In blue cities across America—Oregon, especially—violent protesters are now trying to surround ice facilities to prevent federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.
About 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the US during the Joe Biden years – illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.
Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such blatant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the law’s legal enforcement as they were previously in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.
Federal agents in Portland deploy tear gas, make arrests minutes after judge blocks National Guard action
They cared much less about the consequences of sending millions of strangers into cities and counties where they overwhelmed social services, spiked crime and flooded emergency rooms and schools.
ICE has repeatedly presented data showing in the first rounds of deportations, it focuses on removing criminal illegal aliens or those already processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90% of all current apprehensions.
It doesn’t matter.
Left-wing protesters are swarming Portland headquarters to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have exhausted all efforts to remain here illegally.
Federal judge blocks Trump’s National Guard deployment to Portland amid constitutional challenge
Why? The Democratic Party apparatus knows that the public wants to secure both the borders and the deportation of illegal aliens. Indeed, it lost an election in part because of the advocacy of open bonders.
But Democratic officials believe that if street thugs like Antifa can surround and besiege ice facilities in Portland, Oregon, deportations will stop. Then a de facto amnesty will follow for millions who entered the US illegally – and will soon become Democratic voters.
As a result, they do not fully enforce the law when criminals attack federal law enforcement. Antifa and its spin-off groups prefer the night, when they attempt to block all entries and exits of ice vehicles and personnel and can carry out their violence with greater anonymity.
Portland Police Chief Touts ‘Crowd Support’ Approach as Ice Facility Faces Continued Violence
The masked rioters attack everyone in their own way. They count on immunity from punishment for committing violence against federal officers through the goodwill or indifference of Kindred local and state officials who hate the Trump administration more than they respect the law. An Orwellian scenario ensues in which federal officers are attacked by Antifa, who in turn rely on the non-intervention of local police.
In summary, the armed officers of the city of Portland are in a de facto proxy war with their federal counterparts – in our version of something from the 1860s, on the eve of a real civil war.
Mayor Keith Wilson and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek believe their voters want open borders and so they should have the right in their own city and state to do whatever they want — and federal law be damned.
David Marcus: Portland’s dystopian delusion comes to a city near all of us
But in doing so, both the Democratic Party officials and the street armies of Antifa are on the proverbial wrong side of history.
The armed officers of the city of Portland are in a de facto proxy war with their federal counterparts – in our version of something from the 1860s, on the eve of a real civil war.
For nearly 200 years, America has decided, in formal cases and courts, that no state or local entity can interfere with the enforcement of federal laws or use Washington’s powers. To do this with impunity would unravel the American nation in short order.
We know this from our own violent history. Andrew Jackson in 1832, like Trump, threatened to send troops to stop South Carolina’s nullification of federal tariff laws.
America fought a civil war over Confederate states’ efforts to ignore federal law and seize or occupy federal property within their jurisdictions.
Federal judge blocks Trump’s National Guard deployment to Portland amid constitutional challenge
As early as 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace that he could overturn federal law by using his state troopers to deny enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama—until the Kennedy administration federalized all state troopers and sent additional federal troops.
Alabama Governor George C. Wallace promises “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever” during his 1963 inaugural address. In June 1963, Wallace blocked the door to a University of Alabama building to prevent the judicial enrollment of two black students, until federal marshals forced him to step aside. He quickly became a symbol of resistance to integration. In later years, Wallace publicly claimed remorse for his actions, stating that he had never been a racist at heart. (Getty Images)
So what we are witnessing in Portland—and elsewhere—is a neo-Confederate attempt to replace federal law and, in a reactionary way, invoke states’ and cities’ rights.
Oregon and Portland believe they are more moral than the federal government and thus have a natural right to pick on street mobs by both failing to enforce their own laws against Antifa violence and ignoring the innate civil rights of ice cream workers.
David Marcus: in Democrat Portland, luxury, vagrancy and total disorders
The latter are denied freedom of movement, association and the ability to fulfill their duties by what has turned out to be a near-city-sanctioned siege of their facilities.
The Democrats are good at this. They think that the violence against ice will be depicted as general chaos every day by their allied media. So the proverbial people who keep the siege and its waste away just want all the effort to go away – and presumably the enforcement, not breaking, of the law. In short, the Democratic Party is the official face of the left. Antifa provides the street shock troops and the media serves as its propaganda arm.
So the leftist logic is to allow the violence and siege to continue in a “safe space” for Antifa. A tethered ice will supposedly eventually shut down operations and move on. And any violence that does occur can be chalked up to Trump’s federal government “luring” Portlanders.
ICE Director Says Portland Facility Faces Violence With ‘Little Help From Local Police’
The governing moralistic assumption is that ceding territory to terrorists, failing to enforce local and state laws, and overturning federal statutes are all small prices to pay for the larger projection of chaos and violence that can be blamed on Trump.
Such thinking implies complete indifference to all Portlanders who live near the siege and are subjected to constant disruption, intimidation and occasional violence on a nightly basis. Do these law-abiding residents have fewer civil rights than the law-breaking armies of the night?
Using federal troops to stop the siege of ice facilities, on the other hand, will remind the left’s violent protesters that their neo-enactment tactics will not work, but will instead be subject to arrest and federal charges.
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Bringing in federal troops to enforce the law will also protect the rights of ICE personnel and area residents to live in peace and safety and have their constitutional protections secured. Not all American citizens are Portlanders, but all citizens of Portland are Americans.
In other words, both Antifa and the sassy Oregon officials are our new neo-Confederate secessionists. They believe that their states are now autonomous entities that are still entitled to federal money but not obligated to follow federal laws.
Portland also reminds us of the recent total incoherence of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On the one hand, she advocates for federal dollars to rebuild her city’s burned-out neighborhoods due to her own incompetence and neglect, while on the other hand, she actively obstructs the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration laws in her own city.
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For a party that has been quick to shout “insurrection,” it is ironic that Democrats and their useful, if violent, Antifa insurgents are rising up against the federal government and its agents.
It’s hard to know what’s worse—the antifa thug who tries to injure a federal officer every night, or the sanctimonious neocon official who allows him to keep trying?
This column was originally published on Perseus’s blade.
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