DHS: Filming Cops, ICE Officers is A ‘Violent Tactic’
from the accountability-is-the-ultimate-threat dept
The DHS has been hyping assault stats for weeks, making it sound like there’s an actual war on ICE officers. The reality was much more underwhelming: the 700% increase touted in press releases reflected a mere 69 more assaults on officers than during the same period in 2024. Hardly worth remarking on, especially since ICE enforcement activities have exponentially exploded during the same time period as the agency does everything it can (legal or not) to hit Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s 3,000-arrests-per-day quota.
But anything opposed to ICE must be portrayed as dangerous, if not a direct, literal assault on the law and law enforcement officers. Presenting context-free stats and referring to any protest as “violent” aids and abets Trump’s martial law plans for the nation by justifying the administration’s decision to send a few thousand soldiers to Los Angeles, California.
It’s only going to get stupider and more dangerous. Dell Cameron of Wired was given access to a recent bulletin issued to law enforcement by the DHS. The document was obtained via a public records request by nonprofit group, Property of the People. (The group has yet to post the document at its site, however, so we can’t actually see it for ourselves at the moment. But click through anyway, because it may be posted by the time this post has been published on Techdirt.)
The bulletin apparently kicks off by blaming the media for inflaming hatred towards ICE and creating an atmosphere conducive to “embracement of anti-ICE messaging.” Noem’s DHS would never, under any circumstances, suggest it might be Trump’s policies, as well as ICE officers’ insistence on hiding everything but their eyes during raids, that might be causing this, um, “embracement” of anti-ICE sentiment.
After making far more credible points about a small minority of protesters who may be armed with anything from glass bottles to rocks to “paint-filled fire extinguishers,” the bulletin moves on to portray pretty much anything anti-ICE protesters do as “violent tactics.”
[T]he guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear—like masks, flashlights, and cameras—as potential precursors to violence, telling officers to prepare “from the point of view of an adversary.”
Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.”
If the DHS actually believed these assertions, it could just be dismissed as paranoid ravings from an agency headed by someone who desires the same white-centric nation most of Trump’s administration does. And, of course, that will always be partly true as long as Kristi Noem heads the agency.
But it’s far more likely the DHS doesn’t actually believe the bullshit it’s spouting, but recognizes the purpose it serves. And one of those purposes is premeditated justification of engaging in unprovoked violence against protesters. It also appeals directly to the “us vs. them” mentality so many law enforcement officers at every level possess. This bulletin tells them they’re right to direct violence at anyone using more than their feet to move around, as well as anyone seeking to document the violence cops are perpetrating against their fellow citizens.
This is escalation masquerading as an intelligence briefing. Cops seldom need an excuse to start rioting, but this bulletin — one that comes backed with the implied law enforcement expertise of the Department of Homeland Security — gives them plenty of excuses to start cracking heads and violating rights just in case they need something more than “just because” when protesters start inconveniencing ICE’s kidnapping squads.
And every situation needlessly escalated and every unnecessary confrontation provoked might result in a violent reaction, which will keep that snowball rolling until might is the only right this government is willing to recognize.
Filed Under: dhs, ice, jric, mass deporation, police accountability
Comments on “DHS: Filming Cops, ICE Officers is A ‘Violent Tactic’”
'No really, THIS time we really were attacked!'
It’s like they are trying to make things more dangerous for the US Gestapo…
It’s one thing to try to convince people to be sympathetic to the oh-so-persecuted kidnappers running around by claiming that ‘assaults’ are up by hundreds of percentage points, but when/if people find out that pointing a camera at someone is considered ‘assault’ then good luck keeping that sympathy even in cases where an actual assault takes place.
Re:
We’re still on the lookout for anyone who dares to conspire against the authority officer.
Just let us know your badge number and precinct to send all the info we pick up.
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Update
Yesterday, South Las Angeles activist Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon, age 41, was arrested for committing a kidnapping hoax. Her family claimed that she was taken by masked bounty hunters to a black ops ICE detention site, but an investigation of her cell phone records show that she was freely out and about. A gofundme page has so far suckered folks out of $4500 in donations.
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Yesterday, a US veteran and citizen was found after being disappeared by the American gestapo
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Do you have a point to make? If it’s to claim that we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes kindly fuck off.
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Here we are, the “view from nowhere” Koby has spoken.
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Huh. So you are saying ICE’s actions are lending credibility to actual scams? Not a good look for ICE, but then again, it’s probably the most benign of all their recent “looks”
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A hoax that would never have been possible were it not for the actions of ICE. But yeah, you keep on blaming a potential victim. I’ll be here with a big tub of buttered popcorn for when you celebrate Calderon actually being abducted and trafficked out of the US.
