During the agents’ violent attack on a delivery worker Saturday morning in DC, bystanders repeatedly demanded the agents share their badge numbers. One of them—his face fully obscured by a black balaklava—eventually shot back, “Do I have to answer to you?”
“You guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” one bystander said to the agents at one point during the incident. An agent, ironically clad in a rainbow face mask, replied “Liberals already ruined it.”
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Last week on stage at the Netroots conference in New Orleans, I spoke with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-IL) about ICE: specifically that she believes it should be abolished. It’s a stance that’s considered far left, but after witnessing ICE and other federal agents in DC this week, abolishing ICE should be the baseline Democratic position.
“ICE is a terrorist organization,” Ramirez told me. “It needs to be defunded and needs to be abolished.”
Considering the mass surveillance well underway, the window to organize effectively has already closed. Doing so puts you in as much danger unmasking an agent and in this scenario they will just slap the terrorism label on it and that’s the end of the conversation.
It’s preferable to mass organize but it’s too late now. Keep fighting. We are going to lose but we are going to make this as difficult and expensive as possible anyway. They don’t get to be comfortable.
We’re not gonna lose, these fucks always fall apart sooner or later. Authoritarianism always falls.
Yes, it does, but only the survivors benefit from its collapse. What makes you so confident that you will survive when many others will not?