← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Picture you're pregnant, so you sweep your house for any harmful chemicals. But when you need to look for a prenatal multivitamin, all you can find are options with potentially high heavy metals and questionable ingredients. This is where ritual comes in. Our pregnancy support is made traceable and clean. Label project certified for the many stages of pregnancy, including trying to get there like fertility support. A 3 in 1 blend of CoQ10 NAC and Myo Inositol to help support conception outcomes. Or our essential prenatal multivitamin with 12 key ingredients for mom to baby support. Oh, and our essential postnatal multivitamin for the new nutrient demands of postpartum and lactation. This is the pregnancy support you deserve. Get 25% off@ritual.com pregnancysupport these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
- [01:00]
B
Hello everyone. This is JVL here with my colleague at the Bulwark, Andrew Egger. And Andrew ice. ICE is at it again. Where does abolish ICE go to get its abolishy? Last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, three ICE agents showed up inside a county courthouse to arrest a gentleman. And it was kind of a shit show because these guys were all in plain clothes. They did not have any badges or identification. They did not have a warrant. One of them was wearing a balaclava like he was from narcos or something. And as they start manhandling this. This dude, a bunch of people who are there thinking they're witnessing a crime are like, what's happening? What are you doing? Stop this. You can't do that. At which point they just say, oh, we're, we're ICE agents. And the people surroundings, like, show us a badge. Show us some identification. And they just flatly refuse. And they then begin manhandling the people who are. Who are trying to protect this dude and threatening them with arrest and saying, you know, if you. If you don't touch me. And you, you've got to see the video because there's this gray haired dude with a man bun and like Professor Glasses who you think maybe is like a protester or something, but no, no, he's the ICE agent and he's in full Cartman, respect my authority mode. Respect my authority. As he tells people, don't touch me. Don't touch me. That's a violation of the law here. Andrew, let's look at the video. Do you understand? Do not touch me or impede me in my lawful duties. Ma'am do you understand it is a crime for you to do so? Why? Do you have a warrant? Do you have a warrant for his arrest? Yes. Off me or I am calling the U.S. attorney and prosecuting for assault on a federal officer. Show us the warrant. Show us a warrant signed by a judge. Turn him around. You don't have a warrant, sir. Show us a warrant for his arrest. We are impost with Homeland Security. You don't have a warrant signed. So that's the face of law enforcement. And what brings us here today is news that ICE has said that they are going to press charges against the bystanders in this video who thought that they were stopping the commission of a crime. What are your thoughts, Andrew? You're a law and order guy.
- [04:00]
C
I feel like you only bring me on here to like throw things in my face, you know, it's like, hey, explain. Explain this one. This is not, this is not my idea of a good time. JBL is plain clothes guys yanking people off the street. Let me, let me give a. A partial, I guess, steel man, of the kind of thing that is sort of going on here, right, is that federal immigration enforcement has forever had a bee in its bonnet about the lower level criminal justice systems not playing more ball with them in a number of jurisdictions, right? They're like, hey, you got a guy in there who showed up to be arraigned for a crime or to have a hearing or whatever, who we really wanted deport out of our country. Would you mind handing him to me, please? And the lower courts frequently will say, no, we're dealing with him according to, you know, whatever charges he's facing in our jurisdiction. We're gonna mete out justice that way. It would be bad for our system. People would stop showing up for their hearings if you were also just able to show up for their hearings and then throw them out of the country. So you can see there's like competing interests here, right? And ICE is trying to step that stuff up. They're trying to put a lot of pressure on these people to. They're trying to put a lot of pressure on these local systems, including last week by arresting a county judge in order to get them to be more compliant. So that's kind of the. I call it a steel man as it's coming out of my mouth. It's horrifying, right? I mean, what they're doing right now is trying to, is basically trying to twist these state and local systems, arms behind their backs, these lower level courts behind their backs to get them to Start complying more with federal immigration authorities on this stuff. But what we have seen in this video goes significantly beyond that, because the combination of that and this other cool new thing that ICE is doing, which is these plain clothes raids, where not only are ICE agents undercover doing investigation and stuff, but they are, from the beginning to end of the detainment process, refusing to give any identification, show any identification. We saw this back with student visas getting canceled, people getting pulled off the.