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Fascist fucker
So cops, ice. If you want war, you want to treat others like enemies, then that is what you get in return. No whining at what you opened yourself up to
“Presenting context-free stats and referring to any protest as “violent” aids and abets Trump’s martial law plans for the nation by justifying the administration’s decision to send a few thousand soldiers to Los Angeles, California. ”
How do you write a sentence like this and call it “the Trump administration” like it’s a perfectly ordinary situation? Call it what it is: the Trump regime.
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It’s still an administration. One may call it both. Just as one may have more than one thing about which to comment. Admittedly, these oh-so subtle nuances can be difficult for some to grasp. Be the first on your block.
Remember kids, free speech is violence. Real Patriots™ shut up and do what their propaganda minister tells them for the safety and freedom of all True Americans™!
"Surveillance for me, but hell no -- not for thee."
“Surveillance for me, but hell no — not for thee.”
ICE and DHS want access to everything (including previously near-sacrosanct things like IRS and HIPPA data — but being video’d/documented in action is somehow an assault against them?
If ICE agents (contractors, bounty-hunters, whatever) are acting above board and legally — have “nothing to hide”, so to speak — what are they objecting to, exactly?
Re: Freedom for me, chains for thee
This is the whole point of fascism, that no-one outside the in group counts as human or as a person, hence their equal accommodation, civil rights, sustenance or survival do not matter.
The enemy within rhetoric justifies singling out fringe groups on the edges of the new mainstream for culling (sending to concentration camps and eventually mass executing). Eventually the ouroboros cuts into its own, deciding specific traits are out, then those who don’t agree with the heinous parts of the doctrine, then those whose salutes are not snappy enough.
And in the end, as the Allies are pounding Berlin with artillery, as Soviet tanks push into the city limits, Hitler decides the German people never were strong enough to handle the truth, and it’s all their fault that he has to kill himself and have his body burned before he’s captured.
(The whole thing is madness. It’s as reasonable as a billionaire deciding he needs more money enough to capture governments so that people die of malnutrition or lack of healthcare by the hundreds of thousands. It’s too bad that no-one near these guys can arrange an intervention.)
Maga knows what the filming will lead to.
Anyone filming ICE or cops is trapping their soul onto a device to be destroyed.
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Bold of you to assume they have a soul.
Disclosing the heinous wrongdoing is worse than the wrongdoing itself.
This has been a working doctrine of the Republican party since the Reagan years and the Iran–Contra affair.
It’s not entirely specific to the GOP either. Embarrassment of US officials and the current administration is also the motivation US’ interest Julian Assange, and why Chelsea Manning was treated inhumanely during her imprisonment.
It’s also why Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow (I think with Russian citizenship, now) and can’t go anywhere, including airspace, where he might be extradited to the United States.
For all the disclosures we need from whistleblowers, the US federal government hates them, and hates having its wrongdoing disclosed, even though this attitude belies that the federal government isn’t trying to actually govern in good faith, and needs to be dismantled and restored.
And we’ve seen enough scandals from the Republican party to know they are less concerned about the scandalizing behavior itself than they are the publication of it. I’m guessing the Democratic party has a similar attitude, though they pretend to want clean politicians for candidates.
The 2000 presidential election was evidence enough that the US state has failed. Even before 9/11 it was bleeding out.
And this means in the case of ICE (which is a paramilitary sub-department that shouldn’t exist, especially after the abuses of it during the 2020 George Floyd protests and unrest), we need cameras on them all the time streaming to civil rights defense organizations like ACLU, whether or not filming them is regarded by the state as violent or unlawful.
(I mean, it’s not like ICE or the current DoJ and DHS actually care about law or crime. We’re all sus by default. We’re all POI, and we’re all headed to New Dachau — bypassing due process — if they ever get their hands on us. Why not commit crimes?)
And we need to get to where public video capture of ICE action is just a routine hue-and-cry sort of thing we do.
Terrifying
ICE is now considering “owning a smartphone with a camera” as a terrorist offence. They DO NOT want to be filmed.
Seriously.
Basically thats everyone in the US. And I know people pull nazi germany up a lot, but this is exactly the same.
Define a common behaviour as a crime and you can ‘detain’ anyone you like whenever you like.
We’re heading to the point where ‘anti-trump’ lawyers are going to start being detained en-masse. Some will agree to never handle migrant cases ever again, some will be quietly ‘disappeared’. We saw this in the 1930s across a lot of countries as they stripped away peoples legal protections.