America’s Dirty War
My friend Rick Hein is an international attorney and has been closely following the nightmare moves by Trump and cited Argentina’s horrifying ‘Dirty War’ of kidnappings and disappearances as Trump’s apparent model.
In a recent OpEd for a spanish language publication Rick concluded after laying out the many abuses by the Trump Regime and court losses where we are.
“Regardless, the chilling use of masked governmental agents to inflict chaos, cruelty, conflict, confrontation which is a feature of Trump’s enforcement activities were absent during the Obama and Biden administrations while their administrations’ efforts were actually more effective and efficient than Trump’s masked thugs. These continued activities constitute the clearest signal yet that enforcement is not Trump’s main goal. Rather, the chaos, cruelty, conflict, and confrontation are. Trump’s Dirty War rages on.”
It is hard to argue his point when you see men like this on our streets leaping out of vehicles and grabbing people to be stuffed into the back of an SUV.
It’s un-American and disgusting and the excuses from ICE simply don’t hold water.
Philip Bump wrote yesterday in the Washington Post in response to a letter to the editor from Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons that the reason agents were wearing masks on the streets were because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Bump is curious about that number.
“I emailed ICE multiple times asking where the 413 percent claim came from and whether there were news reports about the assaults it was tallying. I got no response, so I endeavored to figure out where the figures came from myself.
We should begin by noting that the 413 percent figure — mentioned in a DHS social media post about Lander on Tuesday — has been deployed by DHS since early May. In a post from mid-April, the figure was 300 percent, suggesting that some recalculation had been undertaken. If that’s the case, though, either the number of assaults since early May has been steady or DHS hasn’t bothered to update the figure even as their officers have been deployed much more broadly in an effort to increase immigrant arrests.
That ICE uses a percentage is telling. A 413 percent increase could mean that the number of assaults went from 200 in 2024 to 1,026 in 2025 — or that it went from eight to 41. I hasten to say that, of course, assaulting anyone, including law enforcement officers, is unacceptable. But there’s a big difference between an increase of 826 assaults and an increase of 33 — especially if some of those “assaults” are of the Lander variety.”
Needless to say Lyons only cites one case of an agent being “doxxed” and his family being exposed and called terrorists online.
One case.
I’ve been literally doxxed four times in the last year with my personal address and even pictures of my home posted on the internet.
I’m a private citizen. I don’t have the resources of the United States government at my disposal to protect myself. They do.
The uniform and identification is for their safety as much as ours. What is an average person supposed to think if they are driving along behind a tinted SUV on a side street one evening and witness masked men with guns leap out and tackle a family on the sidewalk?
Someone with a gun might see it as their moment to save some lives from kidnapping by gangs and start shooting. In any other time in our history Republicans would celebrate the ‘good guy with a gun’ saving the day. Today you’re assaulting a federal officer.
We are in the upside down.
Rick Hein Conversation
For this week’s ‘On Democracy with FPWellman’ exclusively on MeidasTouch, Rick joined me to discuss this dirty war and the implications for immigrants and all Americans.
Richard Hein is Principal & Managing Partner Attorney of Hein Law Firm, an International Commercial Immigration Law Firm in St. Louis with office extensions in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Madrid, and Sydney, and its membership in the prestigious International Law Firms. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Pre-Law Program at St. Louis University, taught law at the Universidad Centroamericana Law School in San Salvador, El Salvador, and has been an invited professor in International Relations at the Universidad Abierta Interamericana in Buenos Aires, Argentina and on Comparative Law Studies at the Universidad Blas Pascal in Córdoba, Argentina. Learn more about his firm at heinlegal.com.
Catch it now and every Friday here or live on MeidasTouch Network at 7:00 pm ET.
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