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What happens when law enforcement doesn’t follow the law?
Police are critical for any civil society. When we don’t feel safe, when our lives and property are not protected, much of what enables our flourishing — freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of worship, free enterprise — can quickly disintegrate. Nations with high crime and inadequate law enforcement experience this firsthand but we take it for granted in America.
Protecting those benefits of civil society requires law enforcement we can trust to treat us fairly, and who themselves follow the law and civil norms. Lawless lawmen break this trust. And when that trust is broken, civil society breaks down.
There have been many recent examples of law enforcement abusing their authority, ignoring civil norms, and breaking the law. Here are just a few of them.
ICE claims [ [link removed] ] it has the authority to enter your home without a warrant, a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. ICE claims it has the authority to issue an “administrative warrant,” which is the executive branch giving itself the authority to enter your home. This is not what our Founders had in mind. If the judiciary can’t check the power of the executive by holding the authority to issue warrants, the 4th Amendment would essentially be obsolete.
Federal agents are arresting people for not carrying documentation when they leave their house. To state the obvious, this is not a crime. Yes, we’re now at the “show me your papers” stage of these authoritarian times.
If you are being questioned by law enforcement, you have the right to record the conversation. If you are a bystander, you have the right to record law enforcement, as long as you’re not interfering. Yet, there have been many reports of ICE officers grabbing and smacking phones out of peoples hands as they record. In a Tuesday press conference, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said he has heard many complaints from U.S. citizens in their community of civil rights violations, and it even happened to off-duty police officers.
“Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them,” he said [ [link removed] ], “one particular officer ... was stopped by ICE as she went down the roadway. When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork, of which she is a U.S. citizen and clearly would not have any paperwork. When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone in an attempt to record the incident, the phone was knocked out of her hands.”
Protesters are being mistreated. They’ve been apprehended and jailed (but not charged), pepper sprayed in the face, shot directly in the face with pepper balls, and forced into freezing conditions while barely clothed. More than 170 [ [link removed] ] U.S. citizens have been detained, sometimes for days. The Feds claim they were arrested for illegal activity, such as obstructing justice, but in most cases they haven’t been charged with a crime. Watch this interview [ [link removed] ] with Patty O’Keefe, who was detained for 9 hours without food, water, a bathroom break, or a phone call.
Also check out this video [ [link removed] ] showing a protestor who is already on the ground with hands restrained behind his back. The federal officer sprayed chemical irritant directly into his face.
A 79-y-o man suffered [ [link removed] ] multiple broken ribs after ICE officers slammed him on the ground.
ProPublica found [ [link removed] ] 40 cases of federal agents using chokeholds and similar moves that have been banned because they cut off breathing.
And in the case of Renee Good, the executive branch is now claiming that shoot to kill is justified whenever we do anything an officer deems disobedient. President Donald Trump even claimed [ [link removed] ] her death was justified because she was “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”
In a NYT op-ed, Radley Balko writes,
The surge of federal forces into Minneapolis (like smaller, earlier surges into Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Washington; and Chicago) isn’t about law enforcement at all. It is about an administration declaring — explicitly, at times — that the purpose of federal law enforcement isn’t to uphold the rule of law or promote public safety but to enforce the will of a single man.
We started to see this in the way the Trump administration responded to previous shootings by immigration officers, including of Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles and Marimar Martinez in Chicago. Administration officials quickly declared those shootings justified — and righteous — with hyperbolic language similar to that used after Ms. Good’s killing. Those claims would also later be disproved by witnesses’ accounts and other evidence. The government eventually dropped the charges against Ms. Martinez. A judge dismissed Mr. Parias’s charges with prejudice, meaning they can’t be brought again.
In fact, nearly all of the administration’s responses to deaths in custody, shootings or other accusations of abuses have used maximalist language to venerate immigration officers, dehumanize their victims and villainize anyone who doesn’t support the Trump administration. There are no disinterested parties. No innocent bystanders. People are either criminal immigrants or radical leftists who deserve what happens to them, or they are heroic, patriotic federal cops incapable of mistakes. There is no humanity for the civilians and no humility for the officers.
Read the whole thing with this gift link [ [link removed] ].
American Values Coalition has 5 core values, which you can read on our homepage [ [link removed] ]. Number 5 states, “Liberty and justice for everyone are the bedrock of our core principles that we will promote through fairness, honesty, and clarity.” What is happening in America today is not liberty, because our rights are being trampled, and it’s not justice, because our lawmen aren’t following the law.
What Else We’re Reading
Pete Wehner: “MAGA Jesus Is Not the Real Jesus”
The message the Trump administration is sending is not subtle: ICE is doing the work of God. The brutal and sometimes lethal tactics being used by a growing number of ICE agents are divinely sanctioned. Come join this holy campaign.
…
Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.
GIFT LINK [ [link removed] ]
NYT: “Trump Sets Fraudster Free From Prison for a Second Time”
In 2021, a convicted fraudster named Adriana Camberos was freed from prison when President Trump commuted her sentence.
Rather than taking advantage of that second chance, prosecutors said, Ms. Camberos returned to crime [ [link removed] ]. She and her brother were convicted in 2024 in an unrelated fraud.
This week, Mr. Trump pardoned both siblings, marking the second time he had opened the prison gates for Ms. Camberos.
Their pardons were among a handful of clemency grants quietly issued by Mr. Trump on Thursday and Friday.
Among the other lucky recipients: a man whose daughter had given millions to a Trump-backed super PAC, a former governor of Puerto Rico and a former F.B.I. agent — all of whom had pleaded guilty in a political corruption case.
GIFT LINK [ [link removed] ]
Politico: “Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data”
Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
LINK [ [link removed] ]
Texas Observer: “Revealed: Four Businesses with Ties to Patriot Front Operating in North Texas”
Through an analysis of business records, social media, and publicly available information, in addition to interviews and in-person observation, the Observer has identified Veteran Brothers Roofing & Restoration as one of four businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that are operated either by members of Patriot Front or individuals with multiple connections to Patriot Front. These businesses do roofing, home construction, and junk removal work across several counties.
None appear to feature Nazi imagery or messaging in their public-facing websites or social media. But a 2020 internal Patriot Front document and interviews with experts suggest that the neo-Nazi group is engaged in a strategy to establish an independent ecosystem of businesses that can employ Patriot Front members and insulate them from consequences if their involvement in the group is exposed. In the previously unpublished “Tactics and Strategy” [ [link removed] ] document, which the Observer obtained through researcher Tristan Lee’s past undercover infiltration of the group, Patriot Front internally advocated the creation of “an almost exclusive economy which can greaten the prosperity of the collective and make it increasingly impervious to outside attacks.” This strategy is also apparent in a trove of internal Patriot Front communications [ [link removed] ] published by Unicorn Riot: One chat room, called “#positive-investing,” included a meeting about “The Core Factors of Starting & Running a Business” hosted [ [link removed] ] by a Patriot Front regional leader.
LINK [ [link removed] ]
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