{"id":70504,"date":"2025-04-28T07:30:02","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T11:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=70504"},"modified":"2025-04-28T05:06:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T09:06:20","slug":"the-difference-between-the-police-and-the-secret-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/04\/28\/the-difference-between-the-police-and-the-secret-police\/","title":{"rendered":"The difference between the police and the secret police"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

ICE, the 22-year-old federal agency, started out badly and is ending up worse. Its actions and agenda are both unnecessary and morally repugnant. ICE is gross.<\/p>\n

And yet, people choose to work for this agency, doing this work, without getting paid any more to do it than they could just as easily be earning in a job that didn\u2019t involve doing things that were dishonorable and demeaning and thus becoming someone who was both dishonored and demeaned.<\/p>\n

I have, like Jonathan V. Last, struggled to try to get \u201cInside the Mind of an ICE Agent<\/a>.\u201d Last focuses his attention on this woman:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Last describes the video in which this woman participates in the ICE abduction of a graduate student. The student was studying here legally with a valid visa, but her visa \u2014 like thousands of others \u2014 was revoked by ICE. Why? So that they could declare her suddenly \u201cillegal\u201d and abduct her. The woman circled above is:<\/p>\n

\u2026 one of the agents who arrested Tufts grad student R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk last month. The raid was headed by ICE, but it\u2019s unclear what agency this woman works for.<\/p>\n

If you watch the video, this female agent comes in the second wave. The first agent to make contact with \u00d6zt\u00fcrk is a man who bumps her, as if by accident, and then grabs her phone out of her hands. It\u2019s clear that, initially, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk thinks she\u2019s being mugged. But then another man comes in behind her. She is quickly surrounded and they begin to pull off her backpack. Eventually they handcuff her and lead her to an unmarked vehicle.<\/p>\n

If this happened in Oaxaca, you\u2019d assume it was a cartel kidnapping.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last\u2019s post includes the full video, which is frightening, but also unambiguous. You cannot watch that video without clearly and obviously understanding that \u00d6zt\u00fcrk is a victim and that she is being victimized by \u2026 well, by the Bad Guys<\/em> in this story. There\u2019s simply not a way to watch a frightened woman being abducted off the street by unidentified, masked people with guns without those people appearing to be the Bad Guys in the story you are witnessing.<\/p>\n

We can, of course, try to spin scenarios in which they might be something other than what they appear to be. But those scenarios are all contradicted by both what we see here \u2014 \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s genuine fear and confusion. And they are all contradicted by the facts of the matter, which is that this was simply an innocent person living here in America. A person who followed all the rules and was here completely legally and appropriately until the rules were suddenly changed without her knowledge.<\/p>\n

The Bad Guy status of the ICE agents in this video must have been every bit as obvious and unambiguous to them as to anyone else witnessing this unfold. So, again, Last wonders what the ICE woman may have been thinking:<\/p>\n

Was this sort of enforcement action a new experience for her? \u00d6zt\u00fcrk committed no crime and was in the country legally up until the moment the secretary of state personally revoked her visa\u2014but he did so without informing \u00d6zt\u00fcrk. She had no way of knowing that her legal status had changed. The government made a change to target her, without her knowledge, and then had her arrested.<\/p>\n

Is that the kind of job this agent signed up for?<\/p>\n

Does she think that it is proper for the government to create conditions to change an individual\u2019s legal status without informing them? Does she think it is morally acceptable to accost a law-abiding person on the street? Does she think \u00d6zt\u00fcrk needed to be handcuffed?<\/p>\n

To be a woman walking the streets alone is to be vulnerable. Did this agent have any problem being part of a group of men who ambushed a young woman walking the streets by herself?<\/p>\n

Would she agree to participate in such an enforcement action again?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was reminded of Last\u2019s questions when I read this story yesterday, \u201cICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted<\/a>.\u201d The ICE \u201craid\u201d \u2014 inside a courthouse \u2014 at issue in this story also involved plainclothes agents with no badges or warrants. One of them was wearing a balaclava to hide his face. Their \u201carrest\u201d looked more like a kidnapping.<\/p>\n

Two women who witnessed this arrest asked to see some badges or a warrant or anything\u00a0<\/em>that might prove that these masked, armed abductors were not \u2014 as they appeared to be \u2014 criminal kidnappers from the notorious Tren de Aragua gang<\/a> who might be kidnapping this man for ransom. The ICE agents refused to produce badges or a warrant. But they are now threatening to charge those women with obstructing an official abduction.<\/p>\n

An ICE spokesman said that anyone questioning the legitimacy of these no-badge, no-uniform, no-warrant, masked arrests was \u201cshameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who was this ICE spokesman? Well: \u201c\u2018It is shameful,\u2019 wrote an ICE spokesman who declined to be named in a Saturday morning statement \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The spokesman feigning indignation here declined to be named because he is \u2014 like everyone else \u2014 acutely aware of exactly who and what is actually \u201cshameful\u201d here. He is to ashamed to allow his name to be used just as the agents are too ashamed to carry any identification or even to show their faces in public.<\/p>\n

They know<\/em>. They can smell it too. And the stink is just as bad to them as it is to normal people and to decent people.<\/p>\n

The behavior of ICE agents demonstrates that they know what they\u2019re doing is shameful and wrong and dishonorable and ugly. And they\u2019re scared, because they know all of that and they also know that they\u2019re outnumbered<\/em>.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re hiding behind masks or insisting on not being named because this is the only way that anyone could do the kind of work they do.<\/p>\n

So we need to make them famous<\/em>. Unmask them. Name them. Identify them.<\/p>\n

Some might characterize what I\u2019m saying here as a call to \u201cdoxx\u201d these agents or to expose them, but part of the point here is that names and faces are the difference between the police and the secret<\/em> police. An agency that is behaving like the secret police cannot be allowed to remain secret.<\/p>\n

But we also need their names for another very important reason. Names matter here because without knowing someone\u2019s name you cannot say to them, \u201cZacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They know. They can smell it too. And the stink is just as bad to them as it is to normal people and to decent people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":70507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe difference between the police and the secret police<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"They know. They can smell it too. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The difference between the police and the secret police","description":"They know. They can smell it too. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}