Paramilitary terror in the United States
BarcelonaIt's not uncommon these days to see dystopian films and series depicting the United States in the throes of civil war or where chaos reigns and the law of the strongest prevails. Unfortunately, the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol (CBP) to indiscriminately capture immigrants are bringing these apocalyptic scenarios, where police violence is the norm, ever closer. The cold-blooded murder of Alex Pretti, a nurse protesting the raids in Minneapolis, has sparked a wave of outrage across the country. This incident follows the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good while she was arguing with an officer without leaving her vehicle. It also comes on the heels of the scandal surrounding the arrest of five-year-old Liam Ramos, who was taken home from school and used as bait to lure his father home.
All of this could be treated as a series of cases of police violence, so prevalent in the United States, but there's more to these cases. To begin with, neither ICE nor CBP are true police forces; rather, they have recently been staffed with untrained individuals, in a purely paramilitary style. The underlying objective doesn't seem to be simply to capture undocumented immigrants and return them to their countries of origin, but to create a climate of terror among the population as a whole, especially among Democratic citizens.
ICE's methods cross every red line. Agents enter workplaces, schools, and even churches looking for people with different skin colors or accents. There have even been reports of Native Americans being detained, something completely absurd, since they are the original inhabitants of this land. Detainees are taken to centers lacking even the most basic conditions, and more than sixty people have already died in custody.
The methods appear designed to incite public anger and thus obtain images of clashes between protesters and police. The choice of a city like Minneapolis also seems unlikely to be accidental. It is a medium-sized city, easy to control, and has a Democratic majority. The 3,000 officers deployed outnumber the local police, so it can be said that they have effectively taken over. The objective is to instill a sense of disorder in the public that justifies the use of force, and incidentally, to spread a climate of terror among the population. These are methods already used by fascism in Italy in the 1920s and 30s.
Fortunately, the people of Minneapolis are organizing to hide immigrants in their homes (it's impossible not to think of Anne Frank and the persecution of Jews), and networks of solidarity and resistance are being created across the country to confront the raids by ICE and CBP. Because, as a banner in Minneapolis recently stated, perhaps now they're only going after immigrants, but tomorrow they could be after you.
