Radley Balko writes:

With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. Masked secret police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,” that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and that the officers themselves have “immunity” from any form of accountability. Meanwhile, administration lawyers have brazenly lied to federal judges to supplement those deportation forces by deploying U.S. troops to the streets of American cities—seeking to break this country’s healthy antipathy toward domestic use of the military policing that dates back to the founding.

“They’re assaulting basic democratic ideals on all fronts,” said Dana Marks, an immigration judge who retired in 2021. “It’s really just classic authoritarianism. It always starts with the minorities. It always starts with the immigrants. If we don’t stop them, it will be American citizens. Congress, the courts, the people, we should all be jumping up and down and screaming about this. We need to be screaming that this isn’t America—that this isn’t who we are.”

I’ve been writing and reporting on policing in the United States for more than 20 years. I’ve spent much of that time writing about the effects of police militarization, or the way military weapons, training, uniforms, and culture have infiltrated domestic law enforcement agencies. But I’ve never seen anything quite like the last six months.

We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles. Some of those arrested have been quickly shuttled off to detention facilities in other parts of the country without any notification to their families or attorneys. Others have been sent to a third country, often a country in the developing world to which they have no connection. Still others have been explicitly targeted for their political opinions, their activism, or their journalism. [Continue reading…]