There’s something uncomfortably familiar about President Donald Trump’s jackboot approach to the immigration debate.
It brings to mind a memorable off-the-cuff stumble by Chicago’s legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley when he was asked about allegations of excessive force by city police officers.
“The policeman isn’t there to create disorder,” he said. “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Say, what?
Well, as Earl Bush, the mayor’s press secretary for 18 years, memorably advised reporters on another occasion, “Don’t write what the mayor says; write what he means.”
A variant of that advice resurfaced in 2016, when Donald Trump, a candidate known for shocking, even extreme, rhetoric started seeming to be the likely next president. Here’s how it was phrased this time: Take Trump seriously, not literally.
This was repeated by journalists and advisers, among others. And in retrospect, we should have been taking Trump more seriously — as well as literally. Especially as he taunted the press as “fake news,” and as he urged supporters to get violent with protesters who showed up at his campaign events. “Knock the crap out of ’em,” he said at an Iowa rally. “I promise you, I’ll pay for the legal fees.”
Barely into his first administration, Trump began referring to the media as the opposition party and the “enemy of the American people.” Meanwhile, fact-checking the president became a preoccupation of major media outlets, leading one deep thinker of the Fourth Estate to use the term “Trump’s Firehose of Falsehood.”
By the end of his first, chaotic term, Trump’s messages on Twitter became so out of bounds that the social media platform censored him. After losing the 2020 election, he launched a failed legal campaign to overturn it and exhorted his followers to “Stop the Steal.” After thousands of those followers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, even many Republicans were ready to be through with Trump’s chaos.
Yet now we find ourselves back in it. Those on the ground in areas where Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Border Patrol agents mount their raids describe feelings of terror. People shelter in their homes and avoid public places — even those who are in this country legally.
The feeling for the rest of us is disorientation. Why is this happening? Indeed, what is happening?
The jackboots are only part of the chaos, of course. Another key element is the Trump administration’s communications strategy, which really should be termed an information war.
Early on in the Department of Homeland Security’s operations, ICE and the Border Patrol made all sorts of perp walks into videos and memes optimized for social media. As violence escalated, a sort of disinformation pattern became established. An administration official would make a claim about what happened, and later evidence would find these contentions to be misleading.
A shifting series of explanations would be provided for the missions or individual incidents, with no apparent urgency to be accurate or consistent. As litigation commenced and DHS officials were called to testify, judges became frustrated at the rampant false testimony and disobedience of the government.
To many Americans, it seems as if the various authorities of DHS and the Justice Department can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. And that is terrifying.
To take this back to Daley for a moment, after the “police riot,” as the chaos on the streets in 1968 was labeled by a special investigative commission later, governors, big city mayors, police chiefs and community leaders learned a lot and took to heart the need to reform.
Police departments and academies have set clear rules about use of force and other issues. Courts have done a decent job of enforcing them.
By contrast, the immigration agents Trump has unleashed on select American cities have invited more disasters because they do not seem bound by such protocols.
In Minneapolis, we see a large-scale escalation over earlier operations in Chicago, New York, Washington and other cities. A truckload of video has been generated showing roving squads of masked federal agents in military gear snatching people out of cars, releasing canisters of tear gas into crowds and visibly ignoring basic human rights as they target Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali, Latino and other minority communities.
It’s possible there would be much more widespread support for Trump’s immigration crackdown if it corresponded more closely to the stated aim of taking violent criminals off the street.
Unfortunately, that correspondence is wholly lacking. We see violence. We read deeply reported accounts and find credible evidence that constitutional rights are being violated. And we also hear lies.
On Thursday, border czar Tom Homan seemed to suggest that a drawdown of the ICE-Border Patrol operation in Minnesota was imminent. That would be a blessing, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, expect the information war to continue.
Email Clarence Page at cptimee@gmail.com.
Sign up to receive Clarence Page’s column in your inbox each week.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/QS66D7MILKXEUI6PB4D6GTD24M.jpg)
