Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille: Trump’s Secret Police Teams Running Amuck

July 20th 2020

President Trump (The White House)

By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille

In Portland, Oregon, federal troops dressed in camouflage and full military gear, have unleashed a campaign of terror against protesters. Using tear gas, and flash bullets, unidentified federal agents have rounded up people from the streets and carted them off in unmarked vehicles under the sanctions of a Donald Trump executive order to protect monuments, statues, and federal buildings. After Trump’s executive order “the Department of Homeland Security formed ‘rapid deployment teams,” … [that] are made up of officers from Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement who back up the Federal Protective Service, which is already responsible for protecting federal property,” The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs recently reported. 

“Those agents can carry firearms, arrest those accused of committing a crime without a warrant and conduct investigations ‘on and off the property in question,’” Kanno-Youngs writes. Apparently, Homeland security “authorize[ations] are so extraordinarily broad that they can find federal laws that they are authorized to enforce across the spectrum, so long as it has some national security, public safety, human trafficking, criminal street gang conspiracy,” said Peter Vincent, a former top lawyer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has also sent agents to cities across the United States.

According to The New York Times, a DHS memo revealed that “The heavily armed federal agents facing a growing backlash for their militarized approach to weeks of unrest in Portland were not specifically trained in riot control or mass demonstrations.”  

These strong-armed tactics, may be coming to cities and towns across the country. 

Portland May Ted Wheeler called the actions of the federal troops “an attack on our democracy.” “Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said her office had opened a criminal investigation into how one protester was injured near a federal courthouse,” The New York Times’ Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported. “She also filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court accusing the federal agents of engaging in unlawful tactics and seeking a restraining order.”

“What is happening now in Portland should concern everyone in the United States,” said Jann Carson, the interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping. The actions of the militarized federal officers are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.” 

In a DHS memo laying out the reasons for deploying troops to Portland, “acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf repeats the phrase ‘violent anarchists’ 72 times, using this phrase to designate a total of several thousand people,” Crimethinc recently reported. “In many cases, he brands a group of hundreds ‘violent anarchists’ on account of the alleged actions of just a couple individuals.” 

According to a report on Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.”

As my friend, and longtime anti-fascist activist Randy Gould recently pointed out, “Authoritarian fascism has arrived and not enough attention is being paid to it. In the middle of the pandemic and everything else going on, the Trump regime has introduced in its most clear fascism a fascist like, authoritarian police state to America.” Gould noted that these actions are “the dawn of a new more dangerous and blatant phase of the Trumpian New Order.”

For students of history – including recent history, American military support for fascism is not new. In 1973, after the CIA-supported coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet unleashed his troops and rounded up thousands of Chileans and proceeded to imprison, torture, and murder many. Between 1976-1983, after a military junta in Argentina, the government unleashed a campaign of terror during which between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed, including opponents of the government as well as innocent victims.

The difference is that these proto-military federal directed forces (including the CIA) were unleashed outside of the US borders – not against protesting Americans. True, the National Guard has been called out on a state-by-state basis to quell anti-Vietnam War and other protests against US policies. But these responses were at a state level, not a federal level SWAT team response with no apparent over-site other than an increasingly unhinged President. 

As reported in the Washington Post, on Saturday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) issued a joint statement that contrasted the civil rights struggle embodied by the late Rep. John Lewis with Trump’s law and order tactics.

“We are again reminded of the immense power of peaceful protest in the fight against racial injustice and police brutality,” the statement read. “Yet time and time again, the Trump Administration shows its lack of respect for the dignity and First Amendment rights of all Americans … We will not tolerate the use of Oregonians, Washingtonians — or any other Americans — as props in President Trump’s political games.”

These “political (war) games” have already become highlight reels in Trump 2020 presidential campaign. But how will Trump’s use of Homeland Security and other federal officers ultimately play in homes across America where there has been an upwelling of support for Black Lives Matter protests.  Will Trump’s teams of enforcers be viewed with horror evoking images of fascist dictatorships past and present?  Will Trump be able to successfully paint a picture of America under siege for anyone other than his most loyal followers? Is this the new normal that Trump wants to create?

In the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed over 142,000 lives in the U.S., Trump has refused to provide a coordinated federal response. It is telling that his priorities lie with violently putting down protests – without the support of local authorities -- instead of trying to mitigate the toll the pandemic is taking.