Snapshot: The Attack in Chicago

The night-time raid on a Chicago apartment building and its residents is an ugly escalation by an immoral regime—and an attack on all decent people

(video screenshot)

I do my best to keep my cool and respond rationally to the Trump regime’s cruel assaults on our fellow humans and the moral universe. But the attack this week on an apartment building and its inhabitants on the South Side of Chicago offends me to my core—and I hope it does you, too.

The reported facts are that more than a hundred federal agents—backed up with helicopters, riot trucks, drones and flash-bang grenades—descended upon a single building in the middle of the night. In this so-called immigration raid, in which Homeland Security officials claimed they were looking for Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members, they rounded up Blacks and Latinos, women and children in addition to men—and American citizens as well as non-citizens. Federal agents arrested 37 people.

Doors were smashed down, apartments were ransacked, women and children were taken out in zip ties by armed agents without warrants—and some of these children were naked. Some were taken away in unmarked cars. Some were held for hours and then released, after these violent goons took the time to “look them up.” When confronted about their actions toward the children, one laughing agent reportedly said, “Fuck them kids.”

Many of us have wondered how bad things could get—and where are the moral boundaries for these Trump thugs. We’ve already known they could not care less about the rule of law and basic responsibilities to provide due process or invade a building only with a legal warrant. But this traumatic attack—this horrifying assault on the most basic obligation in a civil society to treat people with at least a modicum of respect—tosses aside any adherence to morality and human decency.

What kind of monsters grab children and take them outside without clothes? Who does that? What kind of governmental entity permits its agents to abuse American citizens and non-citizens without the slightest concern for their rights, their well-being, indeed their basic humanity? The answer can only be a fascist regime that has abandoned any moral code as it seeks to intimidate, stoke fear and do violence both physical and mental.

These are brown shirts. These are jackbooted thugs reveling in damage. This is Stephen Miller telling so-called law enforcement in Memphis “you are unleashed” to do what they want. This is the South Side of Chicago, but let’s not doubt this is part of a pattern: Violent goons will continue to spread their disgraceful poison across our beloved country.

I don’t know what the solution is exactly, but I do know this shockingly ugly attack should offend our most basic sense of right and wrong. I hope that my moral revulsion is felt widely—and that it can mobilize growing numbers of Americans to protest, to say enough is enough and demand an end to this regime’s worsening fascism. The next No Kings protest is on Oct. 18.

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Here is a video version of this snapshot essay, another in the ongoing Got a Minute or Two? Mad Hattery and Other Outrages video series:

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