- [06:06]
B
Streets, arrest on the street. Move at Tufts, right?
- [06:08]
C
Yeah, yeah. And it's brazenly kind of cuts against everything that you would ever, ever expect from law enforcement in a free society where there's accountability of who's yanking you off the street, who's putting you in a van, where you can have some confidence that the, the people doing the yanking, if they are plain clothes, are actually committing a crime and that, that, you know, like, like, like, you know, traditionally, if you or I were walking down the street and we saw something like that happening, just a scuffle between a couple of people all in street clothes, group of guys throwing another guy in the van, first of all, we'd hope we wouldn't see that at all in the United States of America. Second of all, if you did, you'd be like, ah, something shitty is going on here. Should I intervene? Yeah, call the police. Yeah, like, get the cops in here. And there's nothing preventing them from doing that. As a matter of policy. There's nothing. I mean, they're there to arrest the guy, right. They know he's gonna be there. They're already putting on all this kind of institutional pressure. There would be no reason for them not to show the badges and stuff. Unless.
- [07:06]
B
Wear the badge and have the warrant in your hand. Yeah, yeah.
- [07:09]
C
Unless. Part of this. Well, there's really two possibilities, right? One of the things they get into this in the story a little bit. One of this is that ICE is just deputizing people left and right to help them with these operations. A lot of these people are like total rookies, amateurs off the street who just, like, are not familiar with the way this is typically done in federal law enforcement or has been typically done.
- [07:30]
B
Greyhairman, perhaps?
- [07:32]
C
Yeah, yeah, sure. So that introduces all kinds of instability and uncertainty and opportunities for chaos, which, again, ICE is maximally putting its foot down on. If you're there and you're like, what the heck's going on? There's a good chance you may end up getting arrested, too, for interfering. But the other thing is that. Is that part of. Is that all this, you have to imagine that all this is a deliberate policy choice. Right. That the goal is to ratchet up the bleariness and the uncertainty around who's doing what. You don't want clear lines of authority. If you are Donald Trump. Right. You want to be able to mobilize the brown shirt army in plain clothes because you want people just in fear. You don't want people to know where they stand going into encounters with these law enforcement officers. You want people to have a reflexive flinching away from really any interactions with people who are identifying themselves as federal law enforcement because they're adopting this maximalist posture of we're going to get you no matter what.
- [08:37]
B
What do you think the balaclava is all about? So this is a thing we're seeing often now with some of these high profile ICE raids where not only they plainclothes, but like agents covering their faces now maybe in like, I don't know, like, where's the worst drug? You know, from what I know from watching clear and present danger, the drug cartels can target legitimate law enforcement officers. And so from time to time, in like the harshest jungles of Central and South America, the police have to wear balaclavas like Batman to protect their friends and family. I don't think that's the case in America.
- [09:17]
C
Yeah, it's not super clear to me that that is a top consideration when you're yanking like a Tufts University student off the street that, like, they might have high level gang contacts who are going to retaliate. I think it's a lot more prosaic. I think these people know that there are smartphones around and they don't want to be like, personally identified and seen as individually responsible for what they would prefer to see as just sort of the anonymous arm of the state coming down on these people. Which again, is completely contrary to the whole point of badges and ID numbers. And like, the idea that even though, like the courts are totally stacked in the favor of any law enforcement officer who's ever charged with anything or ever accused of anything, even though the whole system is already set up to really privilege and prioritize those agents of authority, in that way, at least you are able to know who you're talking about. At least. You know, maybe social stigma can play a role here. And as we have seen in an increasing number of cases like this, ICE and other federal law enforcement who are part of this mass deportation operation are trying to kind of short circuit and do away with that.
