"ICE is Playing Soldier, But Without the Discipline"

 

“ICE is Playing Soldier, But Without the Discipline”

Untrained in deescalation and the proper use of deadly force, they are neither police nor military

“Beyond the investigations [of the Minneapolis shootings], as the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA underscores the important constitutional rights that are at stake. The constitutional rights at issue must be protected. These include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press… The Rule of Law undergirds these inalienable rights. It ensures that all people and all government entities are accountable to laws that are clear, just, and fair.” 

 American Bar Assn President Michelle A. Behnke

Their training is much shorter than most police and sheriffs, certainly US military, and while Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents have some training in crowd control, ICE has virtually none. DHS recruiting campaigns for ICE agents have presented what look like Nazi “culture warrior” ads, focused on those who find violence acceptable and are given directions from their superiors that are simply false statements of what the Constitution says, being accorded “absolute immunity” for their actions without any statutory or constitutional basis, and encouraged to shoot first and ask questions later. As a result, they are woefully misdirected on 1st Amendment (free speech and the right to protest peacefully), 2nd Amendment (right bear arms), 4th Amendment (requirements of judicially issued warrants for most arrests, forced access to search premises, etc.) and the 5th Amendment (due process) constitutional rights… which no government official, even if there is an invocation of the Insurrection Act, can revoke.

The above quote comes from senior command experienced and battle hardened, retired Lt General Mark Hertling. Deeply disturbed at the shooting deaths of Renee Good, a mother and harmless American citizen, and Alex Pretti, a Veterans Administration Hospital intensive care nurse, Hertling railed at the almost instantaneous determination, up and down the entire Trump Administration, that, without any investigation, these two innocents were “domestic terrorists.”

“Hertling said Monday [1/26] that video of ICE officers and federal agents involved in the shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis proves that ‘this is not policing and it’s not military service.’ In an interview on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, Hertling said ‘from the standpoint of a former soldier, I will tell you they are an undisciplined militia, and the leadership is awful.’… Hertling told MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough that ICE officers ‘dress up as soldiers,’ but show none of the discipline and training of the military or traditional law enforcement. Instead, Hertling said, ICE is ‘running through the battlefield as it were in civilian vehicles, maneuvering like assault teams, and engaging civilians as if they were hostile forces.’

“‘ICE and DHS are neither military nor police,’ he said. ‘This is not policing and it’s not military service. It’s something dangerously undefined… ‘The leadership of ICE and DHS seems to be overlooking quite a lot’… In a piece for The Bulwark, Hertling writes that ‘leaders are accountable not only for what they order their subordinates to do, but for what they allow. The leadership of ICE and DHS seems to be overlooking quite a lot.’” Mark Joyella, writing for the January 26th Forbes. But ICE officers, performing purportedly an administrative function to deal with detaining and deporting undocumented aliens, are absolutely not cops and most certainly not military, although they pretend to be either or both when they feel like it.

The DHS/ICE vertical, sometimes with the FBI but mostly with their own internal HSI investigators, have taken on the role of investigating themselves, excluding the well-trained local police from gaining access to on-scene evidence, and pronouncing guilt often hours after ICE/CBP shootings. They issue instant “domestic terrorism” labels, calling the victims “suspects,” even as only a blind man could look at the same videos that the entire nation has seen and almost consistently reached an opposite conclusion. They’ve even pissed off the National Rifle Association, by telling licensed citizen gunowners that even if they’re fully compliant with the law, do not threaten ICE/CBT officers with their weapons, they should not be surprised if they are shot anyway.

Nobody trusts an investigative body that issues a ruling of conclusive guilt before a minute of bona fide actual investigation. How did Pretti get 10 bullets shot into his body in 30 seconds after it seems that an officer removed his holstered weapon, which was never brandished against the officers? Looking at the videos, Pretti seemed to have been murdered by unprofessional federal officers. As local Minneapolis police were barred from Pretti’s crime scene, although operating with a local warrant, federal ersatz cops blocked them with batons. A federal court ordered the feds to preserve evidence intact. As rightwing media tried to justify the “instant” guilt, even their news hosts struggled. A few elected Republicans voiced their own horror at this attempt to cover up what happened, already fearing a massive backlash at in the mid-terms, and popular sentiment was believing what they saw, not what they were told by the feds.

Even Trump, finally willing to talk to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was beginning to sense that Americans were, for the most part, aghast at the visuals. Sending in immigration tsar Tom Homan in to take as look at the ICE actions in Minneapolis, seemed inappropriate, but it is no secret that Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem considers Homan a competitor. I would bet that Trump will try and recapture voters by removing this utterly incompetent ICE Barbie and self-declared beauty queen very soon.

Virtually every major police force requires its officers to wear body cameras, but despite the fact that CBP/ICE are overfunded, their officers do not wear them. Too hard to cover up facts, I guess, because it cannot be the cost, under $1,000 per officer. That all these mass sweeps occur only in blue cities makes me ask the question: what would red cities do under a Democratic administration if the roles were reversed? And exactly why do so many MAGA evangelical Christians believe that along with the Constitution, the Golden Rule… heck the entire New Testament… has been repealed?

I’m Peter Dekom, and history usually imposes a very harsh level of accountability to individuals so blatantly violating the law, crushing human rights and making a mockery of their own purported morality under their own religious teachings.