Making Friends
By 
As many of us have said, if Trump and his fascist friends have their way, ICE is going to be doing a whole lot more than ethnic cleansing. It’s not going away unless we abolish it entirely. It will just keep growing. For example, how about bringing American fascism to Italy for the Olympics?
ICE will accompany the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics in Italy next month, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed on Tuesday, stoking a backlash among Italians angered by the conduct of ICE agents in Minneapolis.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will join a security team from the State Department at the Olympics “to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations,” D.H.S. said in a statement attributed to Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs.
“All security operations remain under Italian authority,” the statement said, adding that ICE “does not conduct immigration enforcement operations in foreign countries.”
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The Italian government said on Tuesday that it was seeking clarification from American diplomats after reports emerged over the weekend that ICE would attend the Games in Italy.
Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, told reporters that ICE agents would not be allowed to deploy on Italian streets. He added that “public order during the Olympics” would be done only by the Italian national and local police but stopped short of saying that U.S. agents would be limited to operational rooms.
The Italian government’s intervention followed growing outrage from Italian politicians over the agency’s presence at the Games.
Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, said in a telephone interview that the Italian government should “say no to Trump.”
Mr. Sala added: “Bringing to Milan a militia which distinguished itself — this is not my opinion — with criminal acts, which kills, which enters in the homes of American citizens without authorization, I do not think that that is a good idea.”
The Italians know a bit about mafioso violence after all.
Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter on Monday backed a proposed fan boycott of World Cup matches in the United States because of the conduct of President Donald Trump and his administration at home and abroad.
Blatter was the latest international soccer figure to call into question the suitability of the United States as a host country. He called for the boycott in a post on X that supported Mark Pieth’s comments in an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Der Bund.
Pieth, a Swiss attorney specializing in white-collar crime and an anti-corruption expert, chaired the Independent Governance Committee’s oversight of FIFA reform a decade ago. Blatter was president of the world’s governing body for soccer from 1998-2015; he resigned amid an investigation into corruption.
Honestly, I’d have thought Blatter was pretty much on board with Trumpism, but I guess the ethnic cleansing is a step too far. Corruption, I mean sure….
Anyway, America is sure doing it right these days…..