Can We Learn to Live in a Police State, Even a Secret Police State?

Can We Learn to Live in a Police State, Even a Secret Police State?

A voice from Los Angeles, where due process is fading.

“The secretive approach taken by immigration agents as they conduct unlawful suspicionless stops has not only created a culture of fear, but has also needlessly impeded local law enforcement… Because their vehicles and uniforms are not clearly marked — and their tactics can be highly aggressive — the public cannot easily discern who is a federal law enforcement agent and who may be a criminal. ... The confusion and distrust sown by defendants’ unlawful law enforcement practices has thus compromised public safety.” 

An 18-state coalition in a lawsuit filed June 6th against the federal government.

“I think it’s clear that agents are trying to create a certain spectacle of intimidation and lack of democratic control… By anonymizing themselves, they’re indicating that they are not accountable to any sort of public.” 

 Stuart Schrader, history professor at Johns Hopkins University.

"Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California," Trump posted to Truth Social just days after his November 2024 election win. "For the first time ever, more people are leaving than are coming in. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to 'Make California Great Again,' but I just overwhelmingly won the Election." 

 Donald Trump

Donald Trump screams about oversized federal government, yet his Big Ugly Bill adds a massive $170 billion more for immigration enforcement, of which $150 billion is allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making ICE the largest police agency in the United States. Apparently, often without accountability to anyone. Living in Los Angeles, I can assure Americans that such efforts are not making much of dent in taking undocumented aliens out of federal benefit programs (they’re just not there, although most such workers pay taxes that support such benefits for citizens and green card holders) or saving states much in the way of public education.

Likewise, small businesses – including construction companies trying to meet housing shortages, hotels, restaurants, childcare, etc. – are suffering, many simply closing or stopping construction. And no Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, as we have learned so many times in the past (which you seem to have missed), legal residents, including US Medicaid recipients seeking work, will not accept agricultural harvesting, meatpacking or slaughterhouse jobs at any price. Housing costs will rise accordingly, as well food costs with less harvesting, even as Trump seems willing to allow a limited number of undocumented farmworkers to remain under supervision.

That lovely “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility for undocumented arrestees, hastily built in the sweltering heat of the Florida swamps, is estimated to cost $450 million/year to operate. As Trump is slowly shutting down FEMA, massive fires and floods notwithstanding, his administration is looking to use money budgeted for FEMA to fund that facility. Taxpayers continue to fund Stephen Miller’s vision of a white Christian nationalist country with extreme cruelty, decimation of constitutional rights and the exceptionally expensive reshaping of how labor really works in this country. For diehard MAGA followers, this is heaven on Earth, until their local economies are crushed, many of their community friends and workers simply disappear and costs, already laboring under Trump inane TACO tariff policies, skyrocket.

As wildfires rage in central California, with a smug look on his face, Donald Trump makes it pretty clear that federal aid to California is going to be limited if anything is allocated at all. This despite the fact that the Silicon Valley was the major campaign contributor to his election, that some of the areas of maximum devastation are Trump strongholds and that California residents pay $80 billion a year more in federal taxes than the federal benefits it and its residents receive. The 3rd quote above illustrates Trump war on California, as does the fact that California (the vegetable capital of the nation and the tech job-creator center for everyone) is the only state, so far, where federalized National Guardsmen and active duty US Marines are deployed as de facto police as they “assist” ICE in their nefarious roundup.

And while ICE agents are arresting US Congresspeople doing their jobs in New Jersey (investigation federally funded detention facilities), as a US Senator is arrested in his office building as he attempts to ask DHS Secretary Noem a question at a press hearing, all that does not begin to compare with the mockery of the US Constitution being perpetrated in California. As Jenny Jarvie, writing for the July 7th Los Angeles Times, tells us: “For many Angelenos, the spectacle of armed federal agents — faces hidden behind neck gaiters and balaclavas — jumping out of unmarked vans to snatch people off the streets presents a clear threat to public safety.

“As federal immigration agents have ratcheted up enforcement raids, arresting and detaining anyone they suspect of violating immigration laws, critics warn that their tactic of masking — particularly when wearing plain clothes and no visible marker of identity — spreads fear and panic across communities and imperils citizens as well as immigrants without legal status… ‘It’s very dangerous,’ said Scott Shuchart, who worked for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2022 until January of this year as an assistant director for regulatory affairs and a policy counselor… If somebody comes up to you with a mask and a T-shirt and no badge, why would you think that they are exercising a legitimate authority, as opposed to being a violent criminal trying to do you harm?’ Shuchart said. ‘How do you know that you need to not resist to avoid arrest, as opposed to resist arrest to possibly survive the encounter?’

“But defenders of federal immigration agents also cite security as a reason for masking… They present immigrants without legal papers as a threat to public safety, even though the majority of people ICE arrested across L.A. in early June had no criminal record. They also argue that masking is necessary because a convergence of factors — supercharged political rhetoric, more sophisticated facial recognition technology, and increased threat of doxxing on social media — makes the job more dangerous for agents in the field.

“‘We have a lot of agents whose faces are being put on social media platforms across the country,’ said Mathew Silverman, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Assn. ‘We have politicians right now that are saying, ‘We will find these federal agents who have masks on. We will expose them.’ It’s just creating an era in law enforcement where trying to do the jobs of law enforcement is becoming more and more difficult.’

“Critics of law enforcement tactics say masking does not make officers safer and only escalates tension. Some argue federal agents operate under no greater threat than local officials… ‘Regular police officers operate every day with their faces uncovered and their badge numbers visible, and it’s not considered unsafe for their identities to be available to people in the public,’ said Stuart Schrader, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University.” The issue is compounded by ICE imposters extorting undocumented arrestees, kidnapping for ransom or simply wreaking a vendetta for strictly personal reasons.

Secret police are the signature move for dictators the world over, from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Xi. Definitely not America!!! Without even a badge number, there is absolutely no path to accountability. This must stop now!!!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to make a bad situation so much worse, to provoke the maximum violence you can, drop thousands of troops and tons of unidentified secret police into any US community… and watch the chaos, strong resistance and economic unraveling explode.