This past Sunday was the occasion of the gay pride parade in Seattle, which if nothing else we can say its participants put on a “colorful” spectacle:
It is also an occasion for police sergeants to twiddle away the time twiddling on their cell phones for most of a day, maybe for easy overtime pay:
Of course we’ve seen other “political statements” made in recent days that the “peaceful” variety just don’t seem to get the “point” across properly, and police presence is “necessary” if only to remind people whose “side” they are on (not theirs’). Meanwhile, the Duwamish River Community Coalition announced that
Duwamish River Festival has been Suspended for 2025 due to current political climate and safety and wellbeing of our Duwamish Valley community members. Thank you for your support and understanding.
The festival takes place in the South Park neighborhood of Seattle, where many immigrants, including the Hispanic variety, live. While some wondered whether ICE’s masked thugs would actually show-up there, we do know that in other locations in the country, ICE thugs armed to the teeth have raided swap meets and other community events for “easy pickings.”
Of course it is “easy pickings” at immigration offices too, where here we see a border patrol agent and someone who is likely a masked ICE thug waiting to nab this mother and her children:
Rolling Stone 7 suggests what might happen to this woman and her children if she or her spouse is a military veteran on the orders of a man who avoided military service with a fake foot injury, and called service members "losers" and "suckers" before he found them useful to terrorize civilians in American cities:
A woman is lured to a public building. As she waits with her military veteran husband for some politburo-like agent to give her a time to come back to get her papers in order, she decides to breastfeed their infant child. Just then, armed agents storm the couple, tear the baby from the mother, and place her under arrest. She is then put in a queue for deportation, exactly what the couple was trying to avoid when they voluntarily showed up at their local government office.
This is not some dystopian novel or narrative about times in the Soviet Republic or Nazi Germany? Nope - this was in Louisiana a few weeks back. This is Donald Trump's America.
President Trump and his administration are carrying out the cruelest and most sweeping mass deportation program in modern U.S. history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, acting at Trump's direction, have detained and deported veterans, their children, their spouses - even those who served alongside us on the battlefield. This is being done under the guise of "making America safe again," when statistically America has never been safer. In fact, the administration is destroying the families who actually do keep us safe.
Trump's efforts to deport veterans and their families are not simply part of his broader immigration crackdown - they are a deliberate attack on service members and our veterans. In a February 2025 memo, the administration announced it will "no longer exempt" active duty military personnel, veterans, and their families from deportation while they pursue legal status - a complete reversal of prior U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policy.
In comment sections of news stories posted on the Internet, one of the common refrains from the MAGAverse (mostly stupid and abusive) justifying this kind of ICE thuggery are claims that they are just “doing their jobs.” Of course in order to “do their jobs” means ignoring the rule of law and due process rights of U.S. citizens, which we all knew was coming next, but the Trump administration was just biding its time to see what it could away with, and that includes no actual punishment for federal agents who break any standard of civil behavior.
It isn’t just the use of racial profiling to demand the “papers” of U.S. citizens, or gang-tackling people who have the audacity to question their action, or smashing windows of vehicles, or engaging in early morning raids with bombs blowing off doors of homes with U.S. citizens inside, including children. but where the "target" was not:
According to this recent Newsweek story from Los Angeles:
CBP said agents were seeking Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, who had "rammed his car into a CBP vehicle" during enforcement operations, per the outlet.
Security camera footage showed about a dozen armed federal agents in tactical gear positioning themselves in the front yard. Two agents were seen attaching items to the property's door and front window shortly before the explosion occurred.
Agents could be seen crouching behind a vehicle in the driveway, before entering the home shortly after the blast, which reportedly blew the door off and shattered a window.
Jenny Ramirez, who lives at the home with Sierra-Hernandez, her boyfriend—told ABC 7 that he was not at the property when Border Patrol agents arrived. She said that everyone who resides in the home is a United States citizen, according to the outlet.
Ramirez said she learned about the operation when a neighbor called to inform her that Border Patrol vehicles were in the neighborhood. "If they would've knocked on my door I would have opened the door, but they blew up the window and door first," Ramirez told ABC 7. "There didn't have to be that violence to enter my house."
Ramirez told the outlet that she had been sleeping with her baby when her neighbor called to alert her about the dozens of agents outside her home.
'Where they broke the window, my baby was there and before I got him out of there was when it exploded," Ramirez told the outlet. "My ears went blank."
When she heard the explosion, she dropped to the floor with her children as a drone entered the house and searched each room for her boyfriend, according to the report.
