{"id":297583,"date":"2025-06-30T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=297583"},"modified":"2025-06-29T07:07:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T06:07:00","slug":"usa-ice-watch-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/06\/usa-ice-watch-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"USA: ICE-Watch Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A nationwide movement of neighborhood programs defending people and democracy.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are multiple videos appearing online of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-ICE agents claiming drivers have \u201cswerved\u201d toward them or have been \u201cfollowing\u201d them and therefore interfering with their policing operations. They have sometimes called the local police and insisted on an arrest or citation being given. It is important to record and document all such interactions because ICE is the vanguard of the emerging fascism in the US.<\/p>\n

Timothy Synder\u2019s small book On Tyranny<\/em> outlines 20 \u201clessons\u201d about how tyranny has arisen in the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries and how citizens must act to stop it. The first lesson is \u201cDo not obey in advance.\u201d\u00a0 Tyrants rise to absolute power because most people acquiesce without being forced to do so.\u00a0 Columbia University capitulated to Trump\u2019s attacks.\u00a0 Major law firms made humiliating deals with Trump without calling the bluff of his threats; major media organizations such as Paramount CBS and ABC News capitulated with the same cowardice. Corporations abandoned their DEI programs without question. We must not grovel in these ways before the plague of ICE.<\/p>\n

ICE directly represents the fast-rising fascist onslaught on the USA.\u00a0 The rise to power of every dictator requires an emergency, an emergency that is then extended into a permanent state of emergency in which the rule of law is swallowed up by the rule of arbitrary force\u2014spearheaded by the police and military.\u00a0 In Trump\u2019s rhetoric, the US is under an \u201cinvasion of rapists, murderers, and criminals who have been invited into our country by the Democrats\u201d\u2014an invasion that must be stopped by drastic and radical ICE-police action.<\/p>\n

In response to this fabricated emergency, an army of ICE agents is attacking the cities and states of our nation, creating social chaos and misery everywhere they appear.\u00a0 They are arresting or detaining people indiscriminately, including all those deemed to stand in the way of this onslaught, whether it is ordinary citizens who angrily honk at them from cars, or high officials such as California Senator Alex Padilla or New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.<\/p>\n

Their mission is to normalize a police state of emergency (through the false-flag of an immigration emergency) that legitimates extreme measures and unregulated police action. How they are recruited, oriented, or \u201ctrained\u201d remains a top secret of the federal government.\u00a0 Kristi Noem and other top officials refuse to affirm or deny whether violent criminal gangs such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers (pardoned for January 6 violent crimes by Trump) have been recruited for this paramilitary onslaught.<\/p>\n

In response to Brad Lander\u2019s arrest, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a declaration claiming he was arrested for “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer” (although videos of the event clearly show otherwise). The DHS statement concluded that: “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences”. These \u201cfederal officers\u201d that have flooded the cities and streets of the US are sometimes heavily armed and wearing combat clothing. They wear uniforms with no individual identifying marks. At other times, they wear civilian clothing with no way to distinguish them from ordinary hoodlums. They almost always wear masks to hide their identities.<\/p>\n

Concerned citizens are faced with a dilemma\u2014the dilemma of all civilized people when confronted by the rise of fascism and totalitarianism.\u00a0 These \u201cfederal police officers\u201d even when wearing a uniform, usually have no identifying marks on their clothing and are masked. Hence, they are \u201csecret police,\u201d bullies who claim authority to act without public accountability. Not only do they refuse to identify themselves, they normally refuse to show a warrant to justify their supposedly official actions. They have zero accountability to the communities where they are sowing chaos. These \u201csecret police\u201d arrest legal immigrants as well as US citizens through dragnet sweeps of places where they might find immigrants, while using racial profiling to target people. They are violating the ultimate law of the land, the Constitution, as well as state and local laws, all of which require due process and personal accountability to be followed in all police conduct.<\/p>\n

As Brad Lander told the press after his being manhandled and arrested by masked ICE agents, “We are not going to allow Donald Trump to wreck the rule of law, to deny people due process and to turn our country into something that doesn\u2019t meet its obligations under international law\u2026. We are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy, and we\u2019re not going to stand by and let it happen.”\u00a0 This underlines our dilemma: for ICE agents are \u201cwrecking the rule of law\u201d and \u201cnormalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy\u201d through the pretense that they are legitimate police who are enforcing the rule of law, as the DHS statement makes clear.\u00a0 However, they are not legitimate federal police or any other kind of police.\u00a0 They are criminals, thugs, and violators of the rule of law and need to be stopped. But how?<\/p>\n

