Every Ohio Republican congressmen voted to militarize America's cities

Yahoo

8 hours ago

Federal agents block people protesting an ICE immigration raid. (Photo by)
Minutes before the surreal show of force by masked, heavily armed federal agents, kids were playing on the soccer field in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and a children's summer camp in the historic immigrant neighborhood was having fun.
'Better get used to us now because this is gonna be normal very soon,' said Customs Border Chief Gregory Bovino after ICE agents and military units arrived at the local park carrying rifles and traveling on foot, horseback, and in armored vehicles.
Children and families scattered in terror.
Mission accomplished?
Faceless federal law enforcement moved, unprovoked, on a city park in a major American city in the middle of the day to conduct an apparent immigration sweep with weapons mounted on tanks.
I cannot get the video out of my head. It should rattle every one of us to our core. Boots on the ground in the land of the free? You okay with that?
The armed occupation scene in LA that went viral is not a one-off, people.
Expect the camouflaged army of state police — deployed in full tactical gear to a mostly empty urban park — to greatly expand its militaristic campaign against the racially suspicious in the U.S., citizens or not, following a massive budget infusion from congressional Republicans.
Unlimited funding has evidently convinced heady enforcers of state-sponsored intimidation and cruelty tactics that they're untouchable.
When a rightly livid LA mayor demanded the outrageous ICE assaults on her city stop, the democratically elected leader of over 3,770,000 Angelenos was simply dismissed by the top border official.
'The federal government doesn't work for Karen Bass,' huffed Bovino. (So, who does it work for?)
Moreover, he declared, the veiled federal agents dressed for war weren't leaving LA until they were good and ready.
Until their indiscriminate dragnet of people with brown skin met an indefinite quota of no mercy, i.e., prolonged detention without due process and deportation to third countries where the human cargo lacks citizenship, family ties, and protection.
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By now you know the vast majority of people being grabbed off the streets, slammed up against walls, ripped from their children, ambushed outside courtrooms, chased down farm fields, and generally terrorized by tough guys who hide behind neck gaiters, are not hardened criminals who threaten anybody.
They are not even close to being the 'worst of the worst' that Trump pledged to deport, according to the government's own data.
The besieged populations are the present-day huddled masses whose only crime is working hard and paying taxes in the United States without legal status.
Some are parents and grandparents with first- and second-generation progeny.
Many have been on the spectrum of regular ICE check-ins to asylum-seekers and those on the long path to citizenship for years, if not decades.
They are fixtures in their communities, neighbors, friends. Today they are hunted as prey. Deprived of dignity. Treated as less than human. Wrestled into submission and stuffed into unmarked vehicles bound for unknown destinations.
Are you ready for armed occupation on steroids in Ohio tearing immigrant communities apart for sadistic spectacle? It is coming. Every single Ohio Republican member of Congress voted for it, while showering billionaires with tax handouts.
With a three-fold increase in its budget, ICE is poised explode its militarized immigration enforcement and detention operation to a level never seen before. Picture thousands of new agents deployed throughout the country. Double the detention centers.
Immigration-related arrests across Ohio have already tripled across the state under Trump. (Imagine it six months from today.)
A New York Times analysis of the pattern and pace of immigration enforcement from Jan. 20 to June 10 showed raw arrest numbers in Ohio spiked by 209% since Inauguration Day.
The state's ICE detention capacity also shot up significantly from two facilities and roughly 120 beds to half a dozen county jails with 1,450 beds.
Ohio's Geauga County continues its fight to keep ICE contract secret
Housing ICE inmates is a money-maker for counties with struggling budgets and some zealously guard their contractual arrangements with ICE from the public.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Ohio migrants have been incarcerated, cut off from family and work not for criminal conduct — they pose zero threat according to even ICE metrics — but for navigating a civil immigration system replete with problems.
Yet for weeks that can stretch into months, prisoners with no criminal histories sit behind bars denied bond and hope.
Human beings who have been a rich part of the fabric of Ohio, who have filled acute labor shortages in the state and revitalized declining economies are left to rot in cramped cages before, with little notice, they're shipped back to their origin country or some distant place they've never been.
Adding to the depravity that paralyzes Ohio immigrants with fear are Republican state lawmakers pushing several bills through the legislature to enhance the arrest and detention of 'any person who is, or is suspected of being unlawfully present in the U.S.'
They are, in effect, setting the stage for something Ohioans are wholly unprepared to process — the expansive overreach of militarized ICE operations moving, unprovoked, on Ohio cities and towns to seize and disappear even any person suspected of being unlawfully present in the state.
Get used to a police state and tanks in the road, border chief? Normalize gut-wrenching inhumanity on a mass scale in America?
Never. Never. Never.
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