Vince Ray‘s cover art (detail) for The Damned’s Grave Disorder, Nitro Records, 2001.

They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.

– John Milton

On October 17, Phillip Brown, a 33-year-old Black man, was driving his Dodge Caravan SUV down Benning Road in Northeast DC to get milk for his three young kids when a Metropolitan police car pulled up behind him. Like many vans, Brown’s had tinted windows and the cops used this as a pretext to tail the Dodge when it changed lanes. The police alerted federal authorities that they were following Brown. The federal agents, who now occupied much of DC as part of Trump’s scheme to flood the city with armed federal forces, took over the pursuit and eventually tried to pull Brown over. When Brown stopped, the bumper of his Dodge accidentally nudged a car in front of him. Moments later, a Homeland Security agent fired at least four shots at Brown’s car. Two bullets hit the driver’s side window. And two bullets struck the passenger seat. It’s a miracle none of the shots hit Brown.

Bullet holes in the driver’s side window of Phillip Brown’s Dodge. Photo: E. Paige White and Bernadette Armand.

The agent later claimed that Brown was planning to flee the scene and made a “deliberate attempt to run them down.” How did he know this? Because Brown allegedly revved the engine of his van.

Brown was pulled from the car, cuffed, taken to the DC jail and charged with felonious assault on an officer and fleeing arrest. But when the incident report was filed, the document contained no mention of the shooting. The night before his first court hearing, Brown was approached by federal prosecutors outside the presence of his lawyers with a plea deal that would reduce the charges to misdemeanor reckless driving, but he had to agree to the deal then or they would rescind the offer, a transparent attempt to cover up the shooting. Brown refused and the next day told his lawyers about the irregular, if not illegal, ex parte visit by the prosecutors and detailed circumstances of the shooting, which his legal team had known nothing about. Brown’s lawyers had not been given body cam footage of the incident, for reasons that are now obvious.

When the glaring omission of the shooting was brought up in court during Brown’s defense attorney’s questioning of the DC cop who wrote the report, Officer Jason Sterling testified that he’d been told by a superior officer not to memorialize the shooting in an official court document. Sterling also disputed the Homeland Security officer’s version of events, saying that none of the federal agents or cops on the scene were standing in front of Brown’s Dodge or at risk of being run over. All the shots hit the side of Brown’s car, not the front. After the hearing, the judge dismissed the charges against Brown, who, it should be noted, was unarmed at the time of the shooting.

Usually, all cops have to do to justify shooting someone is to claim, “I feared for my life.” And as far as we know, the trigger-happy DHS agent who shot at Phillip Brown and lied about the circumstances of the shooting is still patrolling DC’s streets, tasked with pulling over and harassing anyone he deems suspicious, as part of Trump’s made-for-memes operation to Make America Safe Again. Safe for whom?

The mother of Nathan Griffin, the manager of the Laugh Factory in Chicago, on watching her son being arrested by federal immigration agents for “interfering” with a raid: “My son was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. For those of you who don’t know, I was in Chicago visiting my son and he was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. When I think of going out the door in the morning, I don’t want to…Because I do not want to encounter the SUV, the screams, the crying and the horrific things that I saw before I was pulled into the fray when somebody tried to kidnap my son.”

An immigration agent in Addison, Illinois, who was wearing an American flag mask, smashed a woman’s car window while her terrorized children sat in the vehicle…

ICE has stopped publishing its monthly data on arrests and removals by criminality.

Franz Schoening, Commander of the Portland Police Department, testified that on October 18, federal immigration officers attacked protesters with crowd control munitions, not in response to any violence by the protesters but because another federal officer accidentally shot tear gas onto the roof of the ICE facility.

Sen. Dick Durbin: “The Trump Administration isn’t targeting the worst of the worst. Their immigration raids are going after churches and Halloween parades. What a farce.”

50% of new ICE recruits failed an open-book test after taking a course on Immigration and the Fourth Amendment.

This pervasive constitutional ignorance might seem like a grave disorder for a law enforcement agency, but under the current dispensation, it is likely a prerequisite for the position. The Trump administration doesn’t want its ICE agents hesitating to cuff a 6-year-old or tear gas a teacher trying to shield her student because it might violate some civil right or another. That would be wussy and woke.

Arrests of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border by federal immigration agents increased 83% from July to September, meaning that desperate people are still coming despite Trump’s violent mass deportation operation.

Six months ago, 47 people, including nine kids, were abducted by ICE in Hays County, Texas. Since then, County Judge Ruben Becerra has been trying to get answers about why they were detained and where they are being held, but DHS has ignored all of his queries. Judge Becerrq told Pro Publica: “We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them. By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

According to a new lawsuit, federal immigration agents in Chicago pointed a pepper ball gun and a real gun at Chris Gentry, a US combat veteran who was legally standing on the sidewalk during a protest against ICE. The agent who held the real gun aimed it at Gentry and said, “Bang, bang. You’re dead liberal.”

Talia Soglin, the Chicago Tribune: “In government propaganda videos, the Feds boast of going after ‘the worst of the worst.’ In reality, every day, masked agents are fanning out and hitting the easiest targets they can: day laborers, gig workers, tamale ladies.”

You’re walking across the parking lot toward Walmart to spend some of your hard-earned money and keep the commodities circulating, when two armed masked men accost you and demand to know where you were born. Just another day in the Land of the Free.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration was forced to admit that it violated a federal judge’s order barring National Guard troops from entering Portland. Oregon National Guard troops remained on the grounds of the ICE building in South Portland hours after a federal judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order banning the Trump administration from deploying state troops into the city. “After Your Honor’s (temporary restraining order), they were still at the building, yes,” said Justice Department Attorney Jean Lin, before a hearing on the legality of Trump’s order to send national guard troops from Oregon, California and Texas into Portland to crack down on protesters.

This open defiance of federal court orders seems to be in keeping with Trump’s views that he is immune from any legal restraints…

Trump on invoking the Insurrection Act: “If I want to enact a certain act.. I’d be allowed to do that, you understand that — the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved. And I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted.”

ICE is transferring $10 billion to the Navy to build tent concentration camps to hold up to 10,000 people in detention at a time. These would be the largest such camps since the Clinton-era migrant camp at Guantanamo. (So many wretched precedents set by Clinton.)

In a court hearing on Tuesday, Federal Judge Sara Ellis warned Border Control commander Gregory Bovino that federal immigration agents in Chicago are regularly violating her Temporary Restraining Order banning DHS from using tear gas on journalists and non-violent protesters:

They don’t have to like what you’re doing. And that’s okay. That’s what democracy is. They can say they don’t like what you’re doing, they don’t like how you’re enforcing the laws — that they wish you would leave Chicago and take the agents with you. They can say that, and that’s fine. But they........

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