Timothy Synder\u2019s sixth lesson on his book On Tyranny<\/em>, is \u201cbeware of paramilitaries.\u201d It is widely known that Donald Trump used the National Guard and the US Military as a false-flag to create a crisis in Los Angeles around the invasion of that city by an army of ICE-agents masked, lawless, and freely violating the laws and norms of Los Angeles and the State of California.\u00a0 Paramilitary forces not only show up in the form of armed civilian groups who then begin working with the police of some country to destroy democracy: in our case they have been created by the Trump administration in the form of the ICE-thugs to circumvent and subvert the official police in their lawless assault on the North American people under the cover of an immigration crisis.<\/p>\n

Citizens who want to restore our failing democracy must act immediately, forcefully, and non-violently.\u00a0 Synder\u2019s lesson 13 demands that we \u201cPractice Corporal Politics.\u201d He continues: \u201cProtest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo-Kings Day\u201d and its follow-up public actions are indeed essential. But we need so much more than this if the ICE vanguard of the fascist takeover is to be defeated.\u00a0 We need nation-wide neighborhood ICE-Watch Teams that will slow down, publicly expose, and defuse the effectiveness of the lawless, paramilitary ICE-driven onslaught against the Constitution and the rule of democratic law.<\/p>\n

People are using the digital media to create interactive groups dedicated to protecting a certain defined neighborhood in their cities and communities.\u00a0 On a rotating basis 24\/7, there are teams of at least two people with a car ready to respond to a notice from someone in the group that ICE has entered the area.\u00a0 The car (with cameras and recorders rolling) follows the ICE thugs at a safe distance so as not to be seen as \u201cinterfering with the operations of the federal police.\u201d\u00a0 The neighborhood-watch team traces ICE movements and alerts people in these neighborhoods or other locations where ICE is headed. They simultaneously alert the (responsible) media and the real (local) police about what is happening. They also, of course, are coming out in public protest wherever ICE rears its ugly head\u2014making noise, making things public, raising nonviolent hell for these fake, Keystone Cops and thugs.<\/p>\n

In recent congressional hearings three democratic governors were asked if they would allow their state and city police forces to work with ICE.\u00a0 Their answers, while not particularly forceful or inspiring, stated that official police take an oath to follow the Constitution, the law, and due process of law.\u00a0 If there are so-called \u201cfederal police\u201d who are violating the Constitution and the law, then local law enforcement is not required to cooperate with them.<\/p>\n

Neighborhood ICE-Watch Teams (IWTs), networking and operating nationwide, will constitute a formidable social pressure on local police to become more aware of the lawless ICE paramilitary police flooding our communities and our nation. The IWTs will help give the legitimate official police the courage to do the right thing, not only by refusing to cooperate with the ICE thugs but by helping protect the nonviolent community-ICE-Watch Teams from harassment by ICE.<\/p>\n

In this way North Americans can \u201ctake to the streets\u201d nationwide in an organized, peaceful, and nonviolent form\u2014creating networks of community solidarity while working with the real police (who respect due-process of law). By taking collective democratic actions, we are establishing a real social force that defuses the lie of an \u201cemergency immigrant invasion\u201d and the corresponding lie that we need a flood of lawless ICE thugs to invade our cities and communities to save us from this non-existent crisis.<\/p>\n

We must not forget that the real purpose of the ICE onslaught is not to deport illegal \u201crapists, murderers, and criminals\u201d (of which there is little or no evidence), but to destroy the authority of the US Constitution, the legitimate rule of law, and the absolutely essential principle of \u201cdue process of law.\u201d The vanguard of all fascist dictatorships is the creation of a false state of emergency that requires a pervasive, lawless secret police\u2014the establishment of a massive police presence that no longer needs to obey the rule of law because they are supposedly dealing with some emergency. The most effective way to stop the ICE onslaught against our democracy is a nationwide network of ICE-Watch Teams, getting the word out\u2014and getting the job done\u2014of \u201ctaking to the streets\u201d in and organized and effective direct-action movement.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Dr. Glen T. Martin:
\n– Member, <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>
\n– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
\n– Founder\/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
\n– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
\n– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
\n– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
\n<\/em>www.earthconstitution.world<\/em><\/a> \u2013 Email: <\/em>gmartin@radford.edu<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are videos online of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents claiming drivers have \u201cswerved\u201d toward them or have been \u201cfollowing\u201d them. It is important to record and document all such interactions because ICE is the vanguard of the emerging fascism in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":297584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[542,2378,883,821,3506,70],"class_list":["post-297583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-fascism","tag-immigration","tag-migrants","tag-refugees","tag-u-s-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297585,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297583\/revisions\/297585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}