The rise and fall of America's secret police, pt. 3 | Wallkill Valley Times

By Richard Phelps

Back in July of last summer, I wrote the first part of this series on the Rise and Fall of America’s Secret Police. Numerous people thanked me personally for speaking up on this issue, an issue that occupies a very dark, tenuous, shaky place in the American psyche. I wrote of the Republican’s funding of a secret police force with $170 billion dollars in the Big Beautiful Bill, a police force directed by an out of control, autocratic president, a man many close observers have now come to see as having lost his mind.

In America today, we have a police force which covers its face, hides its identity, refuses to give their badge number -- if they have one -- and has been trained that it has blanket immunity for its actions. Since my column, the country has witnessed the most unfortunate expressions of this unchecked, rapid hire, untrained bully force. The murders of otherwise gentle and conscientious protesters in Minneapolis shocked a confused and searching America. Renee Good was shot through the windshield and side window of her car as she, following contradictory orders by shouting agents, tried to leave the scene after saying to the man who moments later would shoot her four times, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.”

“F-ing bitch,” an agent yelled at her after she was shot. Agents then denied medical treatment to the dying woman. A doctor offered to helped stop the bleeding and check her pulse. Agents told him to get back and one agent said “I don’t care” that he was a doctor. Callous, cruel and criminal.

Please don’t try to tell me she was trying to hit the agent who killed her with her car, as that just means you have refused to see that the front wheels of her car were turned to the right of the agent who shot her, not at him, and that you don’t know he has a history of jumping in front of cars to give himself an excuse for the violent actions he’s about to commit.

Also in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti was shot in the back by the secret police as he tried to help up a woman shoved into the gutter by an angry, out-of-control, masked agent. Pretti was disarmed of a gun he had every right to possess, was not reaching for, and which presented federal agents no danger. He was shot in the back as he fell to the ground and then was shot up to ten more times while he was lying motionless in the street. Callous, untrained and criminal.

A year ago, next month, an American citizen was shot and killed by ICE in Texas. ICE’s involvement in the killing was covered up until recently. No one has seen any body camera footage of the shooting. ICE has called wolf too many times for their story to be believed without outside corroborating evidence.

The local news here in Orange County has been all abuzz with reports of Homeland Security opening a “detention” center in Chester. Local Republican politicians seem to oppose the detention center because it might impact wetlands, not because it is morally repugnant to build concentration camps, especially when the funding and prison profits go to friends of the president. Ninety percent of the people held in ICE detention centers are held in centers owned by private corporations. These companies spend millions lobbying Congress to continue funding these concentration camps. It is also interesting to note that the local Republicans coming out against an ICE detention center in Chester have remained moot on the 175 ICE detainees in the Orange County Jail. Between January and July last year, Orange County Jail took in 666 ICE detainees. The jail was paid $31,000.00 per detainee. The rest of the prison population costs $85,000.00 per person, back in 2019. Are the county taxpayers subsidizing ICE through the jail? Why is the County Executive opposed to an ICE facility at Chester but willingly accepting detainees at a loss to the county at the Goshen jail?

Who would have thought that it would be the secret, masked police force that successfully takes away our right to own and carry guns? “No peaceful protester with guns” said Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Who would have thought that our military would be ordered to kill unarmed survivors floating on flotsam in the sea? Who would have thought that our military would be ordered to murder without trial, without arrest, without warning, at least 148 people, so far, at sea? Who would have thought that respected members of the government, objecting to illegal orders and warning active service people to not carry out illegal orders, would be targeted by their own government and called traitors simply for reading the laws already on the books?

Who would have thought the secret police could enter our home without a warrant? Who would have thought that a vice president would be foolish enough to state that federal agents are “protected by absolute immunity”? Who would have thought that the Justice Department has buried investigations into these extrajudicial killings?

I’ll tell you who. Right here, this column.

I believe ICE should be defunded. The funding should be transferred to real police departments, to local police, to trained departments versed in the law, accountable to the public for their misjudgments, mistakes, or cruelty. And the rest of the ICE budget should go to refunding the Medicare cuts we are about to suffer nationwide after the next election, cuts that take place only AFTER the next election, if we have one. And, according to blowhard Bannon, the secret police will be outside every polling station asking for your “papers”. A new level of fascism is coming our way, slouching our way.