Apparently someone left a cake out in the rain.
How else to explain the massive ICE raid staged in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, recognized by most non-Angelenos as the locale of a bizarre but popular song from the 1960s about a love affair doomed to failure.
Perhaps immigration czar Tom Homan — desperate to reach Lord Voldemort’s demands that the ICEstapo arrest 3,000 people a day — legal and criminal status irrelevant — missed the message in the song. Like millions of others.
Nevertheless, there was the nation’s newest secret police, as described by Heather Cox Richardson:
“At about 10:30 [Monday] morning local time, heavily armed masked agents in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck raided the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Journalist Mel Buer reported that agents from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought what he called a “massive federal presence.”
Fox News Channel personnel were embedded with the raiders and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed for the media as a show of force to intimidate opponents. CBP brought its own press team, and its people were also taking photos of bystanders. After Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrived and spoke with Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, the agents left. It is not clear that there was a specific target for the raid, or that anyone was arrested.
Later, Bovino told Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
The raid netted no arrests, according to Bass.
The Big Ugly Bill ramped up the Trump regime’s spending on immigration and the border by $170 billion, giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement a budget larger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.
All those resources need to be showcased, so ICE offered up an armed invasion of an LA park — accompanied by some of the 4,100 National Guard troops that have been all dressed up with no place to go since their deployment last month.
Those troops, with a mission to “protect” the masked and armed ICEstapo agents, were obviously needed to supplement the inadequate force protection offered by a helicopter and a gun-mounted truck in what was apparently a relatively deserted public park. I guess sending some of the 700 staged Marines probably would have been seen as overdoing it.
After an initial wave of protests over the military occupation, based on the lack of national news reports the city has been relatively quiet under the watch of LAPD.
LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson suggested in the future, the made-for-Fox Propaganda raid:
“… should apply for a film permit like everybody else. And stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody who lives in this great city and disrupt our economy every day.”
But scaring the bejesus out of people is the plan, hoping many will “self-deport” to meet Stephen Miller’s daily quota on the road to one million deportations annually. Besides, the impact of masked agents snatching people off the streets and disappearing them to gulags like Alligator Alcatraz just isn’t getting the ratings the regime wants.
And it’s only going to get worse.
Journalist Garrett Graff is blunt in describing what a ramped up ICEstapo will look like:
“What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.”
His reference point is the ramp-up of Customs and Border Protection after 9/11:
“there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”
And that happened under the Bush and Obama homeland security departments, run by professionals and not cosplaying sycophants who wear $5,000 watches to pose outside an El Salvador prison and ignore security agents roughing up a United States senator who was escorted into a press “briefing” in a federal building by the National Guard and FBI.
And they won’t even be eligible for an Emmy. File this under “Your Federal Tax Dollars At Work.”