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Notes from the Frontlines of the Government’s War on the Left
In a real sense, the latest version of American inquisition has simply come full circle, returning us to our historical roots.
Jul 02, 2023
“There must be some kind of way out of here…”
As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.”
While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had faced mounting local opposition and this festival was, in essence, a coming-out party for the movement to defend a priceless bit of urban green space from the bulldozer’s blade.
Now, accompanied by the dull hum of drones and the buzz of helicopters overhead, officers of the “peace” descended from all directions, their fingers on the triggers of their semi-automatics. The orders came down with the force of live rounds: “Get on the ground! Now!”
“I was completely shocked when I heard that I was being charged with domestic terrorism.”
“I was playing ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ funnily enough,” remembers Suede Cassidy frontman Jeremiah Percival. “Around halfway through our set, they started arresting people… pointing AR-15s… traumatizing kids for nothing. It was very stormtrooper-esque. It’s a good reminder to know how fascism is in this country and how it’s very much alive.”
“It was after dark,” recalls Stop Cop City activist Priscilla Grim. “I was walking to see the concert. And I noticed that there was a drone tracking me. And the next thing I knew, men started chasing me, and I fell. They had me turn over on my stomach. And there was the red light of the gunsight to the right of my head. It was… frightening!”
Priscilla and 22 other protesters nabbed that night would go on to be charged with “domestic terrorism”—conduct allegedly “intended to intimidate the civilian population” or to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government of this state”—under a Georgia statute originally meant to deter would-be killers in the wake of the Charleston A.M.E. massacre. “I was completely shocked when I heard that I was being charged with domestic terrorism,” Priscilla told me. “For wearing black! In a forest! It’s absurd. It’s illegitimate. It’s an abuse… And as a survivor of 9/11, I am insulted that the state of Georgia thinks that they can do this.”
The Makings of an American Inquisition
Today, no fewer than 42 such cases are being prosecuted by Georgia’s attorney general. All 42 defendants stand accused of damaging property, not people. The only injuries that occurred were by police and correctional officers on the bodies of the accused. Some were then held for a month or more before being formally charged with a crime.
Georgia is hardly alone. The New York City Police Department recently attempted to charge multiple protesters with “terrorism” after they peacefully occupied a subway station to protest the choking to death of Jordan Neely, an unhoused New Yorker, by an ex-Marine. In an absurd turn of events, the charges were ultimately downgraded from “terrorism” to “criminal trespassing” before being dropped altogether last week.
Though the fanatics of the far right have been responsible for the preponderance of deadly political violence in recent years, it’s the heretics of the left—antiracists and antifascists, environmentalists and anticapitalists, pro-choice feminists and LGBTQ+ liberationists—who have attracted the most attention from police, prosecutors, and inquisitorial politicians.
And across the country, such police work continues under the guise of counterterrorism. Since the George Floyd movement, it’s been possible to see the makings of a future American inquisition in which the machinery of state is increasingly weaponized against the body politic itself—especially against its most leftwing, most marginalized parts.
Though the fanatics of the far right have been responsible for the preponderance of deadly political violence in recent years, it’s the heretics of the left—antiracists and antifascists, environmentalists and anticapitalists, pro-choice feminists and LGBTQ+ liberationists—who have attracted the most attention from police, prosecutors, and inquisitorial politicians.
It is they who have been profiled as “domestic terrorists,” branded as “violent extremists,” and subjected to terrorism-based sentencing enhancements, often yielding harsher prison terms and crueler punishments than those for their right-wing counterparts. As a result of such disparities, hundreds of participants in the George Floyd protests remain caged in federal facilities to this day.
The Long, Hot Summer of 2020
On May 31, 2020, just days after George Floyd’s murder, President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) all but declared war on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. Attorney General William P. Barr went before the press and promised to deploy federal forces to apprehend “radical agitators,” identify “criminal organizers and instigators,” and “coordinate” with “our state and local partners.”
“The rioting is domestic terrorism,” Barr went on to state, “and will be treated accordingly.”
Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli had a nearly identical message for the media: “Cities across America burn at the hands of antifa and anarchists while many political leaders are refusing to call it what it is: domestic terrorism.” A DHS whistleblower later affirmed that Cuccinelli and others had specifically instructed him to play up “the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups” in his intelligence assessments—and downplay threats of terror from the far right.
