Masked men, showing up without warning.
Often with no warrants, no badges or documents, and refusing to identify themselves or their agency.
They show up in vans and simply grab people. They go into homes, schools, shops, workplaces – anywhere they want.
I already talked about this in a larger post about the Los Angeles fiasco: but I keep feel we need to come back to what is a lingering question – and, as time goes on, I feel an increasingly important one.
Maybe I’m opening up a conspiracy theory rabbit hole here. But it feels very warranted.
The question: who ARE these people?
Why are they masked? Why do they frequently refuse to identify their agency or affiliation?
I’m actually beginning to wonder if these are real ICE agents at all. If they are working for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then why wouldn’t they say so?
Why would they be secretive about it, if what they’re doing is legal and legitimate?
Everything I can find suggests that federal agents have to have a warrant for entering a home or workplace, and are required to identify themselves.
Yet most accounts or eyewitness testimony of these ongoing raids says that this isn’t happening.
Moreover, agents of the federal government typically don’t wear masks.
You know who does tend to wear face coverings? Criminals. Bank robbers. Terrorists or militias. And mercenaries.
The White House says these raids are being carried out by ICE. So why aren’t they behaving like ICE agents? Why aren’t they following normal protocols?
And again, why are they hiding their identities?
The only two reasons I can think of are, (a) they think what they’re doing might be illegal or unconstitutional, so they need to hide their identities to avoid future accountability, or (b) they’re not ICE agents, but some kind of private army working for Trump, Stephen Miller and co.
If the latter is the case, that’s alarming: as it would mean Trump and co have a private force loyal to them (and not to the law or the constitution) that’s out there masquerading as federal agents and kidnapping people off the streets.
Could this be what’s happening? Something has definitely been off about all of this: which is why the raids have been provoking such a backlash.
Well, the Trump movement does have actual militias loyal to it – such as the Oathkeepers and various others. There’s also Trump’s suspicious affinity for Fort Bragg – which I examined in detail in respect to the January 6th conspiracy (and again here more recently, in relation to the recent Las Vegas and New Orleans vehicle attacks).
Fort Bragg, let’s recall, is both a major Psy-Ops center, and a known haven for far-right agitators. And Trump was at Fort Bragg a few days after the manufactured ‘warzone’ in Los Angeles, making a speech about the whole thing. He was also at Fort Bragg for an ‘off the books’ meeting right before January 6th 2020 too (as I covered here at the time).
But there’s something else that occurred to me too: do we know where all the pardoned January 6th felons are?
They were all released on Trump’s orders in January. Sure, we know where a few of them are, because they’ve been mentioned in news articles.
But what about the rest of them – the majority of them? From the searches I’ve done online, I’m getting the impression that the answer is no.
Could some of these supposed ‘ICE agents’ in fact be January 6th insurrectionists who’ve been recruited into the administration’s private enforcement gangs? Could that be part of the reason he pardoned them in the first place? So that he could have a mini army of fanatics loyal to him?
I acknowledge this may be a stretch here: it’s just speculation.
But it would actually explain the need to hide their faces. And why they’re unable to formally identify themselves as ICE agents when they’re invading elementary schools or workplaces.
Also, if you’re Trump or Stephen Miller and you need people to carry out actions that are unconstitutional or even possibly illegal, then you don’t want standard federal agents – you want fanatics who’ll blindly do as asked and not care about the rules.
And cultists who once tried to set up a makeshift gallows to hang the Vice-president will have no qualms about rounding up tanned or brown-skinned people without any due process.
Hell, they could even be using flat-out mercenaries at this point.
In fact, this is precisely what Blackwater founder and overall evil scumbag Erik Prince had been repeatedly pushing Trump to do, using private contractors as an all-purpose entity, including for domestic enforcement issues. I examined Prince’s dubious operations and their global implications here some years ago.
Anyway, again I’m aware most of what I’m saying here is speculation.
But there remains a sinister ambiguity about who these masked agents are that are running around America and carrying out warrantless raids and making arrests without due legal process.
From as far back as the Mahmoud Khalil case, they’ve literally been grabbing people off the street or out of their homes, bundling them into vans, and in many cases these people aren’t seen again.
That the American media isn’t more concerned about who they are is, in itself, suspicious too.
And again, I have to come back to a point I made in the article about the Los Angeles situation. Which is this: the immigrants are a red herring.
They’ve just the easy targets to get everyone on board with the idea of mass arrests, warrantless property invasions – and yes, with the idea of unidentified, masked thugs from unknown agencies targeting civilians and quite probably ACTING OUTSIDE OF THE LAW.
The future targets won’t be limited to Mexican migrants workers or pro-Palestinian protesters: the net could be cast wider.
What’s happening now is just the test run: pushing the envelope to see what can be gotten away with.
The fact that the right-wing and the Trump cultists are cheering this stuff on would be almost comedic if it wasn’t so serious. But it does show what side they’re on.
In general, there’s cause for suspicion whenever masked groups are involved. Because it implies the need to either conceal identity or the need to hide that you’re something other than what you’re pretending to be.
Let’s point to the classic example: masked figures carrying out false-flag operations.
There was no doubt whatsoever for me, for example, that the 2015 Paris Attacks (both Charlie Hebdo, which I examined here at the time) and the November 13th attacks (which I covered here, here and here), were carried out by masked Mossad and possibly French intelligence agents – and made to look (not very convincingly) like Islamist terror attacks.
The point being that the masks are a telltale sign that something isn’t legit.
They could fix this problem easily: just have the agents in uniform, lose the masks, and have them identify themselves as federal agents. All the ambiguity would be gone.
There has to be a reason they’re not doing that. And I suspect they won’t be doing it any time soon either.
