Yo, Dems: You can’t ‘reform’ fascism | Will Bunch Newsletter

On Monday, America — some of it, anyway — paused to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 97 this month. In one sense, there’s never been a rougher time for the legacy of the slain civil rights icon, with the Supreme Court perhaps poised to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a president who barely acknowledged the holiday. But thousands of everyday Americans now resisting ICE are channeling the spirit of the man who said “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Happy belated birthday, Dr. King.

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Imagine this...and if you watch the daily stream of videos coming from the ICE raids that have roiled Minnesota since the start of the new year, it’s not that hard to imagine.

You’re minding your own business, or maybe picking up your kid at their school, when suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a platoon of masked, armed, camouflaged government agents. One thing leads to another, and in a flash an agent has wrestled you to the ground, and is brandishing a weapon — maybe a taser...if you’re lucky.

But what if I told you that lawmakers on Capitol Hill have a solution. They are proposing a brave new world where now — flat on your back and gasping for air, and perhaps able to bravely manage to free your phone from your pocket — you could scan a federally-mandated QR code on the agent’s uniform and find out the identity of the man who is currently pummeling you to within an inch of your life.

You’re probably thinking the same thing that I did when I read about New York Rep. Ritchie Torres’ new bill he called the Quick Recognition (get it?) Act, which is his big idea for how Democrats can respond to public anger over the murder of Minneapolis mom Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and the raids that have led to violent encounters and made a major U.S. metropolis look and feel like a war zone.

A four-word sentence that begins with, “What the actual...?”

“There is nothing the Trump administration fears more than transparency and accountability,” a spokesman for Torres, who faces a primary challenge in part because of his outspoken views on Gaza, said recently.

Really? Is that true? Because everything I’ve seen is that Donald Trump is mainly terrified about a GOP bloodbath in the November midterms, which would surely lead to his impeachment, his eventual disgrace, and even a shot at the real accountability that takes place only behind prison bars. But that’s not going to happen unless Democrats can convince those midterm voters they are serious about dismantling the rotten system that murdered Good — so that there are no bad guys left to scan.

It’s tempting to write off Torres’ idea as one stray piece of almost comically misguided legislation. But the truth is that his core idea — that what’s evolved during the Trump era into an American secret police force that folks like Joe Rogan and Bruce Springsteen are openly calling “the Gestapo” can be tweaked into something great — is endorsed by Democratic leaders on Congress and many rank-and-file members.

“Clearly, significant reform needs to take place as it relates to the manner in which ICE is conducting itself,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told MS Now, bloodlessly. “ICE is using taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens and to unnecessarily and viciously target law-abiding immigrant families and communities.”

So you’re going to halt the flow of those taxpayer dollars, right?

Right?

Actually, many key Democrats — facing a Jan. 30 deadline for new appropriation bills — say they are willing to keep the dollars flowing to the embattled and increasingly unpopular agency, but with hopes of leveraging the Minneapolis controversy in return for major reforms. Sen. Chris Murphy, who has been a leading critic of the Trump regime, has suggested banning masks, mandating badges, requiring warrants to make an arrest, and returning Border Patrol officers back to the border.

Most critics of ICE, the Border Patrol, and any other immigration raiders under the Department of Homeland Security would agree that all of those things should have happened yesterday. But the lack of appetite for utterly dismantling the DHS regime — despite its culture of violence and disrespect for law-abiding refugees — reminds too many voters of the cowardice that branded the Dems as losers in the first place.

Progressive attorney Aaron Regunberg mocked the stance of some mainstream Democrats as: “We are the resistance. We are also negotiating furiously to figure out how to fully fund the Gestapo.” He’s right. Under Trump, with recruitment ads inspired by white nationalist memes, ICE has become a tool of a new American fascism.

You don’t “significantly reform” fascism. You need to crush it. As Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the history of concentration camps, noted Monday night: “The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.”

It’s telling that — as often is the case — everyday people are way out in front of the supposedly opposition Democrats. The latest polls show that a strong majority of Americans oppose Trump’s immigration policies — with just 38% approving of them in a new AP-NORC poll, down sharply — and that, for the first time, a plurality would like to see ICE (which has only existed since 2003) eliminated. No wonder the number of Americans who now identify as liberal — 28% — is the highest since Gallup began asking in the early 1990s.

And yes, more Democratic officials are starting to get it than ever before. More than 100 members of the House Progressive Caucus said last week they won’t vote for any budget bill with additional funding for the immigration-raid agencies without an end to their militarized policing. Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, who seemed to tack right on immigration issues in winning a close election in 2024, surprised political observers when he declared this weekend in a CNN interview that “I think ICE needs to be totally torn down.”

Note that he didn’t say “abolish” — a word that causes Democrats to break out in hives. That’s OK. Call it a teardown, or a demolition, but every day, more Americans can see that the United States would function better without ICE — as it did the first 227 years of its history — and with the work that’s actually needed, like arresting the sliver of immigrants who really are violent criminals, given to all new people.

