mass of what would be criminal behavior if done by anyone else, some news stories still stick out, like this one where an attack dog was used to deliberately injure someone.
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Trump has declared war on the Hispanic community

One of the noteworthy features of the 2024 election was the deep inroads that Trump made into the traditionally Democratic voters in the Hispanic community.

The [Rio Grande] Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his maga movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come. “Amazing news! McAllen, Texas is a major border town of 140,000 people. 85% Hispanic—and just elected a Republican mayor,” Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, posted on Twitter. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First.” In last year’s Presidential election, Trump won every county in the Valley, including one where Hillary Clinton had beat him by forty points, in 2016. McAllen had the second-biggest shift in party share of any large city in the nation, trailing only Laredo, another Texas border community. “In the Rio Grande Valley, the Red Wave Makes Landfall,” the Texas Observer declared, calling the 2024 election a “bloodbath” and wondering whether Texas Democrats were “doomed.”
…

Republican gains in the Valley are the result of overlapping forces. The Valley’s population tends to be patriotic and religious, with relatively lower rates of educational attainment. Republicans touted their support for law enforcement and oil and gas—significant sources of employment in the area—while local Democrats were increasingly seen as complacent, and in some cases corrupt. In 2022, McAllen’s congressional district, which had been held by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The district had been redrawn after the 2020 census to make it more favorable to Republicans.)

But Trump has declared war on the Hispanic community, targeting anyone of that heritage for harassment, detention, and deportation. ICE agents have focused their attentions on neighborhoods where they live and places where they congregate to find work and targeting anyone who happens to look Hispanic. This has resulted in many of them being afraid to go out anywhere or show up for work.
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Preparing for confrontations with CBP and ICE

Two couples who are friends of mine are traveling separately to Europe over the summer. Each couple consists of one US-born person and the other a naturalized citizen. When describing their holiday plans, they spoke only of their itinerary and what they looked forward to seeing and doing, By contrast, if I were to be making a trip by air, even within the US, Trump’s America now requires me to think of what I should do if I am confronted by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is no idle concern on my part, since my political views could well trigger interviews with them.

My post about the detention and questioning at Chicago airport of social media activist Hasan Piker by CBP on his return to the US from a trip to France made me think about what might be going on behind the scenes that trigger such detentions. In Piker’s case, there did not seem to be any obvious clues such as past violations of the law. What the CBP seemed to be focused on were his public criticisms of Trump and of Israel. But even if there had been some legal infraction, even a minor one, what is the process by which ‘violators’ are identified and pulled aside for questioning?
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What you should do in the police state that the US has become

In Trump’s America, no one is safe from government harassment and abuse. As we have seen, anyone can be picked up while walking along the street by masked people, bundled into unmarked vehicles, and ‘disappeared’, just like what happens in the worst kinds of despotic regimes. The abducted person may end up in a distant detention center and kept in awful conditions or even deported to countries like El Salvador that are notorious for their terrible prisons. You can see a list of recent such cases here.

So it is a good idea for everyone to know what rights they have and what they should do if ever they ever find themselves being taken in and questioned by the police or agents of the government for anything at all, however minor it may seem, like a traffic stop. This one-minute long video by longtime civil rights attorneys Bill Goodman and Denise Heberle, who look like a pair of genteel grandparents, succinctly tells you exactly what you should do in such situations.


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Welcome to America!

A German woman has experienced what so many poor immigrants experience at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

A German tourist is fighting to be released from an immigration detention center after she was denied entry at the San Diego border and taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month.

Jessica Brösche, a 26-year-old German tattoo artist, is being indefinitely detained by US Customs and Border Protection after she tried to enter San Diego on 25 January from Tijuana, Mexico, with her American best friend, Amelia Lofving. The two were traveling with tattoo equipment.
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Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin, Lofving said. But she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.

Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.

According to KPBS, US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.

According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.

“She says it was like a horror movie. They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” Lofving said of her friend’s experience.

Surely suspicion that she might commit such a minor infraction does not deserve high-handed treatment like this? The republic will not collapse if someone works illegally for a short time as a tattoo artist.

But this is Trump’s America, where border officials have been empowered to treat everyone as potential terrorists. She should consider herself lucky that she has not been sent to Guantanamo and disappeared forever. At least, not yet.

Dropping the term ‘alien’ when describing immigrants

One of the offensive ways in which immigrants are treated in the US is using the term ‘alien’ to describe them, sometimes in the form of ‘illegal aliens’. So it is a welcome sign that some states are recognizing it as dehumanizing and moving to drop the term altogether and replace it with words like ‘noncitizen’ or ‘migrant’.

Immigrants and immigrant-rights groups say the term, especially when combined with “illegal,” is dehumanizing and can have a harmful effect on immigration policy.

The word became a focal point of debate in several states earlier this year as the number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border swelled and led to fierce backlash against Biden administration policies by Republican governors and lawmakers.

Lawmakers in at least seven states considered eliminating use of “alien” and “illegal” in state statutes this year and replacing them with descriptions such as “undocumented” and “noncitizen,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Only two states, California and Colorado, actually made the change.
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More on the government kidnapping squads

In his blatant attempt to ramp up the ‘law and order’ issue for the election, Trump has sent in federal security forces to trigger confrontations with protestors. These forces, who wear camouflage outfits that make it almost impossible to identify which government agency the belong to or who they are, have been driving around in unmarked vehicles, picking up people on the street and taking them to undisclosed locations and refusing, when asked, to say which agency they are from. This has started in Portland, OR and Trump said that he wants to send in forces to other cities like Chicago and Albuquerque, claiming that the Democratic mayors of those cities are not doing enough to stop violence and crime.
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