- [10:32]
B
I mean, whenever I write Something, my name is on it, so I am accountable for the words I write. I would think that if you are a law enforcement officer and you are carrying out your job as an agent of the state, if you are not happy to have your name and face attached to the actions you're carrying out, maybe you shouldn't be doing them.
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C
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, this is better.
- [10:56]
B
Maybe you should find a new job. Right. I mean, this is a right. If, if you think that you could get in trouble for doing what you're doing, then you shouldn't do it. And this is why, like, people like you and I write with our names attached to it and not anonymously.
- [11:09]
C
Yeah. And it all ties into the argument that the Trump administration is making kind of consistently and across the board that that fundamentally, these deportation proceedings, we should all set. That we should all compartmentalize them in our brains, set them aside, get rid of whatever gag reflex we might have about, you know, getting rid of due process for these people, short circuiting any kinds of transparency and constitutional protections around the nature and manner of their arrests. Basically, if the Trump administration is. Points at a person and says, you know, illegal alien, criminal, gang banger, you know, terrorist, Ms. 13, non person, you should just take like an ice cream scoop and get rid of the part of your brain that has any of those concerns as far as those people are concerned. But the problem is that even if they, Even if that were fair or like, like defensible from the point of view of the person being deported, which it's not, it is plainly all the time continually implicating all kinds of people who are around the situations. I mean, this is exactly what we saw with this headline, right? I mean, you have these people there who are, who are putting their bodies between these, between this, this plainclothes DHS officer and this guy who they are trying to detain, who obviously have. Everybody should agree, they should be able to identify whether the person who is in front of them is an actual officer of the law, in which case should probably get out of the way, or that they're not. And if, like, if, if that's video.
- [12:41]
B
They'Re just saying, show us a badge, show us a warrant.
- [12:44]
C
Yeah. That's all. Yeah.
- [12:45]
B
And so here I got. So this is a. One of the persistent themes of Trumpism is to claim to be acting on behalf of one group while treating that group like. And so, you know, like, we're here for the forgotten men and women and we're going to impose tariffs on everything to make their. Their jobs. You Know, make. Make their trucking jobs disappear and make the cost of goods go up. Yesterday they put out one of their new executive orders, the text of which is like, you know, our brave men and women in law enforcement, we have to protect them. Doing things like this is incredibly dangerous to the brave men and women of law enforcement. Right? This is. This is trying to put them into a maximally dangerous position where their identities are ambiguous. And in a country with like, what, 300, 400 million guns in it, we're gonna put them in positions where it could look to any bystander as though they were themselves criminals. It just. It is needlessly dangerous. And here's my. My maybe conspiracy theory. You tell me if I'm crazy. Yes, I agree that doing plainclothes raids with balaclavas and all that is partly to be done to create a climate of fear. I think another part of it is they're looking to get a tragedy and a provocation that they can use to justify ratcheting up to whatever the next level is. They're waiting to do a raid where some innocent bystander who is. Got a concealed carry permit and in a state with stand their ground laws, like, opens fire on law enforcement officers because they aren't clearly identified and thinks that they're stopping a crime, at which point you have, like, tragedy. Like, I'm. I'm kind of shocked that something like that hasn't happened yet. And it's. It's great that it hasn't happened yet. You know, fingers crossed. I hope it doesn't happen. But you do enough of these things. Like, I don't know. We had somebody in the comments section the other day who was like, you know, my. My. My wife is not a citizen. She, you know, she's a legal resident. But if, you know, he's like, I had a concealed carry permit. Like, if we're walking down the street and three guys in masks jump out of the van and grab her, like, and they don't have badges and they don't have warrant. Like, am I supposed to just let that happen or am I supposed to stand my ground? Like, you know what? And this is just asking for trouble. It's needlessly asking trouble. It's putting law enforcement officers in harm's way when they don't have to be. It's a choice to make it as dangerous as possible for them, I think maybe in the hopes that we wind up with some horrible situation that they can then use to justify going to the next level, whatever that is. My Crazy.
