#padilla

Is shocking.

Jesse Duquette

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 20, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.

Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”

Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.

On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.

Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.

The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.

U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”

But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.

President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.

Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration's deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.

Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.

There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”

Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.

This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.

So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.

There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration's defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.

On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”

“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”

But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”

Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.

The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

A/N: This is my first 13 r w fanfic, so please be nice!

“Hey, chica, ¿qué está en tu cabeza?” Tony asked as he sat down next to you on one of the couches in his workshop. You stopped by after school without saying much. You just walked in and sat down, staring off into space. Tony had tried to start a conversation with you when you arrived but you offered nothing more than a few shrugs and hums in acknowledgement.

You shrugged at his question. “No mucho.” You didn’t know much Spanish, but Tony knew how much you loved to speak what little Spanish that you did know. “Estoy cansada.”

“Lo siento,” Tony responded, tossing an arm around your shoulders gently. “But I don’t believe you. What’s wrong? How did that anatomy exam go? The tornado drill interrupted it, right?”

There had been an emergency tornado drill and you were in the middle of an anatomy lab practical when it happened. Tony knew you were already on the verge of a panic attack before you entered the classroom. Having spent lunch attempting to calm you down. He promised to meet up with you after class but the tornado went into your final class and he wasn’t able to see you until now. You wished you could have seen him sooner. You were a hair away from a full-blown panic attack, and his question seemed to be the one to push you over the edge.

You pulled your knees to your chest, suddenly struggling to breathe. You choked on a sob as Tony leaned over to see if you were ok. “Gatito?” His arm around your shoulders moved to rub the back of your neck as you stopped breathing properly. “Hey, it’s ok.” When you didn’t respond to him, he grew even more worried. “Let’s get you somewhere quieter. Can you walk?” You shook your head, hiding it between your knees. Tony stood and gently picked you up. “Alright, that’s ok.” His hand guided your head to bury into his shirt. “Javi, ¡voy fuera!” he yelled, then apologized when you flinched in his arms.

Tony carried you outside and sat you down behind the garage. He let you down gently before kneeling in front of you. “Gatito, I need you to breathe.” He placed a hand on the back of your neck again. “I think it’d be easier if you’d uncurl a bit,” Tony suggested. You shook your head again and whimpered.

“Tony,” you whimpered.

His eyes jumped to yours immediately. “I’m right here,” he assured.

“I-I’m scared,” you confessed.

Tony sat down beside you and held out his hand. “There’s no need to be scared. Here, hold my hand.” You reached out a hesitant hand to meet his own. Squeezing it, you pulled it closer to your chest. Your breathing was still quick and uneven.

“Breathe with me, Y/N,” Tony instructed. “Ok? In.” He took a deep breath in, and waited for you to do the same. He smiled as he exhaled, watching as you followed his pattern. He breathed with you a few more times before he was sure you were calmer.

“There you go. See, gatito, I said you’d be ok,” he chuckled, pulling you in for a hug. You made yourself comfortable on his side, still gripping one of his hands to your chest.

“Thank you Tony,” you said softly, playing with his fingers. “I’m sorry for freaking out. It’s just been a really bad day.”

“Don’t be sorry,” your friend said, pressing a quick kiss to the top of your head. “I get it. Take your time. Talk it out if you need to. You know I’m always here for you, right?”