Over the last few weeks, Minneapolis has looked like a city under siege. The Trump administration has sent roughly 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota in what Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has called the “largest immigration operation ever.”
This comes as protests have spread around Minneapolis and across the country demanding that ICE leave Minnesota and other states following the death of Renée Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and US citizen who was killed by an ICE officer as she observed federal agents. While the Trump administration has labeled her a “domestic terrorist” who tried to run over the agent with her car, multiple videos show Good appearing to drive away.
ICE and other immigration agents are operating in ways we’ve never seen before in this country. But their tactics and weapons are not entirely new. Investigative journalist Radley Balko is the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop and host of Collateral Damage, a podcast about America’s war on drugs. He’s been tracking police militarization for decades and how it’s tied to America’s long-running drug war. On this week’s More To The Story, Balko describes what he’s seeing today from law enforcement as one of his “worst fever dreams.”
“Law enforcement leaders around the country are horrified by what they’re seeing,” Balko says. “Nobody thinks that how Trump is using law enforcement right now is appropriate or consistent with the principles of a free society.”
The SA (Brownshirts) were the generic rabble with no training or professional education as soldiers. Hitler invited them off the street and gave them a fancy uniform and a mandate to harass and kill those he didn’t like. Doesn’t that sound a lot like ICE today that will hire anyone with a pulse and a white supremacist attitude?
The SA were replaced in a power by the SS, the professional soldiers, in an uprising initiated by Hitler that murdered the SA leadership.
Correct, and exactly what I was referring to when talking about ICE.
As for the exact history, the original SS were nothing but a bunch of untrained thugs too. Hitler has just grown distrustful of the SA and wanted his bodyguard to be loyal to him alone instead of the party. This is also what ultimately led to the night of the long knives and the execution of Ernst Röhm. It wasn’t until Himmler took control of the SS in 1929, and with the institution of military training in 1934, that they slowly formed into an actual military organization with properly trained soldiers.