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.
What’s more, ICE and its parent
agency, the Department of Homeland Security, are conducting clandestine,
high-tech monitoring of both immigrants and US citizens. Shortly before The
Washington Post lost one-third of its journalists to layoffs, it reported
on details of “intrusive technologies” that have given ICE, the most
extensively funded federal policing agency, “new surveillance powers.” They
include drones, facial recognition used by agents when approaching motorists and
pedestrians, license plate readers to trace people’s vehicles with fixed cameras
along streets, and trucks carrying phone trackers that “masquerade as cell
towers and trick nearby cellphones to connect.” Locked phones and computers
that are seized can be hacked and decrypted by plugging them into a box with
software made by various private firms.
The Post also
reported on DHS’s targeting of a 67-year-old retiree named Jon, in
Pennsylvania, who wrote a moderately-worded email to a federal prosecutor pleading
for mercy for an Afghan he had read
about in the Post, who was facing deportation to his home country,
where he feared that the Taliban would kill him. Five hours after Jon sent the
email, Google notified him of receiving an administrative subpoena for “information
related to your Google account.” Similar demands had been made to “Meta to
identify the people behind a Facebook and Instagram account that tracked ICE
raids in Montgomery County [PA],” the paper found.
A couple of weeks later, two
Homeland Security agents and a local police officer knocked on Jon’s door. An
agent showed him a printout of his email, asked how he knew the prosecutor’s
address (through a Google search, Jon confessed!), put a few more questions to
him, and then left. He dared to tell his story with just his first name; he feared
for his family’s safety.
One wonders whether the Post’s
owner, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, will allow his paper such hard-hitting coverage of
the Trumpists’ continuing abuses. Bezos has business interests involving
federal regulation, and he has tried to curry favor with the president, most
recently with an absurd $40 million fee for a vapid film celebrating Melania
Trump. Some speculate that Bezos’s decimation of the news staff is another effort
to mollify the bully in the White House.
It fits with a pattern among the
country’s elites, who have never experienced dictatorship; otherwise, they
would know that the more you give in, the weaker you look, and the more power
the autocrat wields over you. Europe repelled Trump’s appetite to own Greenland,
not by wooing and flattering him but by pushing back. Instead, many US corporations,
law firms, universities, news organizations, and others have pursued deals to
preserve their narrow self-interests. They have failed to stand united in
defiance of the coming autocracy.
A police state’s methods are designed
as force-multipliers, encouraging preemptive capitulation. A few threatening
incidents are enough to quiet most of the population, who can live their lives
without hitting the limits of freedom. It is rarely the great mass that rises
up. Rather, preserving or restoring liberty usually relies on a small minority who
are courageous enough to take risks.
The US, which regards itself as exceptional,
looks sadly typical so far. Several months ago, I was told by a journalist of a
Russian friend who compared the first months of Trump with the first years of
Putin by observing: You Americans caved faster than we Russians did.
I suppose that’s because Russians knew what was coming; they had lived it before.
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