Deadly Theater

[Res Ipsa]

Trump won the election based on one of his many big lies: that America was under siege by millions of criminal immigrants — the worst of the worst. This particular lie was directly contradicted by evidence: immigrants here without permission commit crimes at lower rates than citizens, and crime rates were near all-time lows. The lie also defied common sense — cities and states prosecute crime regardless of whether the perp is here legally or not. To the extent there were hardened criminals at large, it was because they were difficult either to build a case about or apprehend. The truth: there just weren’t that many hardened or violent criminals walking around our country.

Trump knew it was a lie, and so did his new cabinet. Yes, they had a list of America’s most wanted illegal aliens, but catching them would require time and tedious hard work. If arresting them would have been easy, cities and states would have already done it.

So keeping his promise was literally impossible because there just weren’t enough baddest of the bad. So, The regime decided to do the next best thing: created the impression that it was detaining and deporting huge numbers of hardened criminal illegal aliens. The first step was to deport planeloads of alleged Tren de Agua members to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. And they didn’t just start to it — they did it with a maximum of brutality and captured in a slickly produced propaganda film starring Puppy Killer Christy. But, as we soon discovered, it was all in violation of the Constitution. You see, the deportees never had a hearing to determine whether they were actually gang members. It was all accusations, sometimes based on questionable witness statements and misidentification of ordinary tattoos. The regime violated court orders and deported people days away from their scheduled asylum hearings. The regime had to scramble around to provide due process, which they had denied to every deportee.

But there clearly weren’t enough plausible Tren de Augua gang members to keep pace with the impossible promised Trump made. So, they implemented a Second strategy: created more people here illegally. It set about revoking people’s status to be here in as many cases as they plausibly could. Yep, if there aren’t enough criminals, change the rules to make more. Students who wrote a pro-Palestinian letter in a student paper: Our of here because little Marco says she is a threat to foreign policy. Following the rules and periodically showing up for check ins while you wait for your asylum hearing? Surprise, your status is revoked and you are detained. Gradually it began to dawn on Americans that regime wasn’t detaining and deporting hardened criminals — it was detaining students, friends, neighbors, store owners, valuable employees. What was presented as an abstract threat coalesced into something personal.

Now, the main reason so many people are in the US without documentation is that they have pending claims for asylum. There is relatively simple way to resolve that problem: hire more immigration judges. That’s the effective way to reduce the enormous backlog of asylum cases. Immigration judges are not Article III Judges. They are simply employees of the executive branch. Surge judges, surge clerks, rent space dm for courtrooms, eat through the backlog. But that’s boring. It doesn’t make for good TV. For the regime, optics trumps substance.

So, enter the paramilitary army. Congress threw an obscene amount of money at ICE. Outfitting a paramilitary trooper is much more expensive than buying a judge a robe. Constructing and staffing dozens of new concentration camps is more expensive than renting some space. But judges make for bad TV, while Ubergroppenfurher Bovino and Alligator Alcatraz feeds the apparent bloodlust of the MAGA hordes. So, we got Trump’s war on the States. And because Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist, he didn’t declare war on the states with most undocumented people: he went
after his blue state enemies.

A right-wing project Veritas wannabe “investigated” Somali run preschools in Minneapolis, claiming the schools didn’t exist, when he showed up after school hours or treated as suspicious the fact that preschools don’t let randos with cameras inside their buildings. Minneapolis had encountered problems with fraudulent Somali service providers (although the convicted ringleader was a whit woman). Trump seized on the vlogger’s report and used it as an excuse to demonize every Somali everywhere. He then used the report as a pretext to surge the paramilitary ICE army to Minneapolis, eventually sending six times the personnel of the entire Minneapolis police force.

This was more theater. If the problem is fraud, you surge accountants, not wannabe soldiers. You know who has accounts? The FBI! The newest ICE recruits can barely read, let alone audit financial records.

The latest legal developments dramatically shows that the deployment of ICE as a paramilitary force, with its policy of instant escalation and maximal brutality, was pure theater. Anyone with half a brain would understand that dramatically increasing the rate of retraining people will cause a similar increase in the number of habeus corpus petitions filed. But, guess what? The federal government didn’t surge US attorneys to Minneapolis to handle the increased workload. The US attorneys, who have been doing their best, have blown so many court deadlines that a judge has ordered the acting head of ICE to personally appear and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court.

Operation metro surge was never about immigration enforcement. It was theater, just as the National Guard operation in Chicago was pure theater. Trump and his sycophants care more about fooling his base into believing that he is carrying out his immigration promises than the lives of the residents of Detroit.

It’s all theater — and deadly theater at that.

[¥akaSteelhead]

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about the Melania movie.



On that tangent -

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying that watching the Melania movie is the absolute worst experience he has ever had at the theater.


Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

[Res Ipsa]

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about the Melania movie.



On that tangent -

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying that watching the Melania movie is the absolute worst experience he has ever had at the theater.


Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

Don’t trust what you read at Discuss Mormonism — Brigham Young.

[canpakes]

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about the Melania movie.

I thought that Amazon was a great place to shop smart, and here Amazon spends $40 million to purchase a stink bomb, and then another $30 million to tell folks about being suckered.

[¥akaSteelhead]

Bribery