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What If Somebody Gets Killed? [1]
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Date: 2025-05-14
A 16-year-old girl is forcibly arrested by Worcester, Mass., police after federal immigration agents took her mother into custody.
The odds are that someday, in one of the increasing number of thuggish arrests by federal agents of alleged illegal immigrants, somebody is going to get killed.
Maybe it’ll be the immigrant. Maybe it’ll be an ICE agent. Maybe it’ll be a bystander. But when masked men with guns and strong intent wade into our communities and show no hesitation in manhandling their targets or anyone who gets in their way, something is going to happen.
Then what do we do?
During this post I’m going to share the outstanding writing of Bill Shaner, an independent journalist working in Worcester, Mass., reporting on an ICE arrest of a woman in that city and the police taking her 16-year-old daughter and a bystander into custody. The story appeared on the Mother Jones website.
It’s ugly. It’s chilling. It’s frightening. And unless you don’t have a pulse it should make you pause and think about what’s coming if the corrupt Trump administration continues its push to take rights like due process away from its targets.
From Shaner:
I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby. Wordless screams.
And then I see the mother, a young woman in a green shirt, wailing, crying, held on either side by menacing white men in tactical vests, black neck warmers pulled over their noses in the style du jour for our secret police forces.
Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through.
The foundation that allows this level of stormtrooper-type bullying is the hatred of immigrants that Republicans and their right-wing echo chamber have been building up for years. They’ve portrayed immigrants not as people seeking a better way of life for them and their families, but instead as dangerous invaders.
Forget the fact that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than Americans, and that illegal immigrants commit them at a lower rate than legal ones. That doesn’t fit the narrative. The narrative that allows this level of government-sanctioned cruelty. The narrative that allows these kinds of scenes to play out across our country.
More from Shaner:
As they’re marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She’s screaming. “You are cowards.” She’s jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. “This is an innocent woman.”
An ICE agent opens the door and the woman’s daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl…it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to. The rules.
A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter’s baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says -- to her -- “Stop, stop, stop. They’ll explain. They’ll explain.”
Of course they don’t explain.
If you’ve ever wondered why so many people vote against their best interests and put so many Republicans – unabashedly pro-rich and anti-poor-and-middle-class – into office, this is one of the reasons. This is one of the culture wars that are part of the ultimate clash of the rich against the rest of us.
The right has cultivated a fear of immigrants. They’re “the other.” They’re here illegally – an understandable concern but one that doesn’t rise to the fever pitch of hate they’ve worked so hard to establish. They’re taking things from you – if they don’t kill you or rape your wife or daughter first – they exclaim.
Forget the fact that illegal immigrants aren’t allowed to take part in most federal public benefit programs. That more than 8 million U.S. workers were undocumented immigrants in 2022. That undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes that same year. That six states raised more than $1 billion each in tax revenues from undocumented immigrants.
Or the one that always gets me: In 40 states undocumented immigrants pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households living there.
More from Shaner:
The woman’s daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.
The crowd chants, “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.
A CBP agent, his face cover falling down slightly below his nose, pushes a woman away from the car in the manner of an offensive tackle -- elbows out, knees bent, forearms thrusting. Others take the woman’s place.
“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.
A woman says, “They don’t have a warrant.” Another says, “They’re trying to kidnap someone.”
In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says “Do you want to stay with your baby?” The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain “She’s putting the baby in harm’s way.” A classic move: “harm” goes undefined because the harm is him.
The woman’s daughter is 16 years old. What do you think would happen if a white girl – particularly a rich white girl -- hysterical over the arrest of her white mother, had acted this way? Would federal agents and the police have treated her the way they did this poor migrant girl?
They can do this because in the eyes of the federal government immigrants aren’t human. Remember, the president himself called them “vermin.” He said they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He gave us permission to hate them. To see them as some kind of sub-human threat to our nation and to us personally.
So, anything goes. Anything.
More from Shaner:
As the car pulls away, nudging into the thick crowd, the daughter shrieks another horrible horrible horrible shriek, communicating the non-communicable as the disappearers take another step toward disappearing her mother. As the car breaks from the crowd she runs after it. A Worcester police officer, his voice frothing with anger, shouts, “Arrest her right now. You are under arrest.” And then four cops swarm her, grab her, throw her to the ground. All the while she’s crying crying crying. Her hair’s caught in her mouth and matted to her face, wet with spit and tears. Four cops hold her pinned to the ground.
Then they march her away. Her and another member of the community who had tried to intervene. They take the pair away from the crowd. I follow. They have the daughter by both arms, same as the ICE agents had her mother. I still don’t know either of their names. Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.
Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl. Now in custody for the crime of reacting in an unruly way to the sudden forceful disappearance of her mother.
You can read Shaner’s report here.
***
Let’s go back to our question: What happens when someone gets killed?
What happens when the number of people intervening in the arrest are enough to overwhelm the agents and police? Will shots be fired? By who? After all, we’re a country loaded with guns on both sides of the political spectrum.
What happens when masked men enter a restaurant, grab a woman who’s quietly eating her dinner, and, without saying who they are or what their purpose is, start dragging her away. Is she being legally arrested? Is this a kidnapping? Should someone try to stop them and save this woman?
In North Carolina, a man was arrested for allegedly impersonating an ICE office and threatening to deport a woman if she didn’t have sex with him. Expect stories of these copy-cat actors to increase.
After all, if you and your buddies hate immigrants what could be more fun than dressing like federal agents, grabbing one, taking him to some secluded place, and beating him to death.
What happens if someone gets killed? We do know for sure that if an immigrant or bystander dies the federal government will take no responsibility. They’ll blame the victim, or the crowd, or Joe Biden. Anyone they can think of.
But, if a federal agent or police officer dies, look out. This president is just itching to declare martial law. He’s just dying to invoke the insurrection act and send out the military against whoever he pleases. Will that give him the excuse he’s been waiting for?
We have immigration issues in the country, but immigration enforcement done through force, intimidation, and the ignoring of our constitutional rights is a powder keg ready to explode.
And you’re a fool if you don’t think allowing these tactics on illegal immigrants doesn’t enhance the possibility that they’ll be used on legal immigrants – which they already have – and American citizens.
Even fascist dictatorships need to take baby steps sometimes.
What do we do if someone gets killed? Think about it because that can be either the first step to a change to a better direction, an ineffectual act on the status quo, or a tragedy that leads us significantly closer to a hellscape in this country from which there’ll be no easy escape.
***
Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Also, please check out our newsletter: Musings of a Nobody — The Newsletter and our video blog: Musings of a Nobody — The Podcast. Please share and subscribe for free to all or some if you’d like.
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