Ramirez told the outlet that the agents told her they were looking for her boyfriend but did not explain why. She said her boyfriend later called her on Friday morning and told her that Border Patrol had contacted him and instructed him to turn himself in.
Ramirez believed the operation might be related to a collision that happened about a week earlier in the city of Industry, per ABC 7. According to Ramirez, her boyfriend had been driving a Jeep when he collided with a truck carrying federal agents.
Once the drone left the house, at least nine agents entered with guns drawn and eventually escorted Ramirez and her children outside, she said.
"They didn't identify themselves until I came out, they told me they were from Homeland Security, from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]," Ramirez told ABC 7.
Naturally, a statement “explaining” this from DHS radically overstated Sierra-Hernandez’s alleged crime, and it might well have been that it was the ICE vehicle that actually did the “ramming.” We are told that he was contacted afterward by ICE and voluntarily turned himself in. Was this action against U.S. citizens “necessary”—or more evidence that ICE and CBP agents have the same “immunity” to commit unlawful and unconstitutional acts as Trump was given by the rogue-right on the current U.S. Supreme Court, that seems intent on undermining every right Americans have, unless it is the right to discriminate on “religious” or “personal” grounds?
In the original Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs could sue federal agents for damages for unlawful searches and seizures. But the Court has ruled in subsequent cases that plaintiffs do not have the same right to seek redress in excessive force and—perhaps more disturbingly—on the grounds of First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
Most recently in the HERNANDEZ ET AL. v. MESA case where a border agent shot and killed a 15-year-old on the Mexican side of the border who was just goofing around with other youth, and where video evidence proved that the border agent was lying when he claimed he shot in “self-defense," and in the EGBERT v. BOULE case where the plaintiff, a U.S. citizen, sued a federal agent for excessive force and retaliation for not “cooperating” with him (the “papers” of the Turkish national with the plaintiff turned out to be “in order”), the court ruled that these plaintiffs (or their families in the case of Hernandez) had no rights that federal agents were “bound to respect.”
Thus in the opinion authored by Clarence Thomas, who has long sought the overturning of the Bivens ruling, in line with his general antipathy to human and civil rights, we are told
In Hernández, we declined to create a damages remedy for an excessive-force claim against a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican national across the border in Mexico. See 589 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 1–2). We did not recognize a Bivens action there because “regulating the conduct of agents at the border unquestionably has national security implications,” and the “risk of undermining border security provides reason to hesitate before extending Bivens into this field.”
Thus
The Bivens inquiry does not invite federal courts to independently assess the costs and benefits of implying a cause of action. A court faces only one question: whether there is any rational reason (even one) to think that Congress is better suited to “weigh the costs and benefits of allowing a damages action to proceed.” Ziglar, 582 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 12). Thus, a court should not inquire, as the Court of Appeals did here, whether Bivens relief is appropriate in light of the balance of circumstances in the “particular case.” Stanley, 483 U. S., at 683. A court inevitably will “impai[r]” governmental interests, and thereby frustrate Congress’ policymaking role, if it applies the “ ‘special factors’ analysis” at such a narrow “leve[l] of generality.” Id., at 681. Rather, under the proper approach, a court must ask “[m]ore broadly” if there is any reason to think that “judicial intrusion” into a given field might be “harmful” or “inappropriate.” Ibid. If so, or even if there is the “potential” for such consequences, a court cannot afford a plaintiff a Bivens remedy. Ziglar, 582 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 16, 25) (emphasis added). As in Hernández, then, we ask here whether a court is competent to authorize a damages action not just against Agent 12 EGBERT v. BOULE Opinion of the Court Egbert but against Border Patrol agents generally. The answer, plainly, is no.
"Plainly no." And we are supposed to trust the constitutional "competence" of this Supreme Court? When it uses as a "justification" for declawing the courts the application of the "prerogative" of the king of England? I mean, I thought the revolution was about ending that. Instead, the right-wing of the court has bent over in multiple levels of backward to give not just Trump immunity from actions that for anyone else would be crimes punishable by prison time, but to federal agents. Here we see at least what was ICE’s Use of Force and Restraints policies…
…which we have seen in countless videos that it has violated repeatedly, but we are told they are really doing it to themselves and not to the person they are slugging while pinned to the ground...
