ICE: Crossing State Lines to Incite Riots -- The American Prospect

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https://prospect.org/justice/ice-crossing-state-lines-to-incite-riots/
Harold Meyerson

The only disorder the National Guard will find comes from the deporters.

Let’s be clear about who, exactly, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been arresting in and around Los Angeles. On Friday, they raided downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where seamstresses and retail clerks, some of them undocumented immigrants, are clustered. On Saturday, they made arrests outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a working-class L.A. suburb where day laborers, some of them undocumented immigrants, assemble daily to get work on small-scale construction projects.

The microscopically thin pretext behind the Trump Administration’s deportation policies is that they’re targeting criminals and gang members. The problem is, groups of seamstresses and construction workers are not commonly construed as gangs. That’s why, despite having made hundreds of arrests, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security can only claim, without evidence, that five detainees are gang members. For now, what they have is a whole mess of seamstresses and odd-job construction workers in their lockups.

When ICE agents swarmed the downtown fashion district on Friday, there was no discernible protest. The same was true at a West L.A. Home Depot which received three ICE trucks on Saturday, something that has gotten no attention locally or nationally, but which my colleague David Dayen learned about from talking to laborers there. (The laborers scattered and the trucks left without incident.) But when ICE swarmed the Home Depot in Paramount on Saturday, there was a backlash.

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THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP and his grand inquisitor, Stephen Miller, have worked assiduously to engineer. Their politics—in Miller’s case, his raison d’etre—is based on demonizing the other. In this case, the object of Miller’s demonization are those immigrants he presumes to be unpopular, and, he hopes, the Democrats who defend them, or at least defend their right to a day in court. Trump and company have long argued that they’re responding to an invasion of some sort. To that end, they’ve highlighted the actual convicted felons or gang members they’re rounding up. When the invaders turn out to be seamstresses and roofers, they’ve felt an even greater need to fabricate an emergency. Deploying the National Guard helps to give the appearance of an emergency, perhaps sufficient to eclipse the absence of an actual emergency against which the Guard is supposed to defend.

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