In two particularly egregious cases, U.S. Marshals and their deputies functionally acted as judges, juries, and executioners, with “Violent Offender Task Forces” fatally shooting two suspects—antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington and Black Lives Matter advocate Winston Smith in Minnesota—on sight
And so began a long, hot summer of inquisition into, and counterinsurgency against, the Black Lives Matter movement. By the second week of June, more than 13,643 protest participants had been arrested by state and local authorities. Some, like a group of three teens in Oklahoma City, even faced charges of felony “terrorism” for alleged acts of property destruction.
By the time the protests were over, some 326 people had been apprehended by federal agents, including members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and DHS’ Border Patrol Tactical Unit. At least 54 U.S. Attorneys’ offices were involved, as were all 56 of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
In May 2023, new reporting on FBI activities would reveal that the agency had improperly run “batch queries” of foreign intelligence sources for information on 133 individuals, all of whom were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests” in 2020. They were looking for “counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees.” According to recently declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they were also spying on American citizens without “any specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity.”
In 20 of the cases prosecuted at the federal level, there is evidence of direct involvement by FBI agents in the arrests themselves. And in two particularly egregious cases, U.S. Marshals and their deputies functionally acted as judges, juries, and executioners, with “Violent Offender Task Forces” fatally shooting two suspects—antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington and Black Lives Matter advocate Winston Smith in Minnesota—on sight.
Up until January 6, 2021, the supposed danger posed by left-wing “extremism” continued to be deemed greater than, or at least equal to, the threat of right-wing terrorism. No matter that the right had been responsible for the lion’s share of lethal incidents linked to extremism of any kind.
There were, of course, no terrorism bulletins released ahead of the events of January 6. Nor would there be terrorism enhancements after the fact awaiting those who participated in the Capitol siege. Such charges were reserved for Americans of a different description.
A Bipartisan Inquisition
The inquisition did not end with Trump’s first term. For all the rhetoric about criminal justice reform—and for all the conspiracy theories claiming that the president had “quietly” pardoned thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2021—Joe Biden’s DOJ has doubled down in a determined fashion on an inquisitorial strategy of counterinsurgency in the name of counterterrorism.
In the White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” released in June 2021, the administration pledged to “disrupt and deter those who launch… attacks in a misguided effort to force change in government policies that they view as unjust.” Subsequent documents, like last fall’s “Strategic Intelligence Assessment,” a joint product of the FBI and the DHS, confirmed what many in the Black Lives Matter movement already knew: that federal intelligence agencies had set their sights on “threat actors” motivated by “real or perceived racism or injustice in American society.”
Over the course of the Biden presidency, the DOJ has prosecuted Trump-era protest crimes with vigor and enthusiasm, while federal prosecutors have expanded the use of terrorism sentencing enhancements, delivering dozens of political prisoners to the doorstep of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A grossly disproportionate share of them have been people of African descent.
Though many have seen their charges dropped, others have seen their cases pursued to the bitter end by local prosecutors.
The vast majority of federal cases involve offenses against property or “commerce.” At least 17 have faced felony charges for unlawful use of the Internet (for instance, “using an instrument of interstate commerce to incite riots”). One of every three defendants was charged with obstructing “interstate commerce,” one in five with crimes of “civil disorder,” and another one in five for “conspiring,” “attempting,” or “aiding and abetting” some underlying crime they did not themselves commit.
Take the case of a young Black woman named Tia Pugh, of Mobile, Alabama, who was initially charged with two simple misdemeanors for breaking a window on the night of May 31, 2020.
“We were attacked first,” she would recall. “I was getting my people out of there… We get killed for less.” After being tracked down on Facebook, then interrogated by the FBI, she was brought up on felony charges for interfering with the police “during the commission of a civil disorder” which “adversely affected commerce.” Facing more than five years in prison, her sentence was reduced to time served after she spent more than a year in pretrial detention in an Alabama jail.
