By CHRIS POWELL
If the country is in big trouble, it’s not just because the president pretends he has authority to wage war wherever he wants. It’s also because the country is full of people who are striving to obstruct immigration law enforcement, full of people who hallucinate that the government is getting ready to kill them, and full of elected officials who pander to both groups.
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Among those officials now is Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, who last week blamed the president and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the conflict that occurred during a protest outside the federal building in Hartford, where ICE has an office.
Some protesters went behind the building and blocked the garage exit as two vehicles, presumably operated by ICE agents, were leaving. Video shows at least one protester in front of and leaning on an exiting car. Witnesses say someone, presumably an ICE agent, pepper-sprayed the blockaders and then the two cars made their way out by pushing through the mob, with a protester being knocked over but not injured.
The incident was the protesters’ fault, not ICE’s, just as the fatal incident in Minneapolis last week was caused by people who also set out to impede an enforcement operation.
At a press conference the day after the Hartford incident, Mayor Arulampalam called it “the direct result of the lawlessness and recklessness of the Trump administration.” Oh, sure — Trump and ICE made those protesters block the garage, and the ICE agents were wrong to try the clear the exit so they could do their work, though they are federal police officers just like FBI agents and impeding them is a federal felony.
With the mayor declaring that the work of the immigration agents is illegitimate, more criminal interference with ICE may be expected in Connecticut, at least until the FBI and local police make some arrests.
This doesn’t mean that the fatal shooting of the protester by the ICE agent in Minneapolis was justified, though it may have been. It means that she and her friends were not just protesting peacefully but seeking confrontation and interfering, just like the protesters at the Hartford federal building garage.
This distinction was lost on the people who held other protests in Connecticut last weekend — and lost on the journalists who interviewed them without posing critical questions.
A protester from Fairfield said, “It feels like it could happen to anyone now,” though “it” doesn’t seem to have happened to anyone not impeding or caught up in an ICE enforcement operation.
A protester from Stratford concurred, saying, “I don’t know who among us is safe,” though no one at her protest was attacked either.
Critical questions being out of fashion in journalism in Connecticut, no one seems to have asked the protesters just what, if anything, should be done about the illegal immigration that has overwhelmed the country. But questions should have been prompted by the signs the protesters carried, which called for ICE to be abolished or banished from Connecticut.
So should there be no immigration law enforcement?
That’s the implication of the slogan on many other protest signs: “No human is illegal.” But that’s a straw man; no one has made such a silly claim. What’s illegal is the presence in the country of people who have not been properly admitted after a background check. The sanctimony of this slogan seems to advocate a return to open borders.
ICE needs closer supervision and Congress should require it. As with regular police officers, agents making arrests should always be identified by badges and name tags and should not be masked. As with ordinary arrests, detainees should be promptly identified on public registers so press and public can keep track of them.
But as with regular police officers, ICE agents may be more sinned against than sinning, as they are sometimes assaulted by their desperate targets and protesters. People who impede them are insurrectionists as much as the January 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol were.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 