William Barr announced that he refuses to honor any more requests for himself and his associates to testify before Congress, because Democrats want to ask “hurtful” questions that he doesn’t want straight answers given for. Barr often behaves like a petulant child when he isn’t given to bouts of sarcasm, blocking internal internal reviews of DOJ activities, or making threats of retaliation against his and Trump’s detractors. Barr has made it no secret that his intention is to create the fiction of “chaos” created by Democrats in which Trump is the “victim” and not the actual instigator, and in doing so creating the even more fictionalized portrayal of Trump has the only one who can “fix” what he himself has broken. In the upcoming debate--which he would do well to pretend that Trump isn’t even there and stick to his vision for the country--Joe Biden should hammer home that his Justice Department will work for the people, and not to protect a lawless president and the unethical or even criminal activities of many of his underlings.
The lawlessness of this administration is particularly apparent in the fact that the DHS and ICE have repeatedly ignored standing regulations and court orders to modify their behavior, especially toward migrant children and those with medical issues exacerbated by the COVID-19. And where once ICE and border patrol officers could expect disciplinary action for abusive behavior, apparently behaviors like the following continue to be “tolerated”:
A Muslim man named Bakhodir Madjitov filed a lawsuit against ICE this week for various charges involving an incident in June, 2019. According to the lawsuit, ICE agents beat him while trying to force him on a deportation flight despite the fact that a judge had granted him a stay from deportation to Uzbekistan. Madjitov was claiming asylum status do to persecution do to a family member’s involvement in the war in Syria. Despite being aware of the stay, ICE agents beat him while he resisted getting on the plane, and they only ceased their actions when onlookers arrived on the scene. Returned to ICE custody, Madjitov contracted the COVID-19 this past June; ICE refuses to release him, claiming that he committed a “crime” by resisting being unlawfully loaded on the plane.
Also last year, ICE agents beat unconscious “gang style” Mario Portales-Castro in Louisville, Kentucky--the same city where no police officers were indicted in the killing of Breonna Taylor today. Portales-Castro was parking his vehicle at his home when he was surrounded by men with guns drawn who did not identify themselves; he got out of his vehicle with his hands in the air when according to a lawsuit, they “immediately started punching him repeatedly in the head.” According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, “Once on the ground, the agents began kicking Portales-Castro in the head, fracturing his skull and causing him to become unconscious. It was when he was on the ground they said the were with ICE.” He was taken to a local hospital, but the ICE agents refused to allow him to remain for treatment for his fractured skull. ICE claimed that they beat him because he was a “criminal,” but his “criminal” record only showed that he had reentered the country after a previous deportation order.
We may ask ourselves what kind of people DHS and ICE consider “suitable” candidates. Certainly on the upper management level it is people who have no moral or ethical qualms about conducting themselves with brutality, since officers accused of abuses never seem to be “punished”--at least not within the organization. One person who previously was employed by the DHS was Michael Hetle, whose last day job was with NASA following his stint with DHS. NASA’s “biography” of Hetle sounds mostly fictional; one suspects that he wrote it himself to bloat his “stature” and make him appear to be just a "normal" person. It tells us that he was
…the executive officer to the associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) at NASA Headquarters. He is responsible for the business operations of the directorate and the executive staff, and supports the associate administrator in coordinating the reviews of all nationwide and international NASA aeronautics related research programs. In addition, he conducts ARMD outreach and interaction activities with all NASA field centers, industry, associations, academia and other government agencies… Before joining NASA he served as a director with the Headquarters of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security… He has received multiple awards for superior achievement and individual recognition while serving with Homeland Security, the U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Defense and senior levels of the U.S. Government.