The problem is that Democratic fecklessness isn’t limited to just the future of ICE. Our European allies are disappointed that the opposition party isn’t out manning the barricades and calling for much more forceful action to curb Trump’s bat-guano crazy demand for Greenland, apparently because he feels slighted by not getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And sure, Americans want lower coffee prices, but they care more about not having Captain Queeg with the nuclear football.

Dismantling the ICE regime needs to be the floor, not the ceiling, and any Democrat in Congress who doesn’t get with the program can — and should — be replaced in the primaries to avoided another debacle with alienated or apathetic voters in November. Call your member and find out where they stand. You won’t even need a QR code.

Question: One question that is top of my mind is “does this week feel like a tipping point?” Can’t shake the feeling that it is. — Marguerite Fahey (@margueritefahey@bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Marguerite, I got several variations of your question, so this is definitely on the minds of folks. But while Trump’s bizarre actions surrounding Greenland have raised questions about the president’s fitness to hold office on a level we’ve never seen before, including Watergate, it is less clear what affirmative actions can take place. It’s impossible to imagine the lackeys in Trump’s cabinet like Kristi Noem ever greenlighting the 25th Amendment, let alone the 20 GOP Senate votes that would be required to remove the president in an impeachment. An increasingly likely possibility is high-ranking generals refusing a Trump order to send troops to Greenland or Minnesota. Yes, it has come to this.

Sometimes readers of this newsletter still surprise me. While most of you are righteously appalled at the immigration-raid abuses in Minnesota and elsewhere, many still want to see major reforms at ICE and its sister agencies rather than abolishing them altogether. “ICE doesn’t need to be abolished,” Ed Truncale wrote. “ICE is like a child that has lost their way and needs to be disciplined, re-directed.” Cathie Cush agreed. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable with ‘Demilitarize ICE’ and ‘Demilitarize the police,’” she wrote. “And make them accountable. And reduce their ranks.”

📮 This week’s question: Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive demands for Greenland have not only threatened the post-World War II global order but raised legitimate mental-health questions about the commander of the world’s largest military. But how can Europe, Democrats, and any remaining sane Republicans respond to this? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Greenland response” in the subject line.

A long time ago on the other side of the world began what would become a fraught relationship between the Hmong tribal people of northern Laos and the United States, as represented by the CIA. At the dawn of the 1960s, American spies recruited the Hmong to fight Communism in their homeland and neighboring Vietnam, which proved a disastrous bet. Thousands died in the next 13 years of combat in Southeast Asia, and more would perish when the Communists took over Laos in 1975, while others dodged bullets swimming the Mekong River toward overcrowded refugee camps in Thailand.

Fifty years ago, the United States was led by people who at least understood our deep debt to the Hmong, forged in blood. Thousands who’d escaped the slaughter were eventually resettled in the United States, and Minnesota — aided by Lutherans and other religious charities and good public housing, and despite its frigid weather — became an unlikely magnet. Today, a population of 94,000 people, with a slightly higher average salary than the state as a whole, and including the mayor of St. Paul, the state capital, make Minnesota home to the largest U.S. Hmong population.

It’s an immigration success story that makes the events of recent days beyond baffling. In one Minneapolis neighborhood this weekend, a witness reported that roving ICE agents that have flooded the metropolis pulled over a car and asked the driver, “Where the Hmongs at?” The St. Paul mayor, Kaohly Her, said “we’ve received reports of ICE officers going door to door asking where the Asian people live… I myself have received advice to carry my passport with me because they may target me based on what I look like.”

On Sunday, federal agents broke down the front door of a St. Paul home and took away ChongLy Scott Thao, also known as Saly, a Hmong-American who was born in a Laotian refugee camp but is a U.S. citizen after living most of his life here. A photo of the man being led out of the house — wearing only boxer shorts and Crocs on a bitterly cold day, a plaid blanket hastily thrown over his exposed torso — went viral on social media. Family members said ICE agents drove Thao around for an hour while they questioned him, but brought him back home when they realized that he was a naturalized citizen with no criminal record, Still, the episode was traumatizing, and epitomized the big question hanging over all of this.

What is this even for? ICE’s harsh and disruptive focus on the Hmong people of Minnesota — people who were brought here because of their support for America in wartime, with the encouragement of the federal government as well as their new prairie neighbors — makes absolutely no sense. A people who suffered in their homeland for their ties to the United States are now facing new torment in their adoptive land — judged not for the content of their character but for the color of their skin. This is a new, shameful moment in American history.

Looking back at the dawn of what’s proved to be a painful decade for America can be difficult. Tuesday is the fifth anniversary of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president, and like most Americans, I had thoughts and prayers that the deep stain of Donald Trump’s lawbreaking first term could be erased. On Jan. 20, 2021, I predicted we’d understand “this nation will not have peace without justice. That empathy is empty without accountability. And that American carnage cannot be healed until we can handle the truth.” Yeah, how did that work out? Read the rest: “After four years of ‘American carnage,’ President Joe Biden gets it: Truth must come before healing.”

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