A Daily Reid: American Gestapo
Besides condemning millions to sickness, hunger and poverty, Republicans' Big Billionaire Bailout Bill will move the U.S. closer to becoming a police state
When they’re not lurking outside of immigration hearings, waiting to capture brown people, so-called ICE agents may be pissing on the grounds of your child’s school. At least that’s what they and agents from Customs and Border Patrol apparently did at a Los Angeles County high school, according to a local news station that filed a FOIA for the security cams.
And that might be the least disgusting thing our new American gestapo are up to.
Increasingly, they’re also racially profiling and arresting U.S. citizens, all in a desperate sprint to meet White House ghoul Stephen Miller’s 3,000 nonwhite person a day deportation quota. Apparently for ICE agents, the new rule is “racially profile and tackle first, ask questions later.”
In an effort to fulfill the Trump administration’s daily immigration arrest “quotas,” federal agents and deputized local law enforcement are racially profiling and snatching people off the streets without due process. These arrests, carried out by armed and masked agents, are sowing terror and confusion in communities across the United States. Stephano Medina, a lawyer with the California Center for Movement Legal Services, shares how ICE regularly denies that it has taken people into custody, leading to family members scrambling for information about their loved ones. “It’s arrest now, ask questions later,” adds Dominique Boubion, an attorney representing Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen who was taken by ICE last month in what Velez has since described as a “kidnapping.”
Masked men grabbing people off of the streets is almost too on-the-nose for this fascist party and movement.
The people being disappeared are not just receiving no due process, their families often have no idea where they are. One man, from Utah, was wrongfully detained for nearly 50 days without a hearing, only to be released to continue his path to citizenship (which at this point, seems a lot less desirable):
MILLCREEK — A Utah man is speaking out after spending nearly 50 days in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Texas, despite being a lawful U.S. resident. His attorney says the federal government got it wrong — and taxpayers footed the bill.
Junior Dioses, a Highland High School graduate, small business owner, and father of five, was returning from a trip to Peru on April 28 when he was stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents at a Texas airport. What was supposed to be a routine entry turned into a nearly two-month ordeal, with two days spent in custody at the airport and 48 days at an ICE detention facility in Conover, Texas.
“When I was there, I kept thinking every day, ‘Why am I here?’” Dioses said.
Dioses, 39, has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years and holds a valid green card. But immigration officials flagged two prior convictions — a 2006 failure to stop for a police officer and a 2019 disorderly conduct charge — as grounds for deportation.
“Most people when they think of ‘(deporting) criminals’ they don’t think of Junior. They think of the guy selling drugs to our kids, that guy (who) murdered someone, that guy (who) engaged in horrific violent behavior,” said Dioses’ attorney, Adam Crayk. “Permanent residents can be deported … if you do things that under our law qualify for deportable offenses.”
However, Crayk, managing partner at Stowell Crayk, said Dioses’ previous charges do not meet the legal threshold for deportation under immigration law.
“There’s already case law that says these are not crimes involving moral turpitude,” Crayk explained. “Had anyone on the government side done the research, they would have known they had inappropriately incarcerated and inappropriately begun deportation proceedings against someone who should have never been in that type of position.”
A section of U.S. law states any noncitizen who “is convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude” committed within five to 10 years and sentenced to at least one year in prison is deportable.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Crayk is correct — an “extensive” case law defines moral turpitude as “conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile, or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality and the duties owed between man and man, either one’s fellow man or society in general.” …
…Despite filing a motion to terminate deportation proceedings — which the government did not oppose — Dioses remained in custody for an additional seven days, Crayk said. Crayk believes the delay was due to bureaucratic hesitation over a potential appeal that never came.
“He didn’t have his green card taken away. He’s still a permanent resident and on track to become a citizen,” Crayk said. “For Junior to spend 48 days in an immigration custody on charges that were never legitimate …”
Crayk also raised concerns about the broader implications of the case and the cost of government resources.
“Taxpayer money covered that time. Every single second of that, we paid for,” Crayk said. “I like to believe that Utahns value the law, and when things are clearly not what the government is saying that they are, that should outrage people.”
Now back in Utah, Dioses is focused on getting back to work and reclaiming lost time with his family — especially with the Fourth of July holiday approaching.
“I just want to spend time with my kids, go to the lake, and have fun,” he said.
And when they roust people, citizens or not, and the forseeable protests follow, the federal agents, real or not, are backed by the power and full force of local police, who have no problem using brute force to suppress dissent.
It’s so bad, even Joe Rogan has a problem with it. Though let’s just recall, he didn’t just vote for this, he urged his millions of listeners to vote for it, too … mainly because he agreed with Elon Musk … the guy Trump is now threatening to deport for switching sides on his $3 trillion deficit bill.
Time for summer (concentration) camp
This as detainees have begun arriving at Ron DeSantis’ Everglades concentration camp.
It’s like they want us to compare this era to the 1930s…
Welcome to your new police state
Meanwhile the Trump Big Billionaire Bailout bill will do more than just impoverish and sicken millions of American men, women and children. It will also move the U.S. closer to becoming a police state:
The Nation — Amid all the frenzied MAGA agitprop and bald-faced lying that have marked the final stages of Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, it’s been easy to lose sight of its transformative policy agenda. Much of the controversy spurred by the sweeping legislation concerns its evisceration of healthcare coverage—a stunning $1 trillion in combined cuts to Medicaid, the state-based program funding healthcare access for low-income Americans, and allied coverage to poor patients under the Affordable Care Act. But the bill, which emerged out of its Senate reconciliation session in a blizzard of votes to amend it on Monday, also erects a permanent immigration police state. With more than $150 billion in outlays to expand the horrific surveillance, detention, and rendition regime created under the Laken Riley Act, the measure will carry out Trump’s pledge to make the terror wreaked by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, alongside federal and National Guard troops, in Los Angeles the standard operating procedure for immigrant roundups going forward.
