Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
There was sheer terror and panic in the voice of the sobbing woman who dialed 911 in Chicago on the afternoon of Oct. 4. It was a day of utter chaos along Kedzie Street in a heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s South Side, as federal agents led by ICE brutally arrested brown-skinned residents and clashed with a growing group of protesters. The woman told the 911 dispatcher that the federal agents swarming her block had just slammed a man to the ground in front of her, according to a recording from the city’s emergency dispatch center obtained by the Talking Points Memo site. “The agents started beating him up,” the unidentified caller said. “They have rifles and they’re pointing it at people.” She added that the man who was getting pummeled was unarmed, then said: “We have rights, we’re citizens here, please help us.” If you’ve been following the news out of Chicago this fall, you know that this 911 call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Department announced “Operation Midway Blitz” in the nation’s third-largest city, boosted by a Trump-posted meme promising a hellish “Chipocalypse Now.” And America has watched with shock and awe as ICE and Border Patrol agents have racially profiled and body-slammed Latinos, fired tear gas and painful pepper balls at pastors, journalists and peaceful protesters, and indicted anyone who stands in their way, even a candidate for Congress. Now there are powerful signals that this it-can’t-happen-here surge of masked and heavily armed state terror that has turned life in Chicago upside down is coming to Philadelphia — and at least a half-dozen other major U.S. cities — very soon. Multiple news outlets, beginning with the conservative (and thus plugged into Trump’s MAGA movement) Washington Examiner, have reported that Philadelphia’s acting local chief of ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has been forced out. It’s one piece of a nationwide shakeout seeking to amp up raids toward Trump’s mass-deportation goal of a million arrests and expulsions this year. The sweeping purge which, according to the reports, will include the replacement of Brian McShane, Philly’s acting field office head, and ICE leaders in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego. In Philadelphia, the new boss is expected to be an unnamed officer from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, but in the other cities the new leaders reportedly come from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, which hints at the new direction. Homeland Security hasn’t officially announced the shakeup and it appears the changes aren’t all finalized, but the wide scope of the makeover has been confirmed by the Associated Press, CNN, and others. It’s easy to dismiss the changes as bureaucratic inside baseball, a rearranging of the deck chairs on the U-Boat. And there is rumored to be an element of that, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her uncomfortably close aide Corey Lewandowski essentially doing a coup against White House border czar Tom Homan, seen by the Noem faction as a veteran whose old-school approach is too by-the-book. But the ICE shakeup has major implications for daily life in Philadelphia and the other affected cities, because what this coup really signals is the impending arrival of the violent mass-deportation approach that’s been battle-tested on the streets of Chicago. More racial profiling of the Latino community, more raids in public places like Home Depot parking lots, and a lot more arrests. Which also likely means more protests and thus more tear gas, more pepper balls, and more assaults on the First Amendment, even here in the city where the U.S. Constitution was written up. I spoke Wednesday with Jenn Budd, who served for a time as a Border Patrol officer before becoming a prominent whistleblower and immigration rights advocate. She told me that the shakeup’s elevation of Border Patrol officials — with an anything-goes approach forged in “the Wild West” of the sweltering borderlands with Mexico — over ICE veterans will enshrine the Chicago tactics that abuse human rights. “I expect the violence to drastically increase,” Budd said. She noted the history of close ties between Trump and the union of Border Patrol officers, which endorsed him as an outsider in 2016 and in every election since, and their shared vision that migration from Central and South America has been “an invasion.” Budd also said the rough-and-tumble border is where the Chicago-style tactics were born. “[Border Patrol] is the ripping families apart, high-speed chases, the lethal terrain,” said Budd, who worked near the border in San Diego during her fraught years as an officer. “It is the law enforcement of the Wild West.” » READ MORE: Trump wants to make war on Chicago. He picked the wrong fight. | Will Bunch Insiders are also saying the changes reflect a behind-the-scenes tension between ICE — which, despite its reputation as the ugly masked face of deportation, is rooted in a slower-paced targeting of known criminals — and the aggressive Border Patrol tactics that are relished by Trump insiders like Stephen Miller, the point man on deportation. The Examiner and other outlets have reported that the dream of the hardcore Noem-Lewandowski-Miller faction is more local leaders in the mold of Greg Bovino, the flamboyantly arrogant and outspoken Border Patrol chief of a California region. Homeland Security dispatched Bovino to its highest-profile hot spots — first Los Angeles and now Chicago, where he has led federal agents on marches through Latino business districts. On Tuesday, Bovino was hauled before Chicago’s U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis, who upbraided the operation commander for tactics that included lobbing tear gas into a North Side neighborhood as kids were heading to a community Halloween celebration. The judge gave Bovino a lecture on the fundamental First Amendment right of dissent. “They can say they don’t like what you’re doing, that they don’t like how you’re enforcing the laws, that they wish you would leave Chicago and take the agents with you,” Ellis said. “They can say that, and that’s fine. But they can’t get teargassed for it.” Needless to say, the Trump regime is in no way embarrassed by this echo of what the late U.S. Sen. Abraham Ribicoff famously described — after a different kind of “police riot” in 1968 — as “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” No, their goal is to dispatch a whole army of Bovinos to command various Fort Apaches in Democratic-run cities. The headlines call them “ICE raids,” but many of the most shockingly aggressive mass-deportation tactics — including the dead-of-night helicopter raid on a South Side Chicago apartment building in which children were zip-tied and units trashed — were led and largely staffed by Customs and Border Patrol. (And, yes, Philadelphia at roughly 60-65 miles from the Atlantic Ocean is well within “the extended border zone” where Border Patrol agents can operate.) Wrote the increasingly must-read Garrett M. Graff: “In the race to become America’s secret police and Trump’s goon-squad-of-choice, CBP’s military-style tactics on our streets appears to be winning — laws be damned." This may sound shocking for Americans already appalled by the nightly videos of masked men violently slamming food vendors or day laborers onto hard asphalt or peaceful protesters pockmarked by pepper balls or gasping from tear gas, but things could get much, much worse under these new battle-ready commanders. You’ve probably had your Sunday escape of televised pro football interrupted by recruitment ads for new ICE officers as Homeland Security struggles to find barely qualified people to fill the 10,000 new slots authorized by the same Congress that won’t fund your health care. Awaiting these amped-up federal goon squads, the government has enlisted the Pentagon to build out “the camps” to detain as many as 100,000 human beings. This only happens with more “Kavanaugh stops” — more law-abiding folks in Philadelphia or elsewhere getting hassled and maybe arrested simply for having brown skin or for speaking Spanish. People, get ready. Buy whistles or tune your car horn so you can alert your neighbors when ICE agents are spotted overrunning our neighborhoods. If you’re white and privileged and outraged at what the government is doing to our brown and Black brothers and sisters, consider connecting with groups like the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia or Juntos that are organizing rapid-response teams to protest immigration raids when they happen. The majority of Americans born after 1955 have lived a life of relative calm, but — at the risk of repeating a cliché that has become deeply meaningful — whatever you think you might have done to stop the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s or support civil rights marchers in the 1960s is what you are doing right now. Philly “attytood” is needed more than ever, because our time for choosing is at hand.
