Let's be honest: ICE is already a secret police force.

(CHESTERTOWN, MD) – Recently, I attended the 3rd No Kings Protest event held nationally. Having attended the first and been unable to attend the second due to a knee injury, which made me incapable of walking at the time, I was ready to get back on the front lines. Obviously, since the first, things have somehow already gotten worse. 

I remember thinking initially of the first protests in Westport, something that felt somewhat routine if not a little self-aggrandizing. Yes, Trump is an egotistical maniac (I would guess most politicians are, they’re just better at hiding it), but surely he’s not thinking himself a King? Not someone with a divine right and provenance to rule over the nation? These are ideas of centuries previous. Ideas, I'm not even sure the actual King Charles III of Britain (and others) actually believes himself. 

Of course, we now know what Mr. Trump thinks of the American people bravely bracing the streets filled with his teargas and his rubber bullets. At the Second No King’s Protest rally, Mr. Trump released video footage of him flying a fighter plane, and shitting all over a popular liberal activist and other protestors that took to the streets of a nondescript city. While that was funny and absurd at the time of its release, reflecting upon it again, it showed the first large cracks in the veneer of legitimate oppression under the state apparatus. Although if certain philosophers are to be believed, all legitimate violence is state violence, and all of that violence is legitimate. 

Naturally, most people (including myself) reject that idea. That’s why, when two protestors, exercising their First and Second Amendment rights to assembly, speech, and the right to carry a licensed firearm in the process of what can only be described as self-protection, Alex Preti and Renee Good were shot in broad daylight by masked officials of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and when the fallout of this event became so immense that Mr. Trump’s administration were forced to withdraw all federal troops from the defiant state of Minnesota and Mr. Trump eventually fired the head of the Department of Homeland Security, as a seeming cave to popular pressure to remove the dog-killing former governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem. 

So, what can we take away from this pressure and removal campaign? First, we can conclude what we should already implicitly know. ICE is acting as a make-shift secret police, currently bogged down by the immense pace at which they were hired, trained, and expected to put down protestors like the dogs that they apparently regularly shoot when they bark too loudly. What are we meant to think of these officers whose names and badge numbers we can never know? What else can they be except, quite literally, a secret police force? We are now a country where if you look brown, wrong, or generally you piss off the wrong guy or gal you can be ostensibly indefinitely detained in prison without charge and without the knowledge of your spouse, children, or family. If I were to describe that country to you, would your first thought be the leader of a free world? I certainly wouldn’t