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Trump’s Gestapo-style ICE raids

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Robert Kuttner:

At around 8 o’clock Sunday morning, in Mountain View, California, four ICE agents in full battlefield regalia followed a resident into a 19-unit apartment building. They carried M15 assault weapons, and had no warrants.

They were looking for two Venezuelans, who had lived there temporarily in the apartment of a lawyer, who was helping asylum seekers pro bono. The Venezuelans were legal residents with temporary protected status until last week, when Trump changed the rules and they suddenly became illegal.

The Venezuelans were not present at the time. There was another asylum seeker in the building with similar status, whom the agents ignored, apparently because she was not on their hit list. Residents called the Mountain View police, who said they could do nothing.

Despite brave words about sanctuary cities, state and local officials have not cooperated but have not resisted. Citizens who try to shelter targets of these raids are themselves inviting arrest.

This was only one of several ICE raids over the weekend. Others took place in Chicago, Boston, Austin, and L.A. Fox News reporters were invited to embed with the agents in Boston and Chicago, capturing the raids on video.

The agents wore tactical gear and vests with large letters displaying “Police ICE” and “Homeland Security.” According to CNN, at least two agencies told personnel to wear made-for-TV outfits, in case there were video opportunities.

This stunt suggests the performative aspect of these Gestapo-style raids, as red meat for Trump’s base. Trump has directed that ICE increase its raids and summary deportations, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500.

Obviously this is all made for TV, like everything else in Donald Trump’s miserable excuse for a life, but this reality TV show has lots of real victims.

According to an AP poll conducted from January 9 to 13, Americans favor deporting undocumented migrants as a general proposition, 43 to 37. But they oppose separating children from their families by a much wider margin of 55 to 28. And they oppose arresting children in school, 64 to 18.

In sum, the more people focus on the basic humanity of migrants, the more they reject the cruelty of Trump’s actions.

And if Trump succeeds in getting large numbers of immigrants to self-deport, he will run into major opposition from corporate interests in the construction, restaurant, home care, and other industries that depend on low-wage migrants.

So people are in favor of “cracking down” on illegal immigration, as long as it’s done nicely, and doesn’t raise the price of a hamburger by five cents or a house by five dollars.

Kuttner ends by asking the kind of question that until fairly recently would have elicited horrified pearl clutching in all the best circles:

My wife and I spent the past weekend in New York as part of a long-planned family birthday celebration. The restaurants were full, the opera was sold out, the museums had excellent shows, Times Square was still Times Square, and people were having a jolly time. It was not as if a visible pall of fascism had descended over the city.

The same was true of Nazi Germany around 1937. The economy had revived thanks to Hitler’s war buildup. The Berlin Philharmonic was in fine form, minus a few undesirables who were scarcely missed. It was a nice place to live if you didn’t care about democracy or if you didn’t happen to be Jewish.

While life goes on normally for most Americans under Trump, if you are an immigrant of uncertain legal status, you are living on the edge of a personal holocaust. Will regular Americans resist, or will they be like good Germans?

Meanwhile Fox News is grappling with different questions:

Some panelists on Monday’s edition of Outnumbered expressed their strong support for adding President Donald Trump’s image to Mount Rushmore, while others suggested bestowing an alternative honor upon him.

Harris Faulkner kicked off the segment by declaring that just a week into his second term, “there are already calls to put his face on Mount Rushmore,” as “a growing number of conservatives are pushing to add Trump to the legendary monument.”

Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

Primo Levi, “Our Nights” from Survival in Auschwitz

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