The ICE-inspired Crime Wave is Growing
The cowardice of ICE officers makes them easy to impersonate
By now, we’re all pretty aware of the fact that the ICE officers harassing working people in Democratic areas are mostly just Proud Boys and other assorted racist militia types who are too scared to identify themselves. And to be honest, I don’t blame them. After all, when this is over, whether that end comes from an election or a cholesterol-induced bit of medical justice, the ICE goons will need to be able to deny their role in what’s happening now. But their refusal to ever identify themselves also creates another issue – it makes them really easy to impersonate.
Since ICE began violating our rights on a regular basis and hiding their faces while doing it, the criminal element among us has learned two things. First, impersonating an ICE officer is a great way to commit crimes, and if they commit those crimes against brown folks, no one will do much to stop them.
The result of ICE’s cowardice and the ingenuity of American criminals has led to a growing number of crimes being committed by people pretending to be ICE officials. That said, sometimes the racists get caught, though certainly most do not. And even when they are caught, media often refuses to report on the incidents. But sometimes, just sometimes, criminals get caught and we actually get to hear about their crimes. For example:
In South Carolina, a 33-year-old man kidnapped and menaced a group of Latino men along a Charleston County Road. As you might imagine, there was a lot of taunting between the threats, including the standard “not in MY country” talk we always get from the red hat faithful. One of the victims managed to record the incident on his phone, or else it’s likely that there would have been no arrest, and we surely never would have heard about it.
In Philadelphia, a Temple University student was arrested when he and two others tried to enter a residence hall on campus wearing homemade ICE gear. He wasn’t arrested immediately, but managed to get picked up later that night when he threw a racist tantrum in a local business.
In North Carolina, incel Carl Thomas Bennet was arrested for impersonating an ICE officer and sexually assaulting a woman. He reportedly threatened to deport the woman unless she complied.
And in the most publicly known incident, Vance Bolter of Green Isle, Minnesota disguised himself as an officer in order to assassinate Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Melissa Hortmann and her husband and attempt the murder of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife as well.
The rule of law is one of our core democratic principles, even if it has always been unevenly applied to working families and almost never to the rich and powerful. But this is something different. In the past, right wing elements in America appealed to “law and order” as one of the guiding principles of American conservatism. Now, conservatives aren’t even pretending to be lawful or righteous; instead, they celebrate their ability to break the law with impunity, with the worst of it coming from the very top, with Trump claiming he has the right to do “whatever I want” while saying in the same press conference that America “wants a dictator” leading it.
And while many of us saw through the silly “law and order” stuff a long time ago, America’s uninformed middle always bought the scam. But now, with lawless cops doing lawless things to our friends and neighbors, and criminals claiming to be the good guys in order to hurt us even more, just about every thinking person in America has a very good reason to question whether the rule of law is still a thing in America.
Apparently, it isn’t.
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.