Federal Officers Arrest Two People Fighting A Wildfire In Washington Because Why Not

Failures

from the criminals-of-opportunity dept

You can’t do mass deportation without being indiscriminate. That’s how things are working out in Trump’s second term in office, with ICE, etc. entirely abandoning any pretense of just trying to rid this country of dangerous criminals who are here in the country illegally.

Raiding Home Deport parking lots to round up people just looking for work isn’t enough for ICE and Kristi Noem’s DHS. It’s not enough to hang out all day in court hallways just so officers can grab anyone voluntarily showing up for mandatory immigration check-ins.

A whole bunch of workers this same administration considered “essential” during its mishandling of the COVID pandemic are now considered entirely expendable. And that means things like this are just going to become more common as the government continues to run out of people that have committed any crime more serious than overstaying their (official) welcome.

Two people fighting the Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula were arrested by federal law enforcement Wednesday, in a confrontation described by firefighters and depicted in photos and video.

Why the two firefighters were arrested is unclear. But a spokesperson for the Incident Management Team leading the firefighting response said the team was “aware of a Border Patrol operation on the fire,” that it was not interfering with the firefighting response and referred reporters to the Border Patrol station in Port Angeles.

Over three hours, federal agents demanded identification from the members of two private contractor crews. The crews were among the 400 people including firefighters deployed to fight the wildfire, the largest active blaze in Washington state.

CNN also covered this story, which finally led to the DHS delivering its official response from its seat at the local Nazi Bar:

The two illegal aliens apprehended were NOT firefighters. The two contracted work crews questioned on the day of their arrests were not even assigned to actively fight the fire; they were there in a support role, cutting logs into firewood. The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time. No active firefighters were even questioned, and U.S. Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.

The last sentence is mostly accurate. But to pretend this reporting is false simply because it refers to people involved in firefighting efforts (in this case, cutting up fallen trees) as “NOT firefighters” is being pedantic for no other reason than to attempt to own the libs. People put fuel in tanks and attach missiles to planes but no one pretends these people aren’t involved in “fighting wars” even though they’re not right out there on the front line catching bullets.

Under any normal administration, the optics of detaining a few dozen firefighters and arresting a couple of them for civil law violations would be enough to prevent this operation from moving forward. On top of that, a directive from none other than PRESIDENT TRUMP (and one that has not been officially rescinded) makes it clear immigration enforcement efforts are supposed to steer clear of situations like these:

Under Donald Trump’s first presidential administration, as wildfires ripped through northern California and burned over 300,000 acres in 2018, DHS said it would “suspend routine immigration enforcement operations in the areas affected by the fires,” except if a serious criminal presented a public safety threat. The agency also said it wouldn’t conduct any operations at evacuation sites or assistance centers. 

“It is unclear if that stance has changed under Trump’s second administration,” CNN says, reporting on facts that make it clear that stance has indeed changed and that Trump’s second administration is more than willing to not only cripple firefighting crews, but rouse the rabble with “fake news” bullshit that serves no greater purpose than increasing the number of commenters and reposters who seem to believe the FCC has the power to either put CNN in jail or yank a broadcasting “license” it not only doesn’t possess, but is impossible to obtain because [for all the red hats in the back] THE FCC DOES NOT ISSUE BROADCAST LICENSES TO CABLE TV STATIONS.

But even if everything the DHS said on X is true (and there’s no reason to believe it is, especially when there are recordings of this entirely unnecessary “enforcement effort” that undercut the DHS narrative), it’s still fucking stupid. Why do this sort of thing at all when it’s going to generate far more negative press and animosity against the government than… I don’t know… looking for actual dangerous criminals and focusing your efforts on them?

The cruelty isn’t the point. The institution of some form of Christian white nationalism is. The cruelty is the juice. And as long as that’s still enough to get this administration hard (literally and/or figuratively), it will remain a crucial part of its efforts to rid this country of the people Trump and his followers believe never deserved to be here in the first place, no matter how much they contribute to a nation whose leaders have nothing but bigotry to offer in return.

Filed Under: border patrol, cbp, dhs, fire fighting, ice, kristi noem, mass deportation, priorities, trump administration, washington, wildfires