....subject to no apparent discipline whatever, in fact such action is repeatedly "justified" by people like Talking Barbie Trish McLaughlin, who Trump just pulls the string and out comes the prefab talking point lies. Frankly, I think likening ICE to the Gestapo is giving them too much "credit." I think their actions more resemble that of Nazi Brownshirt Stormtroopers, randomly beating perceived political enemies and Hispanics who are the stand-ins in this country for what the Jewish "vermin" was in Germany.
ICE has also been accused of 23 shooting deaths during the period 2015-2021 according to this report 1 –while being timid about the current state of its use of force policies, although it is likely it has been “updated” to reflect the Supreme Court giving them virtual unlimited immunity from prosecution for lawless and unconstitutional behavior.
This state of affairs of course applies to U.S. citizens, of whom ICE technically has no legal authority to detain, which is why they are supposed to obtain warrants for people who they know are unlawfully in the country, and not just pick out random people because they look “Mexican.” Of course this isn't just about ICE thugs, but "regular" cops and just about anyone who has an "opinion" on the matter who do this, as I described in this post 4.
But whose "counting"--well, Stephen Miller is and he doesn't care whose knows. That’s like me saying that every white person I see on the street is probably a “Nazi"; well, we know the Jewish Miller is one, who probably takes such accusations personally enough to convince Trump to go after Harvard with this "antisemitism" hypocrisy.
Also in Newsweek, retired judge Thomas G. Moukawsher pointed out that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has completely sold out what any credibility it still had left with its “case” against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who according to The Independent said in court documents "suffered severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation and psychological torture" while in the CECOT concentration prison:
It turns out that the only support for the government claim that Abrego Garcia was a key figure in a gang-related adult and child smuggling ring comes from three people who are close relatives of one another and are facing deportation.
Two of them are expecting to stop their deportations in exchange for testifying, and their ringleader—a five-times deported and twice-convicted felon who admits smuggling aliens—has already been sprung from jail by the Justice Department and had his deportation stopped.
Despite their incentives to help Bondi, these three contradicted each other about Abrego Garcia's supposed membership in the MS-13 gang. One just said Abrego Garcia was "familial" with gang members. Another said, without taking an oath, that she "believed" Abrego Garcia was a gang member. The final witness suggested the opposite, noting that "there were no signs or markings, including tattoos, indicating that Abrego is an MS-13 member."
These cooperating but clumsy cons also preposterously reported that Abrego Garcia's smuggling involved driving 2,900 miles three or four times per week—over 120 hours at the wheel weekly—a figure almost physically impossible.
The government didn't even have the courage to bring its sole supporters to court where Abrego Garcia's lawyers might have cross-examined them. An ICE agent read their statements instead. No wonder the Tennessee magistrate judge, backed up by her supervising judge, ordered Abrego Garcia released.
Foolishly, the DOJ leadership then proved that it wasn't done ruining its reputation. After a ruling finding no credible evidence that Abrego Garcia smuggled anyone and which noted he had been charged with "smuggling" not "trafficking" a DOJ spokesperson declared that Abrego Garcia "has been charged with horrific crimes, including trafficking children, and will not walk free in our country again."
The DOJ exit strategy? Ultimately, it will drop the frivolous charges. They will then try to deport Abrego Garcia to somewhere like Somalia.
To rescue it, the courts must punish Pam Bondi and those who have maliciously prosecuted Abrego Garcia.
Bondi ordered the prosecution. Two lawyers signed the indictment papers filed in court. After the charges are dismissed, the Tennessee judge should summon all three of them to court to show cause why they shouldn't be disciplined under ethical rules forbidding frivolous filings.
Commenting on the charges against Abrego Garcia when she announced them, Bondi trumpeted about this train wreck, "This is what American justice looks like." Here's hoping she's wrong and that judges prove it to her.
Damn, and they had us “scared” there for a moment that what Bondi, Karoline Leavitt and McLaughlin were claiming was actually “true.” NBC News tells us additional information about Abrego's detention in CECOT which is as bad or worse than expected 6 , and one can only wonder what horrors are being experienced by gay makeup artist Andry Romero or any of those 200 other people who committed no crimes but were declared "gang members" merely because they had tattoos like millions of Americans.
While Abrego's wife is suing the Trump administration, every time a Trump official gets a chance out comes more of the usual hysterical lies and fabrications. However, the judge in the case has ordered the Trump administration to refrain from making additional inflammatory comments to prejudice the jury pool.