Though many have seen their charges dropped, others have seen their cases pursued to the bitter end by local prosecutors. Black activist Brittany Martin was, for instance, convicted in 2022 of “breaching the peace” for shouting in officers’ faces during a peaceable assembly in Sumter, South Carolina, in 2020. Although the alleged offense typically carries a maximum penalty of 30 days, prosecutors charged her with a crime of a “high and aggravated nature.” Last spring, she was sentenced, while pregnant, to no fewer than four years behind bars.
Future Enemies of the State
By any measure, the white supremacist movement is now officially acknowledged to pose the deadliest terrorist threat in America. The White House, the DOJ, and the DHS have made much of their commitment to confronting such far-right forms of terror, but the numbers coming from the federal government tell a different story.
On June 6, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released its annual internal audit, assessing the department’s strategy to “address the domestic violent extremism threat.” The audit revealed that investigations into white supremacist, “racially motivated,” and “anti-government/anti-authority” activity fell dramatically from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, the number (and share) of investigations involving “abortion-related” (including “pro-choice”) extremism skyrocketed, increasing by more than 800% and surpassing that recorded in any other year on record.
There is little mystery as to who is being targeted by such investigations since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which revoked a pregnant parent’s right to choose. Last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray clarified which side was the most suspect and which side considered the most victimized: “You might be interested to know that, since the Dobbs decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70% of our abortion-related violence cases, are cases of violence or threats against pro-life… where the victims are pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that.”
“I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way… Community organizing is not illegal and should not be treated as such.”
The case of Pilsen Community Books (PCB), a worker-owned bookstore on Chicago’s Lower West Side, is illuminating in this regard. PCB was recently revealed to be the subject of an FBI “assessment,” based on three factors: its status as a “not police friendly place”; its role as a “meeting, planning, and networking venue”; and its recent use by “pro-abortion extremists… to prepare for a pro-abortion direct action.” In other words, it’s a dangerous hotbed of constitutionally protected activity.
“Everything is very much out there in terms of what we believe and what we do,” says worker-owner Mandy Medley. “I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way… Community organizing is not illegal and should not be treated as such.”
Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security and its national network of 80 “fusion centers” have been hard at work collecting and aggregating data on “anarchist” or “environmental violent extremists.” And they’ve cast a wide net, even ensnaring writers and artists in their web of surveillance.
State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism
Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., inquisitorially-minded Republican politicians have been pressuring the FBI and DHS to crack down ever harder on their ideological adversaries. Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced legislation that would designate “Antifa,” and “any other affiliated group or subsidiary of Antifa” to be a domestic terrorist organization based on its “unlawful conduct” and its belief in “communism, anarchism, socialism… and lawlessness.” That same month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on “Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” at which Greene called for a clampdown on the newest enemy of the state: “The movement that wants to use trans terrorism against Americans.” No mention was made of the very real movement that approves of the use of terror against trans Americans.
One such trans American was Manuel Terán, an Indigenous forest defender known as Tortuguita, who was killed by a barrage of 57 bullets one cold January day in that Atlanta forest. While it was a state trooper who fired the fatal bullet, it was DHS, the FBI, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that provided the intelligence for the operation. In the months since Tortuguita’s killing, those very agencies have continued to beat the drums of war, warning of the threat of “violent extremists in Georgia” and singling out those motivated by “anti-law enforcement sentiment.”
In a real sense, it may be that this latest American inquisition has simply come full circle, returning us to our historical roots: to a society where the caging of Black people, the spilling of Indigenous blood, and the violent policing of the body politic are the stuff of business as usual—a society where state terror, in the name of counterterrorism, is accepted as a way of life.
On the other hand, if Black Lives Matter and the movement for bodily autonomy are any indication, it may be that we, as a society, have a lower tolerance for state terror than we once did.
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Snowden Says Shut Down DHS After Report Revealed Secretive Effort to Police Online Speech
The NSA whistleblower said creating the Department of Homeland Security "was always a mistake," but "its plan to become the Speech Police is the final straw."
Nov 02, 2022
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should be shut down after reporting shined light on the agency's sweeping campaign to police what it deems disinformation online, an effort that raised alarm among civil liberties groups.
"It's time to talk about shutting down the Department of Homeland Security," Snowden, a former NSA contractor who exposed the agency's illegal mass spying program in 2013, wrote on Twitter.
