'ICE Goes Masked for a Single Reason' -- David Wallace Wells

[ancianita]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/opinion/ice-masks-immigration.html

While the NYT doesn't seem to cover these events in the detailed context that Wallace does, the bigger picture is important for Americans to "get," nevermind just Democrats.

“... ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” a federal judge, William Young, wrote in a blistering 161-page First Amendment ruling handed down last week.
“In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” he continued.
The judge, a Reagan appointee, compared immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and declared that federal efforts to deport outspoken protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”

Is this a true secret police? The term is darkly tempting, though much of what we’ve observed ... has fallen distressingly within the bounds of our brutally capacious immigration law. The National Guard deployments, too, have unfolded in public view.
The terroristic sweep of President Trump’s mass deportation program will be repeatedly litigated in the years to come, in courts of both law and public opinion — U.S. citizens arrested by agents apparently uninterested in their immigration status, agents drawing guns on civilian bystanders.
And to the extent that many of those officers and their superiors have been not just enforcing laws and executive orders but also engaging in a kind of conspicuous and public cosplay, the costumes they have chosen are those of the enforcement arm of an authoritarian regime.
When the masks came on, the mask came off.

The cosplay is now bleeding into state violence, and even for those used to pointing fingers and calling out authoritarianism, the past week has been a precipitous escalation:
Trump speaking of the “enemy from within” as a national defense strategy waiting for approval proposes focusing the military on domestic threats and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, compares political opposition to terrorism; a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment complex; local police officers hit with tear gas from ICE agents...

...last Thursday in Portland, Ore., the conservative journalist Nick Sortor was arrested while documenting a protest against ICE — producing an immediate wave of right-wing outrage and, reportedly, a promise by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, that her department would surge resources to the city.
Elsewhere in the city, ICE agents pepper-sprayed a woman who seemed to be filming them on her phone.
In Chicago, ICE agents were accused of making bogus calls to the police, saying that people were tampering with a detention facility’s gate. (Police officers quickly determined the people were there only to observe.)
A Chicago City Council member was arrested after asking whether the agents had a warrant for someone they’d detained.
“If arresting an elected official for peacefully asking questions isn’t a demonstration of authoritarianism, then what is?” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois asked...."



It needs repeating: Trump claims by his actions that American Democratic states and cities are "the enemy within."

The enemy within is Trump and his henchmen themselves -- who criminalize, then attack, Americans, judges, state governors and mayors.

Why? "to terrorize Americans into quiescence" -- Democratic and Independent voters in the midterm and general election.

Use of Force, violating Americans' 1st, 4th, and 10th Bill of Rights is their election message to their base.