[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
At a meeting with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Rep. Robert Garcia announced that the House Democrats on the Oversight Committee would be launching a ‘Master ICE tracker’. This follows the previous removal of ICE trackers by Apple and Facebook after the apps and sites tracking activity by immigration law enforcement personnel led to multiple violent confrontations with illegal alien activists, ugly acts of violence and at least one death so far.
These confrontations are not just the work of random extremists, but of a leftist activist base supported by top Democrats and the media which have promoted ICE trackers, distributed the contact information for groups interfering with ICE arrests and subsidized the perpetrators.
Before Carlitos Ricardos Parias, an illegal alien TikTok influencer, was arrested in an alleged car ramming assault on federal agents in Los Angeles, he had received a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’ from Councilmember Curren D. Price Jr for his “tireless efforts to safeguard our neighborhoods from illegal raids”.
Such close cooperation between illegal alien rioters and local Democrat officials first attracted national attention during what some have called ‘Newsom’s Riots’ when leftist groups funded by the governor and other top Dems set off violent confrontations in L.A.. While the riots died down once the National Guard took decisive action, the violence has continued on a smaller scale as the Parias arrest shows with local confrontations by activists backed by California Democrats.
The situation is much more blatant in Portland, Oregon, where the city council unanimously endorsed the ‘Protect Portland Initiative’. Mayor Keith Wilson declared that the move reaffirms that the city is a “proud sanctuary city in a sanctuary state” for illegal aliens. Criminals.
The resolution imposes close oversight on the Portland police to prevent any cooperation with ICE federal law enforcement and to refuse any assistance to ICE personnel, and further orders officers to challenge immigration law enforcement personnel, to ‘log’ information about ICE officers, including ‘badge numbers’ to feed into an ICE tracker, and to protect “protesters”, “medics” and “legal observers”: the latter of which are categories used by Antifa rioters.
Portland police have been recorded shielding rioters from federal law enforcement and coordinating efforts to identify ICE personnel with them. Antifa and illegal alien rioters operate with local police as their human shields in an extension of the illegal ‘sanctuary city’ concept from harboring illegal aliens citywide to providing cover for rioters during confrontations.
This is not just illegal, it is the definition of an insurrection. States and localities providing tactical support and cover for militia groups and other irregulars engaged in attacks on federal personnel have historically met the legal test for being engaged in an insurrection.
California and Oregon Dems are playing a dangerous game, coming closer to a confrontation between local and federal law enforcement by drawing the police into a fight with ICE.
Local California elected officials have pressured police departments to confront ICE since this summer, they’ve urged police chiefs to interfere in arrests and demand identification from federal immigration law enforcement in order to pass on that information to leftist groups who then target those officers personally. They’re passing unenforceable laws ‘banning’ ICE personnel from wearing masks during arrests while leaving it to the police officers on the street to try and enforce them.
All of these activities have moved the status of the so-called sanctuary states and cities from passive refusals to cooperate with immigration authorities to direct confrontations, for now through radical proxies like the rioters and trackers, but that given enough incidents are likely to escalate into ‘blue’ on ‘blue’ violence. And that outcome is exactly the goal they are seeking.
Police officers are being told that their job is to ‘protect’ illegal aliens and rioters, and that federal enforcement, including the deployment of the National Guard is ‘unconstitutional’, and it will only take one or two police officers buying into this insurrectionist and secessionist rhetoric to trigger an incident on the street that begins with a physical confrontation and ends in a firefight.
That will not be a “tragic accident” or an “unfortunate incident” that Democrats and their media will blame on President Trump’s “overreach” and “militarization”, but the result of their plans.
In Portland, the scene of the worst anti-ICE violence, city officials and their local allies have worked to force immigration enforcement out through a variety of means, including zoning regulations and using a nearby housing project and its inhabitants as human shields.
A decade ago, REACH Community Development, a housing nonprofit, plunked down a housing project named Gray’s Landing across the street from where an ICE facility is now located. REACH is run by Margaret Salazar, a former member of the Biden-Harris transition team.
In an interview, Salazar has said that she supports the anti-ICE protests.
The housing project appeared there a few years after ICE leased the site of its current facility in what the New York Times fancifully describes as “a showcase for the state’s history of innovative urban design.” In reality, the ICE facility is in a generic office park across the street from a machine tool shop, right by an overpass, and in the vicinity of the kind of ugly new modernist buildings that cities slap together to attract hipsters to their slums. It’s hard to know whether Gray’s Landing set up shop there to sabotage the ICE facility or because it was cheap.
Gray’s Landing has been appealing for help from what it falsely describes as “Federal violence” and begs for support for “seniors, families, and veterans” from “violent tactics” by Federal agents. As its people know quite well, Gray’s Landing is not dealing with “clean up” costs and violence because ICE is there, but because rioters in support of illegal aliens keep attacking the facility. If there were no riots, there would be no ‘clean up’ and no “chemical agents”.
But the propaganda is a key part of the campaign to oust the ICE facility by abusing zoning regulations, overloading the facility’s ability to transport illegal alien criminals, while then hitting it with zoning violations because the criminals inside it are being detained too long according to the rioters and the police who have been turned into their accomplices to back up their claims.
Democrats and their rioter allies have manufactured a crisis to protect illegal alien criminals.
The political, regulatory, lawfare and street assaults on ICE are a multi-front war to protect a form of organized crime, human trafficking and illegal border invasion, that the Democrats disproportionately benefit from. And California and Oregon Dems are testing out strategies that will be copied by their colleagues across the country as part of a campaign of insurrection.
The anti-ICE violence is not random, it’s not extremist, it’s coming from the top down. It’s a coordinated insurrection and it should be treated like one.