And the lies just keep coming, and we are still supposed to believe anything coming out of DHS, such as in this story 8 about a community activist being kidnapped and held in a warehouse with only water until she agreed to self-deport; note that the only thing that is actually being denied by DHS is that it employed "bounty hunters" to conduct the "operation."
But despite all of this, the MAGAverse insists that like that woman in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania who claimed that Luis Ramirez wouldn’t have been murdered by local white “youth” if he just hadn’t “been there,” there is a “process” that must be observed. If they would only do the “legal” thing. The truth, of course, is that it is the “process” that keeps “them” out is what should be seen as illegal.
In this discussion 2 concerning the U.S.’ history of a “lawless immigration regime” that once allowed almost everyone who was European into the country right off the boat, Will Wilkinson discusses with Elizabeth Cohen her book, Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All, in which she writes about “how out-of-control federal immigration enforcement agencies came to not only pointlessly terrorize and persecute immigrants, but to pose a clear and urgent danger to the safety and basic liberties of American citizens.” Wilkinson notes that
So, they’re tapping into something that’s visceral, but what is the fear? And I think your book really strongly traces that there has never been really any justification for our immigration regime other than white supremacy, other than a certain kind of racism. So, the reason that we do it is because some people really viscerally feel that they’re entitled to a country that has a very particular ethnic and demographic composition. And that if it doesn’t, it’s a threat to them. It’s not their home or something.
Because sometimes I get frustrated when talking about immigration policy with even friends who are a little bit on the right, who act as if it’s just completely seedy or unfair to suggest that there’s any racial motivation behind wanting to further militarize the border or behind wanting to reduce not only illegal, but legal immigration.
It is also a "talking point" of the MAGAverse that this is about "overpopulation"--tell that to Elon Musk, who wants to populate the whole world with his "seed." China has the same land mass as the U.S., yet it has four times the population, and yet has somehow survived to become the U.S.' principle adversary.
But that purposefully skirts the essential reality, as the Brookings Institute points out here the hypocrisy of this country’s racist immigration policy that makes skin color the principle determination of "legality":
In sharp contrast to today’s undocumented population, “illegal” European immigrants faced few repercussions. There was virtually no immigration enforcement infrastructure. If caught, few faced deportation. All of those who entered unlawfully before the 1940s were protected from deportation by statutes of limitations, and in the 1930s and 1940s, tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants like Nora O’Donnell’s grandfather were given amnesty.[viii] The few not covered by a statute of limitations or amnesty had another protection: until 1976 the government rarely deported parents of US citizens.[ix] There were no immigrant restrictions on public benefits until the 1970s, and it wasn’t until 1986 that it became unlawful to hire an undocumented immigrant.
In sum, from the early 1900s through the 1960s, millions of predominantly white immigrants entered the country unlawfully, but faced virtually no threat of apprehension or deportation. Businesses lawfully employed these immigrants, who were eligible for public benefits when they fell on hard times.
By contrast, the undocumented population today—mostly Latino and overwhelmingly people of color— none of the privileges accorded to previous generations of white immigrants. The toughening of immigration laws coincided with a shift of immigration from Europe to newcomers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa,[x] often in the context of racialized debates targeted mainly at Latinos. Researchers have documented how through the 1960s, racialized views of Mexicans shaped law and bureaucratic practice.[xi] Over the next decade, Congress: ended the Bracero program, which had allowed as many as 800,000 temporary migrants from Mexico annually to work mainly in agriculture; cut legal immigration from Mexico by 50%; and ended the long-standing practice that parents of US citizens wouldn’t be deported. Reducing lawful means of immigrating predictably led to a rise in unauthorized entries, which was met with calls for tougher enforcement.
But come on, the MAGAverse still insists, just come in “legally.” Unfortunately, that is the typical thinking of the willfully ignorant and uninformed bigot. The Cato Institute points out here 3 that it is nearly impossible to legally immigrate to this country unless there is a “family” connection or you belong to a class of immigrants favored by a well-connected tech industry to get a work visa, often under false pretenses for “cheap labor” or “cultural” reasons--or as in the case of Infosys, India-based companies issuing counterfeit work visas and green cards, because who wants to waste time with what the Cato Institute admits
The labor certification part of the process by itself currently adds an average of roughly a year and a half to the immigration process. Before a labor certification can be filed, the employer and employee must gather all the required information about the position and the employee’s history. The attorney must take time to validate this information because small errors can derail the entire application. For instance, failing to put the exact day a prior job started and ended as opposed to just the month can lead to a denial.