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere."
DHS, formed in 2002 in the wake of the September 11 attacks, "was always a mistake, a costly artifact of the hysteric post-9/11 authoritarianism that left us no more safe, but much less free," Snowden continued. "Its plan to become the Speech Police is the final straw."
Snowden was responding to an in-depth story by The Intercept on Monday detailing secretive DHS attempts to "curb speech it considers dangerous" by trying to pressure and "influence tech platforms" such as Twitter and Facebook. The department's "stepped up counter-disinformation effort" began under former President Donald Trump and has continued under President Joe Biden, the outlet noted.
"According to a draft copy of DHS' Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS' capstone report outlining the department's strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target 'inaccurate information' on a wide range of topics, including 'the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine," The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang reported.
"How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech," Klippenstein and Fang stressed.
"DHS justifies these goals--which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically--by claiming that terrorist threats can be 'exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online," they added. "But the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering."
The ACLU, which has previously called for the dismantling of DHS over its myriad abuses, expressed concerns in response to the The Intercept's story, which noted that the agency's efforts to police disinformation online have only expanded in the wake of the agency's decision to scrap its widely derided Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year.
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere," the ACLU tweeted earlier this week. "Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights."
Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at FIRE--a free speech organization that is fighting right-wing censorship campaigns across the U.S.--told The Intercept that "no matter your political allegiances, all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the government's preferred decisions about what content we can see online."
"Any governmental requests to social media platforms to review or remove certain content should be made with extreme transparency," Goldstein added.
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DHS Inspector General Launches Criminal Probe Into Secret Service Text Deletions
"This is a big deal," said one advocacy group.
Jul 21, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has opened a criminal investigation into the Secret Service's destruction of text messages sent the day of and before the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
"This is to notify you that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has an ongoing investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding the collection and preservation of evidence by the United States Secret Service as it relates to the events of January 6, 2021," DHS Deputy Inspector General Gladys Ayala wrote in a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray on Wednesday night.
"To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the USSS must not engage in any further investigative activities regarding the collection and preservation of the evidence referenced above," the deputy inspector general continued. "This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices, or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint earlier this week asking the U.S. Justice Department to launch "an immediate and full investigation into whether Secret Service employees willfully destroyed federal records," welcomed news of the inspector general's criminal probe.
While the Secret Service has claimed that texts from last January 5 and 6 were erased as "part of a device replacement program," the inspector general has emphasized that the messages were deleted after DHS oversight officials requested them to aid their assessment of the deadly insurrection incited by former President Donald Trump.
The Secret Service acknowledged its receipt of the inspector general's letter, which comes as the House committee investigating the January 6 attack is attempting to recover the agency's missing electronic communications--with limited success so far.
"We have informed the January 6th select committee of the inspector general's request and will conduct a thorough legal review to ensure we are fully cooperative with all oversight efforts and that they do not conflict with each other," the Secret Service said in a statement.
A Secret Service official said the letter "raises some legal complexities," NBC News reported Thursday after speaking with two unnamed sources.
While the inspector general has asked the Secret Service to cease all internal inquires amid the watchdog's criminal probe, the agency also faces a subpoena from the House January 6 committee and a request for information from the National Archives.
According to CNN, which reviewed the letter: "The inspector general wrote that the Secret Service should explain what interviews had already been conducted related to the text messages, along with the 'scope off the questioning, and what, if any, warnings were given to the witness(es).' The inspector general told the Secret Service to respond by Monday."
The results of the inspector general's probe could be referred to federal prosecutors, the outlet noted. The Justice Department declined to comment on the letter's reference to an "ongoing criminal investigation."
The January 6 panel is set to hold a public hearing Thursday at 8:00 pm ET.
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This Is Biden's Chance to End ICE's Abuses--For Good
The systemic abuses of ICE make communities less safe—especially when they act in tandem with law enforcement through programs like 287(g), ICE detainers, and Secure Communities.
Feb 13, 2021
President Biden's 100-day deportation moratorium, announced late last month, was a monumental achievement for immigrant justice activists and immigrant communities. Less visible but potentially groundbreaking: The Department of Homeland Security's promise to conduct a top-to-bottom review of programs and policies governing the arrests and deportations of immigrants in the United States.