- [15:48]
C
I think it's not an implausible reading of this stuff by any stretch because obviously that's one real danger here. I guess one kind of caveat that I would add to that is we still don't really have a great sense of how widely spread this practice is. Most of the individual instances that we're seeing kind of bubble up, which they're all controversial when they come out. So I feel like we have a pretty good sense of when and how widely it's happening. Or maybe that's Pollyanna Ish. But it's. It's this. It's a Tufts University student. It's like a young woman kind of alone on a street in I don't know what states Tufts in. I should know that.
- [16:24]
B
It's Boston. She was in Somerville.
- [16:26]
C
Yeah. Like in Boston, Massachusetts. Or it's, you know, it's this guy who they're detaining coming out of a courtroom, like in the middle of a courthouse. Right. Like. Like these are not yet, I would say kind of like the maximal playing with fire type arrests that you might see if something similar were playing out like in a busy street in Florida or Texas or something like that. Right. But the danger is obviously there. The danger is constantly there. And the point. And again, there's no genuine benefit. There's no actual state interest that is preserved or genuine state interest. There's a governmental interest, there's a regime interest in doing all this for the reasons we've discussed, but there's no genuine state interest in this happening. That would outweigh. That would justify the. The increased risk of all those things that you describe, even though we have not yet seen kind of like a maximally risky situation or God forbid, an actual tragedy. So who knows, who knows where all this.
- [17:25]
B
Can I ask you a question, Andrew? Why aren't the cops involved in these raids pushing back on their superiors and saying, no, I'm gonna wear my badge because this is dangerous. You're trying to put me in danger by them. And again, we don't know who's telling whether is this orders. Are they deciding on their own not to wear badges? But you would think again, our brave men and women in law enforcement would be well within their rights to push back against their superiors if they are being instructed not to display badges and say, no, I'm in the middle of a courthouse. I can fucking just have the badge hanging around my neck. That's not going to impede my ability to do my job. And you, if you are. If there is a superior Telling them not to wear a badge, like I'm going to go to the press and tell them they're trying to make us, they're trying to put us in harm's way, they're trying to put us in danger. I haven't seen any of that from law enforcement officers on the, on the front lines. Have you Andrew?
- [18:21]
C
Yeah, well, I think some of this again comes back to the idea that people are kind of like being deputized for a lot of this work. Like these are true believers who are kind of signing up to do it. Right. And again, we don't necessarily know that these guys in this video are among those people. That was kind of suggested by a couple of people who are close to the, the encounter. But that's a concern, right? Basically if you have just kind of like real gung ho, like pro deportation, we're gonna make it happen guys stepping up to do the work, not only are they gonna have fewer concerns along the lines you mentioned, cause they're just kinda like ah, Costa doing business baby. But also you have to kind of wildly inflate the risk of just kind of regular sorts of police affiliated violence with people who have not been trained as much, people who are newer to the job and people who are ideologically by the specific kind of people that they're arresting. Not just like cleaning up, not just like you know, preserving law and order, but like getting those kind of people out of the country. Right. So that's, yeah, it's a, it's a, that's just me hazarding a guess, but that's kind of where I'd go with that.
- [19:27]
B
All right, well before we get out of here, Andrew. So you're in favor of abolishing ICE now, right? Ha. Kidding. Don't answer that. Don't answer that. But you guys can fight about it in the comments if you want. Stay with us. Hit like hit. Subscribe. Stay with us on the feed. We'll be back.
- [19:39]
A
Picture you're pregnant so you sweep your house for any harmful chemicals. But when you need to look for a prenatal multivitamin, all you can find are options with potentially high heavy metals and questionable ingredients. This is where ritual comes in. Our pregnancy support is made traceable and clean. Label project certified for the many stages of pregnancy including trying to get there like fertility support. A 3 in 1 blend of CoQ10 NAC and Myo Inositol to help support conception outcomes or our essential prenatal multivitamin with 12 key ingredients for mom to baby support. Oh, and our essential postnatal multivitamin for the new nutrient demands of postpartum and lactation. This is the pregnancy support you deserve. Get 25% off@ritual.com pregnancysupport these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.