Imagine a neighborhood in your community that is now loaded with SUVs with highly tinted windows that are driving up and down your streets. Occasionally they stop and many heavily armed, camouflaged, masked men emerge and approach people in their cars, outside their homes, in their places of work. They demand to see your papers – your proof of identity and citizenship (do you carry “proof” of your citizenship with you at all times?). When you do not respond immediately, they profanely shout at you and physically detain you, bending your arms behind you so that they can handcuff you. They haven’t identified themselves or what authority they might perceive to have. Your lack of compliance has defined you as an ‘agitator’, ‘domestic terrorist’, ‘criminal’. You are taken to a detention center where you may be given an opportunity to identify yourself (maybe you have a passport card on your phone). Or maybe you are just locked in a cell, with no water or medical care, and certainly no phone call or formal charge – your freedom is simply gone. Then perhaps the unknown authorities choose to release you. No transportation back to wherever they kidnapped you from – you can walk back.

I am not describing a scene from a WWII movie or the actions of the Gestapo. I’m not describing the streets of Iran or (insert name of your preferred authoritarian regime). I’m describing the reality for Americans in our own country. The same country where we grew up on ideals of due process, liberty, civil rights, and equal justice under the law. This is not that America.

We have an armed force entering our nation’s cities who are essentially hunting parties. They do not have warrants for the arrest of criminals. They simply have the authority granted to them by the Federal government as a secret police. I cannot call them ICE or Border Patrol or whatever other fake label that has been placed on them – because a police force that detains people with impunity, under the color of law, without identifying themselves, with the intention of showing might and leaving the citizenry in fear is nothing but a secret police. This militia uses force, sometimes lethal, to accomplish its aims (and let’s be honest, some of its aims are to meet a detention and deportation quota). Are they shooting criminals? Was Renee Good a criminal, sentenced to execution by the secret police? What about the other people shot by them, most of the victims being US citizens? If a municipality’s police force had this record, they would be under investigation for civil rights violations – not this secret police, where the goal is to investigate victims. The propaganda machine must be fed.

The examples of how wrong this situation is are piling up. There’s the violent abduction of a Somali-American citizen in Minneapolis by ICE one month ago. There were the two Target employees, US citizens, who were dragged out of their place of work and stuffed into a van. There was this physical and pepper spray attack on two elderly community members observing and vocally protesting ICE action. The detention of another citizen, not for committing a crime but for not showing his proof of citizenship. And there is the Coast Guard veteran and his wife from Phoenix, who while on a Carnival Cruise in the Carribean were SWATed by ICE, him taken away in handcuffs, until they bothered to look at his passport (available throughout the cruise as any cruise-goer knows) and released him (hours later). Even the Babson College student who was under a federal court order prohibiting her deportation couldn’t escape her lawless deportation to Honduras (and even after the government apologizes to the court for the error, no remediation is forthcoming). No warrants. No due process. Enabled by Kavanaugh stops and the rest of the Supreme Court. No apologies.

And no response from the legislators in power, the Republicans. As so many scream at the Democrats to “do something”, our citizenry needs a remedial lesson in civics. The majority in the House and Senate is held by Republicans – they get to choose which pieces of legislation are discussed and brought up for a vote. So the VISIBLE Act in the Senate (focused on unmasking and identifying immigration enforcement officers), Senator Cortez-Masto’s bill to reallocate excessive ICE funding to local police operations, or the reorganization of immigration enforcement – none of these bills will receive a hearing in the current Congress, let alone a vote. The Republican solution in the current budget negotiations – body cameras for ICE. But without accountability for those wearing those body cameras, it is merely lipstick on a pig. The problem for ICE right now is that America’s cell phones are their body cameras – and Americans do not like what they are seeing.

And the national disgrace continues…