While a Texas court temporarily enjoined the deportation moratorium (the ACLU has intervened in the case), the top-to-bottom review will go forward. Its success is the key to the puzzle of how to actually limit deportations and keep families together over the course of Biden's presidency. What's at stake? Whether millions of immigrants and their family members -- many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years -- will be forced to live in fear of being deported, and torn away from their families and communities.
"It doesn't have to be this way. These ICE programs are in many ways a vestige of the post-9/11 era of government overreach and destruction of civil rights."
DHS set out the deportation moratorium in a short memo, which stated that immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States should "prioritize responding to threats to national security, public safety, and border security." It set out corresponding "interim civil enforcement priorities" that will apply during the 100-day period, pending the full review. And this week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will issue new interim guidelines designed to make ICE agents accountable to the interim priorities. Taken together, this is a major break from the Trump administration's approach, which effectively made all undocumented people targets for deportation and gave ICE agents free rein.
We have serious reservations about the interim enforcement priorities, which use sweeping and overbroad terms that have harmed communities of color for decades and mischaracterize all recent border crossers as threats to border security. Still, this news is significant: limiting immigration enforcement to these priorities would likely protect tens of thousands of people from deportation.
But without additional serious reforms, there is no reason to believe that ICE will abide by the Biden interim priorities and their eventual successor priorities. Even now, ICE agents are saying publicly that they intend to undermine the new administration, ICE's spokesperson is touting the agency's "unlimited discretion to evaluate any conduct" to justify arresting individuals on "public safety" grounds, and ICE is deporting individuals who should be protected by the Biden interim priorities.
As long as ICE has the resources to track, arrest, and deport large numbers of people, it will attempt to do so, bending the law to its prerogative. That is the lesson of the Obama years, when ICE flouted the enforcement priorities and related reforms, deporting thousands of individuals who did not meet its criteria. ICE also continued to regularly issue detainers requesting that state and local law enforcement agencies jail individuals past their release date, so that ICE could deport them, although the DHS secretary had directed detainers to be used only in "special circumstances."
At the time, immigrant justice groups argued that ICE's deportation and detention quotas had not changed in response to the Obama enforcement priorities, and there was simply "no evidence" that ICE agents would "actually modify their practices." In recent years, Freedom of Information Act requests have confirmed that ICE deportations continue to be quota-driven -- not public safety driven, as it claims.
Biden's review of immigrant enforcement policies must reckon with how to change both ICE culture and capacity. This is hard, but one of the clearest fixes is ending ICE programs that use state and local law enforcement as "force multipliers." These include the 287(g) program, ICE detainers, and Secure Communities.
Under these programs, local police have helped ICE ensnare thousands of people in an indiscriminate deportation dragnet -- the opposite of the limited approach the Biden administration has promised. Here's how: Being in the business of immigration enforcement incentivizes local police to make pretextual arrests on state or local criminal grounds -- with the actual goal of identifying immigrants to detain for ICE's deportation. It emboldens law enforcement officers across the country to use immigration enforcement as a means of threatening and harassing people in immigrant communities. Racial profiling, harassment, and constitutional violations have resulted, as congressional hearings have detailed.
Local police jail people on ICE detainers, which ICE agents issue unilaterally with no outside review. ICE uses detainers in local jails as a "stop gap measure" to give the agency time to pick up people encountered by local police, despite often lacking probable cause to believe they are deportable. This is one reason why so many U.S. citizens and immigrants have been wrongfully detained by local police on behalf of ICE.
It doesn't have to be this way. These ICE programs are in many ways a vestige of the post-9/11 era of government overreach and destruction of civil rights. ICE turned to state and local law enforcement, claiming "terrorism" concerns as justification in a strategy championed by Kris Kobach. Here, as in so many instances, "terrorism" was simply cover for the government to expand its powers and engage in biased profiling -- not make us safer.
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More Humane Cages? Prospects for Immigration Justice Under Biden Appear Dim
In stacking not just his DHS team but all of his transition teams with neoliberals and hawks, Biden has sent the world a clear signal that despite the cage-free fantasies of liberal Democrats, his immigration policy will be more of the same.