Nowhere here does it mention that Hetle was a police officer in Bellevue, Washington. Nowhere does it mention that Hetle was disciplined for racially harassing a female Ethiopian immigrant during a traffic stop. Nowhere does it mention that Hetle was involved in the shooting of a suspected bank robber, firing his weapon 11 times even after the suspect was down--an action that only itself became “suspect” after the next incident in which he fired his weapon. According to a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Hetle was an extremely arrogant individual who complained that he wasn’t receiving proper “recognition,” and wrote a memo stating that "I will take all reasonable steps to achieve recognition in the year 2001.” And that he did, killing an unarmed Hispanic man, Nelson Martinez-Mendez. The Bellevue police chief at the time seemed almost nonchalant about it despite some local anger over the shooting, and allowed Hetle to evade discipline when his National Guard unit gave him a lengthy leave of absence in Hawaii; Hetle eventually “resigned” from the police force in 2003, and the victim’s family eventually agreed to a $75,000 wrongful death settlement with the city.
But that wasn’t the end of Hetle being in the news. According to the Washington Post, this past March in Springfield, Virginia police responded to a call and found a black man, Javon Prather, dead from a gunshot wound. Hetle, who was a neighbor, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. According to the victim’s mother, “Hetle had a restraining order against her son’s wife.’[Hetle] would call the HOA and say there was dog poop in their backyard. He would call and complain when they put out trash. Anything he could do to scold them and to get them in trouble.’” She also claimed that “her son had told her he believed Hetle was biased and targeted him and his wife because they are biracial. Fairfax County Police Lt. Stephen R. Wallace said police did not currently have any evidence there was any racial animus that motivated the shooting.” Of course, it is unlikely that the police did a “background check” on Hetle, whose prior activity would have suggested that there was indeed racial animus in his nature. One suspects that if NASA had actually done a background check on Hetle, they might have had second thoughts about giving him a job; but for DHS, he certainly would have been deemed to have the “right stuff.”
Thus DHS is willing to give a job to anyone as long as they have the right “mind-set,” and that includes Chad Wolf, who is currently undergoing confirmation hearings as “permanent” head of DHS, which seems a bit odd given the fact that the election is less than seven weeks away; maybe he won’t receive a full retirement “benefit” package unless he is “official.” The DHS has been accused of such things as using federal agents and border patrol officers as Trump’s personal militia force to cause mayhem in cities with Democratic mayors, allowing ICE officers to abuse their authority, act without restraint and the aforementioned ignoring court orders on releasing medically at-risk detainees and children.
Wolf has also been accused of censoring and manipulating documents to underplay Russian election interference and white supremacist domestic terrorism; this includes Russian attempts to flood social media with claims about Biden’s mental health on one hand, and on the other, refusing to classify the domestic terrorist organization known as the “boogaloo movement” as a far-right extremist group, while at the same time elevating the antifa movement as a “terrorist” group despite no evidence that it is involved in the same kind of hate crimes and targeted killings that members of the “boogaloo movement” are accused of. Wolf was also grilled about conditions at ICE detention centers, with rising COVID-19 cases, and sinister reports of what cannot be called anything else but deliberate sterilization of women.
What did Wolf have to say for himself? Naturally he does what everyone in the Trump administration does, lie and deceive. He called a whisteblower’s report concerning intelligence censored and manipulated for political purposes to be “patently false.” He also denied that he had deliberately withheld intelligence reports on the Russian disinformation campaigns concerning Biden’s mental health. Wolf tried to obfuscate continuing Russian interference by claiming China and Iran were “equally” culpable, without providing proof that this is so.
Wolf also claimed he was “looking forward” to a review of conditions at ICE detention centers where COVID-19 was rampant, and reports that women were subjected to sterilization via hysterectomies without their consent or knowledge. Wolf was also apparently unfazed about reports about ICE detention center like the River Correctional Center in Louisiana and Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico, where detainees were punished for making “repeated” medical requests.
Why at this late date Wolf is even in the confirmation process is one thing, but why this man who always looks like he needs a shave and a shower is even being considered suitable is a moot point. He “fits” Trump’s needs, and his denials about the abuses of ICE and its agents show that his character has just the kind of thuggery the job “requires.”
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