By David K. Shipler
America’s
march toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimed
not merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americans
and violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and the
evident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.
The agents, masked and camouflaged
in combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, Donald
Trump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassured
them: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct
of your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law with
impunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism:
the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law and
the liberties of the citizens.
The First, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth
Amendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarized
policing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (First
Amendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment);
the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourth
and Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). All
that is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.
How far it will go is an open
question. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests have
sparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicans
who have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looks
clear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above local
control.
This is in the playbook of every
dictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’s
Bolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarian
aspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’s
civil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normal
structure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, political
prosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selective
taxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.
An element of secrecy usually accompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Such is the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges or nametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of the American nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees in Minneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streets of Gaza.