The scale of the proposed increases in ICE funding alone make for grim dystopian reading. As Don Moynihan notes, ICE’s annual budget for detentions would skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the present fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year—a 365 percent increase, and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons. Here, per Moynihan, are some additional spending comparisons:
The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined. It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars.
And what will now become the largest state police force in U.S. history has already shown its colors:
These massive giveaways are earmarked for an agency that’s shown a decidedly cursory regard for the fundamental protections afforded to all Americans by the rule of law. In conducting their expansive raids on workers and families that are not suspected of any overt criminal activity, ICE agents have masked themselves to shun responsibility for their actions—an illegal abuse of power commonly associated with Eastern Bloc police states. Reviewing the agency’s recent arrest record, it’s not hard to see why agents don’t want their identities known: On an unprecedented scale, they are rounding up and detaining immigrants who aren’t accused of any criminal activity. ICE’s apprehension of immigrants facing criminal charges are up 128 percent over last year—but the agency’s detention of immigrants without criminal records has increased by more than 1,400 percent. Customs and Border Patrol agents had previously stopped most immigrants without criminal records as they turned them away from the border, by a ratio of 30 to 1.
Now that ICE is carrying out White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s new directive to round up anyone who might vaguely resemble an immigrant, that ratio has disappeared. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, each agency is now apprehending roughly equal numbers of immigrants without criminal records. And ICE, of course, is going far out of its way to pursue its Miller-authorized directives to detain and rendition its corps of noncriminal suspects.
Building out the detention capacity of US immigration enforcement by nearly a fourfold factor would elevate the ghoulish white-nationalist policy mandates of Miller into a permanent federal legacy—at the precise moment that the Trump spending bill rolls back basic social-democratic protections from healthcare to food security, to education. And other arms of the federal government are already moving ahead with plans to turbocharge the MAGAfied model of immigration enforcement as a glorified form of political terror and disfranchisement. A recent NPR exposé found that the Department of Homeland Security has joined forces with the data-thugs-without-porfolio at the Department of Government Efficiency to create the federal government’s searchable national citizenship data system. The ostensible mission behind the database is to provide state and local election officials with confirmation of the citizenship status of prospective voters, in line with Trump’s evidence-free claims of rampant immigrant election fraud. The new data network draws on immigration records and Social Security data to produce the country’s first-ever registry of citizens. (Because, as we all know so well by now, combining DOGE and Social Security has been a resounding success in assessing government priorities thus far.)
But the real damage here, as NPR reporters Jude Joffe-Block and Miles note, concerns the creation of a national surveillance state on steroids—without any public debate or consultation with Congress. “This level of integration among federal agencies handling sensitive personal data has never existed before,” they write, “and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens—something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been considered a third rail—especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.”
So you will be poorer … sicker … and dramatically more fearful and surveilled. Is that what you voted for?
Are you comfortable with this person, who clearly has a negative obsession with nonwhite people, shaping domestic security and race-based citizenship policy?
Peep this remarkable anecdote:
Guerrero spoke with Jason Islas, a working-class Mexican American who was Miller’s friend in middle school and attended his lavish bar mitzvah. Though the two initially bonded over Star Trek, Miller abruptly ditched Islas as a friend the summer after middle school, citing his Latino heritage as a justification. “The conversation was remarkably calm,” Islas told Guerrero. “He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.”
Miller is now living out his ultimate fantasy, of not just “sealing the border and deporting all the ‘illegals’,” but also terrorizing brown people in general, randomly and with maximum, nazi-like cruelty. It’s hard to escape the notion that he is living his best life doing this, just as he did when he architected the separation of migrant parents and children — even nursing infants — during Trump’s first term, as well as the Muslim ban. That guy, plus creepy Tom Homan and the woman who shot her own puppy to death in cold blood are in charge of immigration in America. Them, and Donald J. Trump. Take that in…
They are the reason masked men are kidnapping people off of our streets, including some who may just be pretending to be ICE agents so they can pursue sexual predation or other violence.
All of this is happening while the U.S. job market is constricting, prices are skyrocketing, and millions of nonwhite Americans and even legal immigrants are living in fear. Just the way Homan, Miller, Vance, Trump and their deranged fellow regime members want it.
But hey, at least Trump is copping checks from apparently ever major media company, including the people who own the venerable 60 Minutes. The corruption at this point isn’t even hidden. The fear, the corruption and the fascism, are all overt.
And what’s the endgame in all of this? Here’s a big hint:
From our friends at Merriam-Webster:
indentured servant
noun |
: a person who signs and is bound by indentures to work for another for a specified time especially in return for payment of travel expenses and maintenance
Good luck out there…
They have also deported a famous musician, Jane Eugene of Loose Ends while she was getting her Visa extended!
I live in California.
Trump is trying to grind us down into submission. You feel it in the air.
Thank you for talking about this.
Other states don't understand how frightening ICE raids are.
Yet.
The ICE enforcers are masked, they don't talk, they just brutally grab and arrest people.
Now there's billions of more money for this kind of horror ...
I will never forgive these Republicans who voted to pass this big disgusting, immoral bill. The worst of them are the ones who pretended to be decent human beings, but voted yes anyway.
F**k them.
I love Hakeem Jeffries, but I fear our country may not recover from this project 2025 regime.
Stay well. Thank you for bringing some light during these troubling times.