Authoritarian regimes have a long history of creating collaborators among the populations being oppressed, and the Trump regime is no different. Here are just a few examples:
It happened shortly after the illegitimate Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, when Texas passed a law allowing the state to pay bounties to Texans willing to sue their neighbors for either having an abortion or helping someone do so.
It happened again when Trump 2.0 turned ICE into America’s largest law enforcement entity and gave it an unlimited budget, which it then used to pay massive bonuses to the worst people in our neighborhoods so they could hunt down better neighbors whose only crime was wanting better lives for their families.
Long story short – If you’re a big cheese-eating rat, the government will pay you to be a rat, as long you promise to only rat on brown people and not on rich pedophiles.
In their latest assault on our freedoms, Trump and his goons are soon going to authorize cash payments to bounty hunters willing to target immigrants and help ICE arrest them. Bounties on immigrants. That’s where we are in the downward spiral that is America under Donald Trump.
Bounty hunting is a profession that has a long and terrible history of violent criminality. As in all professions, there are good and bad elements, but for the most part, the violent excesses of the bounty hunting profession come from the simple fact that the people who choose to be bounty hunters tend to seek that trade because they have violent backgrounds and aggressive personal histories, and bounty hunting is a violent profession that is mostly unregulated. It’s a license to hurt people.
When we consider that bounty hunting is both an easy profession to enter and one that is nearly unregulated, we quickly learn that just about anyone who really wants to can become a bounty hunter with little effort and even less training. While it is strictly regulated in a few places, in most, you only need to be a legal adult without a criminal record. And now that Trump is drafting them into service to target immigrants, I suspect a great many new bounty hunters will enter the profession, and they will be exactly the kind of people we think they will be. Trump might as well make out the checks directly to the Klan, because that’s who he’s about to put on the payroll.
Now, I am certain that the response I will get from my right will involve statements like “not all bounty hunters are bad” and similar nonsense. I get it. By trashing an entire industry, as I just have, I also trash the good elements within it. This is true, but it is also unavoidable, since statements like “not all X are bad” are designed to falsely diminish the scope of the problem. There are good bounty hunters, but there are far fewer of them than my opposition will ever admit. It’s just more spin.
ICE operations have been violent, dysfunctional disasters in every American city they have entered. Much of this is due to the fact that ICE has been recruiting new agents non-stop and lowering the standards in ridiculous ways in order to fill their ranks. They routinely hire people who have no idea what they’re doing, and then put them to work under people who know even less. But they’re violent, and that is all that really matters. If you’re a breathing bigot who enjoys the misery of others, ICE has a job for you, and it pays well.
But even though they have an unlimited budget, ICE can’t hire enough people, so they’re lowering the bar yet again. Now the standards have dropped all the way to the ground, and the most violent elements of our neighborhoods are actively being recruited by the most violent president in our history in order to create as much violence as possible on our streets. If you like hurting people, this is the America you have always wanted.
We no longer need a corrupt government to oppress us. Now, they can simply pay us to oppress ourselves. And we’ll take the money. Of that, I am entirely certain.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.