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Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency

17 1
yesterday

A masked ICE agent aims his automatic weapon at a woman journalist filming an Operation Midway Crackdown raid in Chicago.

It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word. They don’t hide under the table. They eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

– Jean-Paul Sartre

The fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

The initial story from ICE was that 30-year-old Marimar Martinez was part of a “convoy” of cars in the Brighton Park neighborhood of southwest Chicago, which was trailing ICE vehicles for half an hour, ramming them with their cars and trying to force them off the road.

At one point, a DHS official later claimed, Martinez aimed an automatic weapon at the ICE agents, who, fearing for their lives, responded by shooting Martinez repeatedly.

But once again, the government’s story unraveled once the body cam footage was released. Videos from ICE cameras, as well as Martinez’s own Facebook livestream, show Martinez following the ICE vehicles, while frequently honking her horn.

Contrary to the allegations made by DHS, at no point does the video show Martinez, a US citizen with no criminal record, turn her car toward the ICE vehicles. Instead, the footage captures the ICE agent swerving his white Chevy Tahoe into Martinez’s Nissan SUV, forcing her to a stop.

There’s no evidence that Martinez pointed a weapon at the ICE agent. Rather, the ICE agent can be heard on the recording almost begging Martinez to give him a reason to shoot her: “Do something, bitch!” he says as he exits his car and seconds later unloads a volley of shots at Martinez, hitting her seven times.

This is the latest episode of ultra-violence in Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz, where ICE agents have killed and brutalized Chicago residents for reasons that later turned out to be bogus.

Three weeks ago, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez was shot by an ICE agent after dropping his daughter off at pre-school in Franklin Park, a suburb west of Chicago. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. But the video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even........

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