This graphic supplied by the Institute shows the labyrinth that "legal" U.S. immigration policy has become:
Confusing? It is supposed to be, to keep those “others” out; by the way, that "big beautiful bill" and its Medicaid and SNAP work requirement paper work is also meant to be too confusing for the same reason--except that it targets those who are actually U.S. citizens.
As this 2006 TIME cover story concerning the racial element of "legal" immigration policy...
...talked about, farmers desperate for labor find it nearly impossible to “legally” bring in workers willing to do the needed field and food production work “natives” abhor doing...
...just to keep those food prices “affordable” but still somehow "break even." Farm workers who have been in the country for decades had been largely untouched until today, but are still unable to obtain legal status despite the fact they are a vital component of “national security” if you think food production is vital to “national survival.”
But the Trump administration's idea of "national security" is nothing more that what white nationalism says it is, and that is what is being "enforced." In the New York Times editorial the other day 9 , it accuses the current version of the FBI of making the country less safe because of the politicization of it, leaving it “less able to combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more,” instead now entirely focused on apprehending those warehouse and food production workers, and U.S. senators:
Of course FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who like his direct boss is completely unfit and incompetent, nothing more than a conspiracy gasbag—“countered” the editorial by claiming that the FBI apprehended 449 “child predators” and “rescued” 224 children. Let that “sink in”: For every 2 “child predators” that Bongino claims the FBI has arrested, 1 child was “saved.” Like everything else this administration claims, you must question its authenticity, particularly its “definitions.” Ask for "evidence" and you will be told its a "secret." Again, this is just made-up stuff, the kind we hear every day from Trump administration spokespeople.
Thus racist U.S. immigration policy acts to literally cut one’s nose off to spite one’s face, as these graphs from CNN show the effect of Miller’s “everyone but criminals” deportation policies:
It is the epitome of stupidity. The labor needed is right there next door, with people who are resourceful enough to find work on their own that the “natives” either cannot “find” or will not “relocate” to where the work is. Admittedly in the case of farm work, perhaps isn’t surprising since it is generally “seasonal” and not “regular.” On the other hand, construction work isn't something that most unemployed can do either.
But the bigger picture is that as economists have pointed out, deporting all the “illegals” who are working and paying taxes in this country will have massive repercussions on the economy of this country, not just in decreasing the GDP, but having “collateral” effects on jobs dependent on businesses that employ those laborers.
But again, it is all about racism, and denying it is becoming excessively tiresome, because we know that people like Trump, Miller and Kristy Noem have all been accused before of being racist and white nationalist before they came to power in the current administration. I mean, we are talking about a person who thought it "enhanced" her "conservative cred" to kill a puppy.
Noem of course was on hand with Trump and Ron DeSantis for the "opening ceremony" of "Alligator Alcatraz." What can you build in only eight days? A very large open "cage" that will leave the prisoners who are mostly working people who have committed no crimes left by these inhuman excuses for human beings to the devices of the weather (yes, it is hurricane season) and sub-tropical disease. DeSantis has a "fix" for this: deputizing ICE agents as "immigration judges" to pass judgment and sentence anyone they detain (U.S. citizens too?) on the spot to instant deportation.
But then again, who needs judges at all? We know that most of the men sent to CECOT are there under false pretenses, but who is listening to the judges who order that some of the individuals are returned? Abrego Garcia is the only who has been "returned" thus far, meaning he is the only one who the DOJ has managed to "Trump-up" fake charges against. According to a DOJ whistleblower as reported by NBC News:
While "mass deportation" actions are not exactly “new” given that Barack Obama was once called the “Deporter in Chief,” what Trump is doing is self-creating whole new classes of “illegals." Although a judge has blocked his effort to create an "alternative immigration system," at least through denial of asylum claims at the border 5, Trump is arbitrarily and inhumanely reversing protections for or the status of those legally in the country, and of course seeking to end constitutionally-protected birthright citizenship; the fact that the Supreme Court’s far-right refused to make a ruling on its merits shows that like their overturning of Roe v. Wade, nothing is “safe” from these fanatics who merely look “human” from the outside.
And yet, as Michael Embrich writes in that Rolling Stone article that speaks for many more than just the subjects of his story:
Our diversity is what makes us strong. But Trump knows that he is a master at a divide-and-conquer method of governing - so much so that he has much of the nation cheering the sick and reprehensible things he is doing to our veterans, allies, and their families this Fourth of July.
The silence of so many, in both words and actions, while our veterans and their families are being deported, is deafening.