Nov 16, 2020
Countless variants of the theme of caged children were used to try to shame leftists into voting for Biden in the recent presidential elections, despite the fact that--as President Trump repeatedly and correctly noted in a twisted defense of his own family separation policy--the Obama/Biden White House started the program. Now that we are getting a glimpse of Biden's transition team, it is clear that his opponents on the left were right to curb their enthusiasm and (in many cases) cast their votes elsewhere. Instead of a reprieve from policies that fall squarely within the definition of genocide, Biden appears poised to dig in his heels. Take, for example, his appointment of Obama's former top immigration adviser Cecilia Munoz to his transition team, who brushed off NPR interviewer Maria Hinojosa's question about family separation, responding that "Some of these things are going to happen."
While much has been made of the gendered diversity of Biden's transition team (including Munoz) and potential cabinet picks, it will be little comfort to the women of Central America, or any other region subject to U.S. interference, to know that the new U.S. #GirlBosses may include Susan Rice as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton as UN ambassador, or Michele Flournoy as Secretary of Defense.
The intertwined success and violence of the U.S. asylum/deportation industry hinges on its profitability.
Many of Biden's DHS transition team selections show his platform will differ (if at all) only in form, not in substance, from that of Trump. None of his team members hail from the ranks of BIPOC organizers who delivered him his victories in key states like Arizona, and for whom immigration is a major issue.
Instead, Biden's picks further the logic of his Latino campaign strategy, which pandered to right-wing Miami Cubans and Venezuelans, ignoring the vast, diverse majority of Latinx communities for whom immigration justice, access to quality healthcare and education, and protection from police violence are far more important than fighting communism. While numerous analysts on the left have pointed out that Biden's approach didn't even win him Florida, he's sticking to it.
Biden's DHS transition team members range from billionaire-funded think tank pundits to corporate lawyers, with a smattering of left-liberal ACLU types, none of whom fundamentally question the overarching logic of border security. Take Blas Nunez-Neto, for example, DHS transition team member and RAND analyst who accuses migrants of "taking advantage of incentives created by the U.S. asylum process" and has advocated that asylum seekers be made to seek asylum from U.S. embassies while still living in their countries (a non-starter for people fleeing deadly violence) and building more private prisons to detain entire families indefinitely, as humane alternatives to family separation.
Beyond the more egregious stances taken by some of Biden's DHS transition committee members, they appear to be in agreement on some fundamental--and fundamentally flawed--points, all of which prioritize profit over human lives. For Biden's DHS team:
- Border "security" (i.e. preventing "terrorists" and/or people without "legitimate" asylum claims from entering the United States) is at least as important as ensuring that the militarized security apparatus doesn't kill mostly BIPOC people on either side of the U.S. border.
- Privatized border security expenditures of public funds should continue at least at their current levels, shifting focus from Trump's extension of Obama/Biden's physical border walls toward ever-increasing spending on (equally harmful) technologies of surveillance.
- Migration deterrence measures should follow the logic of the "Biden Plan" for Central America, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into repressive state security apparatuses and mega-development projects (despite the Plan having dramatically increased impoverishment, state violence and migration since its implementation in response to the 2014 "unaccompanied minor" crisis).
- Climate change, which is dramatically increasing migration and should be taken into account in immigration policy, is not a result of capitalism and thus should not be addressed by curbing or (God forbid) ending it.
To understand the dangers to immigrants of the upcoming Biden administration, it's also important to look beyond the DHS transition team to his other transition team picks. U.S. capitalist-military imperialism in partnership with client governments--and in regime-change efforts against non-client states--is the primary "push" factor for immigration to this country. Journalists Sarah Lazare, Alan MacLeod and Kevin Gosztola have shown in recent days how Biden has already handed the reins over to the same war hawks and authors of neoliberal trade deals responsible for impoverishment, violence and environmental devastation abroad, and (consequently) immigration to the United States. The defense contractors so heavily represented in Biden's transition team will profit as much from border security initiatives as they do from foreign wars.
The intertwined success and violence of the U.S. asylum/deportation industry hinges on its profitability. In stacking not just his DHS team but all of his transition teams with neoliberals and hawks, Biden has sent the world a clear signal that despite the cage-free fantasies of liberal Democrats, his immigration policy will be more of the same.
