By John W. Whitehead
“I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors, to do our job. We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.” —Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf’s defense of the Donald Trump Administration’s deployment of militarized federal police to address civil unrest in the states
This situation is a wake-up call.
What is unfolding before our very eyes, with police agencies defying local governments in order to tap into the power of federal militarized troops in order to put down domestic unrest, could very quickly snowball into an act of aggression against the states, a coup by armed, militarized agents of the federal government.
At a minimum, it is an attack on the Tenth Amendment, which affirms the sovereignty of the states and the citizenry, and the right of the states to stand as a bulwark against overreach and power grabs by the federal government.
If you’re still deluding yourself into believing that this thinly-veiled exercise in martial law is anything other than an attempt to bulldoze what remains of the Constitution and reinforce the iron-fisted rule of the police state, you need to stop drinking the kool-aid.
It is no longer about partisan politics or civil unrest or even authoritarian impulses.
This situation is a turning point.
Unless we take back the reins, and soon, looking back on this time years from now, historians may well point to the events of 2020 as the death blow to America’s short-lived experiment in self-government.
The government’s recent actions in Portland, Ore., when unidentified federal agents, believed to be border police, ICE and DHS agents, wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” and sporting all kinds of weapons, descended uninvited on the city in unmarked vehicles, snatching protesters off the streets and detaining them without formally arresting them or offering any explanation of why they’re being held, is just a foretaste of what’s to come.
The Trump administration already has announced its plans to deploy these border patrol agents to other cities across the country (Chicago is supposedly next) in an apparent bid to put down civil unrest. Yet the overriding concerns by state and local government officials to Trump’s plans suggest that weaponizing the DHS as an occupying army only will provoke more violence and unrest.
We’ve been set up.
Under the guise of protecting federal properties against civil unrest, the Trump administration has formed a task force of secret agents who look, dress, and act just like military stormtroopers on a raid and have been empowered to roam cities in unmarked vehicles, snatching citizens off the streets, whether or not they’ve been engaged in illegal activities.
There’s a reason Trump has tapped the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for this dirty business: These agencies are notorious for their lawlessness, routinely sidestepping the U.S. Constitution and trampling on the rights of anyone who gets in their way, including legal citizens.
Indeed, it was only a matter of time before these roving bands of border patrol agents began flexing their muscles far beyond the Nation’s borders and exercising their right to disregard the Constitution at every turn.
Except these border patrol cops aren’t just disregarding the Constitution.
With this latest salvo by the Trump administration in its so-called crackdown on rioting and civil unrest, America itself is about to become a Constitution-free zone where freedom is off-limits and government agents have all the power and “we the people” have none.
Are you starting to get the picture yet?
It is just one more piece of that elaborate test to see how far “we the people” will allow the government to push the limits of the Constitution
We’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.
For instance, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government was given greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.
The terrorist invasion never really happened, but the government kept its newly-acquired police powers made possible by the nefarious USA Patriot Act.
Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.
Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and empower the military to assist with border control.
That so-called immigration crisis has now morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest) that the government is eager to use in order to expand its powers.
Yet, as we’ve learned the hard way, once the government acquires, and uses, additional powers (to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the police, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process), it does not voluntarily relinquish them.
It is the slippery slope on which we’ve been traveling for far too long
Sure, it’s the Trump administration calling the shots right now, but it’s government agents armed with totalitarian powers and beholden to the bureaucratic Deep State who are carrying out these orders in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and all it represents.
Whether it’s Trump or Biden or someone else all together, this year or a dozen years from now, the damage has been done: I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” we have allowed the president to acquire dictatorial powers that can be unleashed at any moment.
Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”
This way is how it begins.
This way is how it always begins.
Don’t be fooled into thinking any of this will change when the next election rolls around.
—The Rutherford Institute