People who don’t like Donald Trump are kinda gun-shy talking about turning points. Turning points of course can mean very many things. But as I watched first the videos of the murder of Renee Nicole Good and even more the official reactions to it I’ve started to think that we’re in the process of seeing one. I don’t mean Donald Trump is doomed politically, though perhaps he is. I mean a turning point in the public perception of ICE (and the Border Patrol) and their newly hyper-militarized role in American cities beginning last summer.
What we see in the videos of Good’s shooting is some mix of a moment of confusion or perhaps minor panic on the part of Good as the driver. And we see this ICE agent draw his weapon in a fairly calm and methodical way and fatally shoot Good in the face.
Videos of police shootings that rocket around the web are by definition always really bad. That’s why they get shared so widely. But in this case, if you’ve even somewhat kept up on the progress of “mass deportation” since the summer, you can’t watch this video and not recognize that this is a common pattern across ICE and CBP — these rapid escalations to lethal force with a calm and regular energy. It’s of a piece with the gaiters and gear ICE agents adapt to appear particularly menacing and remain unidentifiable. Yesterday I saw a social scientist at Harvard commenting on a photograph of CBP commander Greg Bovino and a couple other agents, accusing them of cosplaying. What do they think, this person asked, that they’re like in Fallujah in 2007? This is a high school in Minneapolis. And yeah, they’re decked out with all the accoutrements of urban warfare. ICE and CBP have grown into predatory organizations in which an ethic of explosive and malicious violence against civilians, coupled with casual lying, is not only tolerated but aggressively encouraged. That’s how you get to this agent casually shooting a woman in the face because she may have momentarily angled her wheels in the wrong direction during a tense moment.
But it’s what we saw afterwards and especially today that took things to a new level — top Trump officials including the Vice President and Secretary of Homeland Security saying that what we see in these videos is in fact exactly what we want to see happen: a federal law enforcement officer, in danger of being killed, reacting with deadly force to someone “weaponizing” their vehicle. I don’t think that this kind of predatory up-is-downism is sustainable for a majority of the American people. We know that Donald Trump sees America’s blue cities as a kind of conquered territory. We’re now seeing what that actually means in practice, when the potential violence which has always been coiled up in federal law enforcement is released on American citizens because of the predatory license granted by Trump’s example and his acolytes. The message is pretty simple. Your cities are a war zone, and any false move, any transient moment of non-compliance or any fidgety moment of misunderstanding can mean your death. Top Trump officials are saying emphatically that this is exactly how it should be and I don’t think that will stand.
ICE should absolutely be abolished. The country needs an immigration enforcement agency. But not this one. ICE was created at the beginning of the counter-terrorism era, has always been notorious for brutal and undisciplined behavior which is incompatible with democratic self-government and the rights of American citizens. Get rid of ICE (and possibly CBP as well) and replace it with an organization structured around lawful and apolitical enforcement of the country’s immigration laws.
The U.S. has a long tradition of intolerance of unleashing military and paramilitary forces on American civilians. You find it right there in the central role of the Boston Massacre in driving the final crisis of the American Revolution. You see it in the 3rd Amendment and numerous laws which are supposed to keep the U.S. military from being used in domestic law enforcement except under the most extreme circumstances, and now don’t seem to apply anymore.
ICE and CPB aren’t the military of course. But this is too literal a way of looking at the matter. They are being sent into American cities as forces of occupation and they are acting like that. They are very consciously decked out in the costumery of urban warfare and military occupation. We don’t have to stand for this. It’s outside of our traditions. It’s malevolent and predatory. It’s time to say enough. And this may be the turning point.