To Not Become a Police State

June 6/7, 2025

“The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty

The long labor of liberty ended!”Archibald MacLeish, “The Fall of the City”

Today, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, granted DOGE access to the Social Security database including our Social Security numbers and personal information. Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed. In her dissent, joined by Sotomayor, Jackson wrote, "The Government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now —before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful. In essence, the `urgency' underlying the Government's stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes." Jackson said the court has "truly lost its moorings" when deciding what's worthy of emergency intervention and may be showing preferential treatment for the administration. “It says, in essence, that although other stay applicants must point to more than the annoyance of compliance with lower court orders they don't like, the Government can approach the courtroom bar with nothing more than that and obtain relief from this Court nevertheless." Access to our employment, mental health, and medical records among others can be used for many things. Among them, authoritarian control.

Also today, after Pam Bondi declared that there was no scenario in which Kilmar Abrego-Garcia would return to the United States and Donald John said he was unable to bring him back because he was under Salvadoran control, he was returned to the United States. Not because of the “mistake” but under federal indictment. Speaking as if a federal grand jury were a convicting body rather than one that found sufficient reason for a trial, Bondi said, “The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring," Bondi said. "They found this was his full time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country." In so saying she poisoned the jury pool, making it more difficult for Abrego-Garcia to get a fair trial. Which may have been her intent. The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee. Schrader's resignation was reportedly prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons. Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division.

Over the past several days, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents around the country have had to deal with angry crowds protesting their actions in cities from Minneapolis to Chicago to Los Angeles. These most recent encounters became heated. "It got out of control because of the way that they showed up," says San Diego council member Sean Elo-Rivera, talking about ICE agents conducting a raid on a local Italian restaurant. At one point, the public surged around the agents, surrounding their cars. The ICE agents used flash-bangs which led to chaos. Elo-Rivera posted a photo of federal agents in tactical gear outside the restaurant, with the word "TERRORISTS" written over it. The administration reacted angrily but Elo-Rivera says he believes the operation was meant to intimidate.

"They wanted to make a show of it, so they did it on Friday night at dinnertime. They wanted to make a show of this so they showed up with assault rifles. They wanted to make a show of this so they showed up in far more numbers than they needed to," Elo-Rivera says. "And the use of masks I think is incredibly concerning." At a press conference, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons said agents had good reasons to do so.

"People are out there taking photos of their faces and posting them online with death threats to their family and themselves. So I'm sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don't like what immigration enforcement is,” he said. Maybe if they didn’t act like the Gestapo, they wouldn’t have to hide their identity.

A Department of Homeland Security request for 21,000 National Guard troops to support "expansive interior immigration enforcement operations" includes a call for troops to search for unaccompanied children in some cases and transport them between states. Having National Guard troops perform such tasks, which are not explained in detail in the DHS request, has prompted concern among Democrats in Congress and some military and law enforcement officials as it should.

There’s a lot more news. There’s ALWAYS a lot more news. But today (yesterday) was the 81st anniversary of D-Day which was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. A good day to remember that over 140,000 American service members died in Europe to defeat authoritarian Fascism. We don’t need to die, we just need to keep it from happening here. And so, as a reminder, another view from my third visit to the American military cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands where in May, 2023, 78 years after the end of WWII in Europe, Dutch families were still vying for the honor of caring for the graves of “the boys who saved us from the Nazis”.