ICE is Trump’s Gestapo or SS. They have no proper function, no constitutional authorization, and are loyal to Trump personally.
In Minneapolis on Wednesday, an ICE agent murdered a woman in her car.
The next day another shooting by federal border patrol agents (not ICE) occurred in Portland.
Trump and Vance have stated palpable untruths about what happened, to defend their goons. Both the videos of the incident and an eyewitness, less than 10 feet away with a good vantage point, make it clear that the ICE agent was gratuitously approaching, and trying to enter, the car. Trump and especially Vance have claimed the ICE goon shot in self-defense. Against what? You approach the driver-side of a car that is (apparently) trying to leave the area, you pull on the door handle, which doesn’t open, then you fire three shots at the driver through the window, killing her—and that’s somehow you defending yourself?! [Later edit: the killer was not the one who tried to open the door; he was standing in front of the front left edge of the car.]
Trump has claimed that the victim was part of a “far Left” network. Even if true, which I’ve heard no evidence to support, how does that justify killing her? If far Left organizations are protesting ICE and deportations, good for them.
The two young people shot in Portland were not killed and are in the hospital. The Trump line is that they were part of a criminal drug gang and were here illegally. Drug gangs exist only because of the drug Prohibition. There are no Gatorade gangs, no chocolate bar cartels. Why not? Because these things are not illegalized and their prices are such as earn an average rate of profit.
The federal border agency was stopping vehicles in a “targeted” manner—meaning: stopping drivers who looked Hispanic.
All of this crime, violence, and now government goon squads, is due to the widespread fear of foreigners.
And it’s a perceptual-level mentality: there would be no ICE and no immigrant hysteria if the people entering this country were solely from Canada, the UK, and Scandinavia. Sure, the labor unions would still be yelling about lost jobs, but that is not sufficient to galvanize a group as large as MAGA.
The public’s wrong view of immigrants and wrong ideas regarding drugs are enabling a power-mad low-life to change America into a police state.
The public’s wrong view could not have happened without the destruction of the concept of individual rights. That destruction began in the ivory towers of Europe in the early 19th century. The Progressive movement brought the anti-rights view to America at the turn of the 20th century.
The anti-rights view didn’t have to win. The reason that it won is that “rights” are a very abstract normative concept, and until Ayn Rand no one was able to defend the relation of abstractions to concretes or to ground morality in the facts.
The ultimate reason that ICE exists and that they murder is the lack of a theory of concept-formation, of free will, and of objectivity—including objectivity in ethics.
That ignorance, played upon by Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, permitted Jeremy Bentham to proclaim 20 years after Kant’s Critique that rights are “nonsense upon stilts.” And that has been the “settled science” about rights ever since.
Part 2:
Here are the essentials.
1. ICE men are not police officers. Disobeying them is not anarchistic because their function and raison d’etre are to grab people and deport them.
Yes, given the laws against immigration, their actions could be called “law enforcement” in the abstract, but as we have seen, ICE acts arbitrarily, violently, thuggishly. They do not restrict their actions to criminalized immigrants. Or, more precisely, they, not the law, decide what the scope of their actions are.
The nature of an action follows from the nature of the entity that acts. The nature of ICE as an entity is: arbitrary force. They are thugs. I would never refer to them as “law enforcement.”
(My use of “Gestapo” is figurative. Literally, ICE is the transition to that kind of evil agency.)
2. One of the goons tells Good to get out of her car. Why? Do they have the authority to pull protestors out of their cars? No.
Is it anarchy not to obey a senseless command from a paramilitary, non-police goon? No.
And one of the goons actually tries to open the car door! Where do they get off doing that?! In that situation, I too would try to drive away. As someone pointed out, officers had a license plate and could easily have arrested Mrs. Good subsequently. Instead, Ross killed her.
3. Stuart Feldman raises several factual issues, but there’s one thing left out of this one:
Did Ross see her turn right soon enough, or was he focused on the scene of his fellow agent starting to be pulled along with the car? I have no idea.
Later video shows that Ross looking through the windshield must have seen her turning the steering wheel to the right, away from him. That alone, if I saw it correctly, is enough to put the lie to the charge of self-defense.
4. How on earth could any sane man fear for his life when a car that is stopped a few feet away from you starts to move? You are not squarely in front of the car, but at its front edge. As everyone knows, intuitively, the car can’t get up to any reasonable speed to clip you before you can hop back out of the way. This was not a dragster but an ordinary sedan. The bullet hole I saw was on the corner of the windshield, showing that he was not in front of the car.
Further, the time Ross spends drawing his gun he could have spent stepping away to avoid being hit. Look at the frames of the video that show Ross standing still and drawing his gun.
This was not self-defense. Fear of being run over could not have been his motivation in standing still, drawing his gun, and killing Good.
I repeat that there is eyewitness testimony:
an eyewitness, less than 10 feet away with a good vantage point, make it clear that the ICE agents were gratuitously approaching, and trying to enter, the car.
If it wasn’t self-defense, then it was an execution. That’s what it looks like to me.
5. Skepticism. Distinguish a court finding from a private judgment. There is ample evidence for anyone who looks into it to conclude privately that this is murder. If you have grounds to think that a trial may bring out exculpatory evidence, then you can qualify it and even retreat to “highly likely.”
But the big picture is: Trump’s goon squad, created out of xenophobia, shot a non-violent protestor three times in the face, killing her.