ICE agents and federalized cops are now deliberately stationed where they can incite the most backlash.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****AUGUST 14, 2025****

**On the

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Report: 1 in 3 Big Tech Enforcement Cases Dropped by Trump Administration [link removed]

Tech and crypto firms have spent $1.2 billion during and since the 2024 election, and they are reaping the benefits.

**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed] [link removed]

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Energized by Zohran Mamdani’s primary triumph, 1,200 DSA members came to Chicago to chart the group’s future.

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‘Shin Godzilla’ Will Make You Nostalgic for a Working Government [link removed]

Back in theaters, this clever sequel pits the radioactive reptile against a flawed (but functioning!) bureaucracy.

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****Meyerson on TAP****

**On D.C.’s busiest streets, Trump’s provocateurs provoke**

**ICE agents and federalized cops are now deliberately stationed where they can incite the most backlash.**

Productivity experts, take note! Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have figured out how to use fewer National Guards, ICE agents, and federalized cops to foment, they hope, at least as much civil disorder as they did in Los Angeles with far larger deployments.

As I **documented** [link removed] earlier this week, the level of the deployments in D.C. is far smaller than that in L.A.: just 800 Guards, with just 200 on duty at any one time, compared to the 5,000 Guards in L.A., not to mention the 700 Marines. But Trump & Co. are deploying those Guards, and ICE agents, and now the federalized police, in ways guaranteed to stir public outrage.

Earlier today, D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith **issued an order** [link removed] to the city’s police (no longer under city control) that they had to assist federal authorities in their efforts to detain undocumented immigrants. The new policy was limited: The cops must now help ICE agents identify such immigrants and transport them to holding cells, but not make such arrests themselves. That marked a clear reversal of the city’s own policy of forbidding its police from cooperating with ICE at all.

As was not the case in L.A., Washington has relatively few places where the undocumented cluster, as it has far fewer undocumented residents to begin with, and the workplaces within city limits that do employ them are chiefly restaurant kitchens. Which leads to the second part of the Trump-Miller policy: With few immigrant-rich target areas to which they can swarm, they’re setting up dragnets and making the occasional immigrant arrest on the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

Last night, ICE agents, some Guards, and the cops deployed to 14th Street Northwest, one of the city’s liveliest streets, chockablock with restaurants and stores patronized by a very cross-class and cross-racial clientele. As is rarely the case in Los Angeles, the sidewalks on such commercial streets in D.C. are invariably filled with pedestrians during the evening hours—and no such street more so than 14th Street last night, when ICE agents **began pulling over cars** [link removed] to check, they said, for seatbelt compliance, and then checked the drivers’ and passengers’ IDs—with the cops standing by to assist when necessary. The dragnet lasted until 10 p.m., during which time ICE arrested at least two motorists, and appeared to infuriate the overwhelming majority of other motorists and passing pedestrians, who began chanting, “Shame! Shame!”

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In the one 14th Street incident guaranteed to enter the Urban (Verified) Legend Hall of Fame, one such pedestrian **threw a Subway sandwich** [link removed] at an ICE agent on Sunday night, for which he was arrested and charged with a felony. The pedestrian, it turned out, was actually an employee of the Department of Justice, from which he was summarily sacked.

Though Trump’s choice as D.C.’s federal prosecutor—right-wing TV celebrity Jeanine Pirro—boasted that the sandwich-hurler faced a year in jail, it’s going to be very difficult to find a D.C. grand jury willing to indict him, much less a trial jury willing to convict him. In the 2024 presidential election, 90 percent of D.C. voters cast their ballots for Kamala Harris, against just 7 percent who voted for Trump. We’ve already seen this kind of jury resistance to the spurious charges leveled by the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bilal Essayli, where a number of grand juries have refused to charge ICE protesters who raised their hands to fend off ICE agents’ blows for the crime of raising their hands to fend off ICE agents’ blows.

In Los Angeles, the major anti-ICE protests were confined to the very few blocks in downtown L.A., normally unpopulated at night, where thousands of National Guards were clustered. In Washington, D.C., no such massive groups of Guards or troops have been sent out, but in Washington, as is not the case in L.A., there are a few streets where heavy pedestrian traffic can be safely counted upon. Hence, Trump and Miller have concluded they can provoke a kindred level of civil disorder with a smaller force of federal and federalized agents, provided they’re strategically deployed.

More productive provocateurs! Business schools and neofascists, take heed!

**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**

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