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Docs Show US Agents, Including Sniper Teams With 'Shoot to Kill' Authorization, Deployed to George Floyd Funeral
The ACLU of Texas, which obtained the documents, said they "paint a chilling picture of federal agents unleashed in our cities."
Oct 02, 2020
New reporting reveals federal forces--including at least six sniper teams, an elite Border Patrol tactical unit, FBI aerial and ground surveillance, and National Guard troops--were deployed to George Floyd's funeral in suburban Houston earlier this year, with some of the agents authorized to shoot to kill in the event of serious civil unrest.
VICE on Thursday published highly confidential government documents obtained via a public records request from the ACLU of Texas showing how federal and local authorities braced for "rioting and looting" at the peaceful June 9 burial of George Floyd, the 46-year-old Black man killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota while being arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit banknote on May 25.
"The records show local and federal officials were ready and willing to open fire, even as the nation was undergoing a reckoning over systemic racism and excessive use of force by police in the aftermath of Floyd's death," VICE reported.
As Floyd's horse-drawn hearse made its way to his final resting place in Houston Memorial Gardens cemetery in Pearland, records show that at least half a dozen "sniper teams" were at the ready on nearby rooftops, with authorization to use deadly force in the event of violent unrest below.
"It is not lost on us that CBP deployed snipers and federal agents to surveil and potentially use military-style force against people mourning George Floyd, who died because police officers killed him."
--Madhuri Grewal, ACLU
At the same time, an FBI surveillance plane monitored events from the sky while federal "overwatch units" monitored the mourners for "agitators." The Texas Department of Public Safety and "multiple" unspecified agencies also monitored the event with aircraft and drones, the documents show.
The U.S. military and federal government faced widespread criticism for using aircraft, including drones, to spy on protests sparked by Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and other cities earlier this year.
More than 60 members of the elite, militarized U.S. Customs and Border Protection unit BORTAC--whose camouflage-clad agents in unmarked vans snatched demonstrators off the streets of Portland, Oregon during this summer's racial justice protests--were among the federal forces deployed to Floyd's funeral. Their stated mission was "to prevent property loss or damage," according to one of the documents.
Mainstream critics have called BORTAC President Donald Trump's secret police force--and even a sign of advancing fascism.
In Pearland, National Guard troops were present on standby in a "ready posture as a last line of defense," while local law enforcement also deployed "light tactical military vehicles" at selected intersections to "protect against vehicle-borne attacks" during the funeral procession.
The "rules of engagement" detailed in the leaked documents show the CBP tactical unit was "geared up and ready to deploy" for events as minor as "verbally aggressive language" or throwing empty water bottles. "Less-lethal" force was authorized for more serious incidents, including brick-throwing.
For even more aggressive behavior, the documents state that "deadly force is authorized anytime."
The large, militarized federal presence was requested by Pearland city officials, according to the documents. Pearland spokesperson Joshua Lee told VICE that city police requested the federal presence, and that the "mission of all personnel was to provide a safe environment for the Floyd family to conduct their service in peace."
"Just because nothing happened doesn't mean there weren't credible threats," Lee explained. "We plan for a variety of potential outcomes to be as prepared as possible."
Shaw Drake, policy counsel for the ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center, said the documents "paint a chilling picture of federal agents unleashed in our cities."
"CBP is a rogue agency that has operated with violent impunity in border communities," Drake said in a statement. "Now they are being deployed as a federal police force to cities across the country in collaboration with local police."
"CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, and also the least accountable," Drake added. "It's disturbing to see they made preparations to tear gas or kill people who were mourning another death at the hands of police. CBP has no place in our communities, period."
Madhuri Grewal, federal immigration policy counsel at the ACLU, added that "it is not lost on us that CBP deployed snipers and federal agents to surveil and potentially use military-style force against people mourning George Floyd, who died because police officers killed him."
"Congress pumps billions into CBP annually, and this is what the agency is doing with our taxpayer dollars," Grewal said in a statement. "At a time when our nation is calling for an end to police brutality, our government is responding to communities grieving the relentless murder of Black people at the hands of police with more police and overmilitatization. It's shameful and inhumane."
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