The People's Forum: Trump's secret police, in context
Jade argues that state terrorism is a bipartisan project. DM the People's Liberation Front to contribute to an op-ed!
In the past couple of months, Trump has taken yet another step towards fascist repression with his own Gestapo-styled secret police force. This force, led by acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf, has beaten protestors and journalists and abducted them into unmarked vehicles. Chad Wolf has described these actions as “proactive arrests." In other words, the crime the protestors are committing is showing the slightest amount of discontent with the racist, classist power structure in our society.
Although news coverage has died down as their presence deescalated in Portland, DHS agents are still acting as Trump’s personal fascist stormtroopers. For example, it was this force that recently murdered Michael Forest Reinoehl while trying to arrest him after Reinoehl had shot a patriot prayer member at a Portland protest. Eyewitness accounts of the police shooting relay that Reinoehl was chewing a gummy worm and walking to his car at the time of his murder, not showing any sign of resistence.
Image description: Four Department of Homeland Security officers in full military- style gear are standing in a haze of tear gas, with debris littering the ground.Source: The Intercept]
Wolf also announced DHS agents' deployment to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to suppress uprisings over the police attempted murder of Jacob Blake. As opposed to the more publicized role as shock troops during protests, it seems Trump will now mainly be using federal forces as a slow-burning, occupying army to “crack down on crime.” This abuse of power is absolutely sickening, but, in CrimethInc's words,
“We should take care not to treat the intervention of federal agents as exceptional; it is just the latest chapter in a story involving state repression at every level.”
It should be noted that the secret police are largely made up of the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS was founded in the paranoid wake of 9/11, which justified Amerikan terror across the globe, and now we’re seeing Amerika’s fascistic violence focus back on its own populace. Previously, the media would justify drone strikes and invasion by portraying entire countries as full of extremists, terrorists, and fundamentalists. Now, much of the same media apparatus is labelling protestors as extremists, terrorists, and anarchists.
This is a great example of the imperialist boomerang, the process through which repressive colonial tactics are eventually used to enforce rule back in the imperial homeland. Along those lines, Customs and Border Protection has extended its reach further and further inland, in order to combat faceless undocumented enemies. Now incorporated into DHS, CBP can now legally operate in a city far from any border.
Of course, opaque federal agencies like these are just one tool in the toolbox of Amerikan repression. The pretense for their deployment in Portland was that the Portland police, who’ve been tear gassing, mass arresting, and otherwise brutally crushing protestors for weeks, simply weren’t being violent enough. As we have all probably seen, this pattern of violence is ubiquitous in all of Amerika. Repression of workers and people of color always begins at the local level, with the federal government only stepping in if local police can’t generate enough force and violence on their own. It can even be argued that more violent repression serves to make citizens grateful when they're crushed with more care by the normal police.
Here in Houston, although HPD Chief Acevedo is portrayed by the media as a kind-hearted, compassionate reformer, police turned on protestors, mass arresting them while giving them no opportunity to leave, mere hours after Acevedo posed for cameras while marching with protestors during recent BLM protests. The HPD was also responsible for 6 police shootings in 6 weeks earlier in 2020, as well as thousands of arrests for nonviolent offenses within the same time frame. We easily lose sight of this run-of-the-mill state violence when we contrast it with the federal abductions.
These tactics of repression have been used in one form or another for longer than any of us have been alive. Chad Wolf’s usage of the term “violent anarchist” 72 times in a single speech mirrors state repression of socialists and anarchists starting well over a century ago, stemming from the labor movement. This can perhaps best be seen in the Haymarket affair, in which police used violent force against a large crowd of peaceful striking workers resulting in the deaths of several and arrests and injuries of many more. The police justified this after a single unidentified person, often now considered to have been an agent provocateur for the police, threw dynamite at the police.
Despite later investigations exhonerating the eight anarchists arrested, five of them still ended up dying in prison. The labor movement was denounced as a hive of terrorists and anarchists. State violence like this continued for decades against labor activists, anarchists, and socialists, with many police forces of the north growing out of the need to suppress the labor movement.
Movement after movement have been met with police batons. Practically every major Black political leader of the 1960s and 1970s was targeted by the state through intimidation, infiltration, false arrest, personal sabotage, or assassination. An entire generation of Black activists and leaders was swallowed up by the state during this period, where many of today's police tactics were first developed. Much of this violence was a part of COINTELPRO, a series of violent and largely illegal FBI operations designed to infiltrate, incarcerate, and surveil various left wing, Black and brown individuals and organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, to disrupt any chance of fundamental change to the system.
The program used variously nefarious tactics, such as withholding or fabricating evidence in court cases, harassment, entrapment, and outright murder. It should also be noted that for most of the program’s official history, JFK and LBJ, two supposed progressive presidents, were in office. State terrorism is a bipartisan project. Trump’s secret police can easily be seen as a direct evolution of these tactics in a more visible form,designed to strike fear into the populace as much as it is to stop unrest directly.
Entire books have been written about Amerikan state terror. This article isn’t meant to minimize how despicable this newest development is, but to illustrate its broader context and place in history. To stand up to fascism, we can’t just oppose Trump’s secret police, but all of the police and tools used by state and capital to control the people. It must be recognized that these problems go far beyond just one figure or one event and into the core of the white supremacist, capitalist system that our country's authority, wealth, and global hegemony are founded upon.