Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman

Every aspiring fascist dictator needs an enemy to oppress.  It keeps the angry white masses enraged and it provides a rationale for violence and destroying the rule of law.

President VD Amin claims our country has been invaded by enemies, by which he means anyone who disagrees with him or tries to hold him accountable for his crimes.  One of his most popular targets are immigrants. Not supposedly “illegal” immigrants, a derogatory catchall for any noncitizen who has not yet received some sort of formal status, even if their legal claim to residence is both legitimate and pending, and which must be distinguished from illegal non-immigrants, like Tom “Bag o' Cash” Homan.

Brief ICE encounter, per Brett Kavanaugh

To provide his base of white supremacists with the entertainment for which they clamor, he and his minions have unleashed ill-trained unaccountable heavily armed and masked agents with licenses to roust essentially anyone they want.

Their hunting license was recently approved by six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices (see last week's tirade), who said that these masked men could stop and detain anyone who looked Hispanic and spoke Spanish if they were in the vicinity of a car wash or other low-wage employer.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh whipped out a concurring opinion dismissing the concerns of those so rousted:

The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest. 

One difficulty with Kavanaugh's acute analysis is of course he assumes the answer he wants. The laxness of the criteria ensures that the dragnet will ensnare lots of other people who do have legal status and are thus worthy of constitutional protection.

Kavanaugh assumes that the intrusion on liberty, like his effort to rape a high school student, is but a mere trifle:  

If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.

It turns out that like Brett himself, that's not quite right.  The record in the case, as recounted by Justice Sotomayor, told the real story:

A masked agent ordered Gavidia to “ ‘[s]top right there’ ” and began asking him questions. Ibid. Agents then asked Gavidia whether he is “American at least three times”; three times, Gavidia affirmed that he is. Ibid. Unsatisfied, the agents asked Gavidia for the name of the hospital in which he was born, and when Gavidia could not immediately recall, the agents racked a rifle, took Gavidia’s phone, “pushed [him] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” Id., at 6–7. Agents released Gavidia only after he offered up his REAL ID.  

And if the unlucky victim had not had a REAL ID, they could have been taken into immigration detention until such time as they are able to obtain the proper documentation, from behind bars. 

So the agents will jail you until you can provide evidence satisfactory to them to prove your legal status.  Lawful Permanent Residents usually carry around their "green card," which suffices.  But U.S. citizens dare to walk the streets without a photo ID proving citizenship (Your driver's license might not suffice).  Do you walk around with your passport?  If you look Hispanic, you'd better, says the Supreme Court. 

More recently, to provide pleasingly violent video for the delectation of President VD Amin,  a motley crew of anonymous federal agents and armed troops have rampaged through the streets of Washington, D.C.  Here's how their trifling intrusions on liberty went down there, according to a suit filed this week by the ACLU:

Trifling ICE encounter with U.S. citizen

Plaintiff José Escobar Molina is a 47-year-old man who has lived in D.C. for 25 years. He has maintained valid Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for El Salvador since 2001. On August 21, 2025, Mr. Escobar Molina was walking from his apartment building in Northwest D.C. to his work truck, about to start his workday, when two cars pulled up next to him. As he was about to get into his truck, plain-clothed and unidentified federal agents exited the cars and— without conducting any inquiry—seized Mr. Escobar Molina, grabbing him by the arms and legs and immediately handcuffing him. The agents arrested him without a warrant and without asking for his name, his identification, or anything about his immigration status. The agents also did not ask him where he lives, whom he lives with, how long he has lived here, or anything else about his ties to the community prior to arresting him. After ICE detained Mr. Escobar Molina overnight at its processing center in Chantilly, Virginia, the next day an ICE supervisor finally realized that he had valid TPS, which statutorily prohibits ICE from detaining him, and released him. 

That's a pretty big trifle, Brettster.  And in Washington, the agents confess that their criteria for arresting people on the street are laughably vague and racist:

In some instances, the racial profiling is blatant and explicit. For example, on August 31, 2025, while a Latina woman was walking to a CVS in Northwest D.C. to pick up medicine for her daughter, an armed officer in camouflage stopped her to check her immigration status simply because—as the officer stated explicitly—the officer believed she did not “look like a citizen” and looked like she is from another country. In fact, the woman is a U.S. citizen. 

What does it mean to not look like a citizen in the eyes of the immigration police?  The answer is provided by the victims themselves. 

We have a niece who is a U.S. citizen and was adopted as a baby from Guatemala.  Does she “look like a citizen?”  If so, why does she fear driving in New Hampshire and always carries her U.S. passport card?

And, although it seems like a million years ago, we remember when an immigrant with a valid student visa was violently kidnapped on the streets of Somerville and asported in chains to the immigration gulag in Louisiana by masked agents because she signed a letter protesting the war in Gaza.

The conclusion: the body snatchers are empowered to arrest and detain anyone who “looks like” an immigrant, which means anyone who isn't white, thanks to the current bent Supreme House of Lords.

The question is whether, as in the remake with Jeff Goldblum and Donald Sutherland, resistance is futile.

It is not.

First, as the Ozturk case demonstrates, at least the lower federal courts are not inclined to rubber stamp lawless assaults on anyone they choose, whether because they wrote letters or spoke Spanish.

2025 reboot: no stars

Second, the public furor over such lawless arrests may help turn public opinion, especially Hispanic public opinion, against the regime that empowers the body snatchers.  Despite what every half-assed third-way Democratic consultant seems to say, public opinion is not stationary.  It can be influenced by exposure and advocacy.   

Third, let's remember to place the blame for the invasion of the body snatchers where it belongs: on every f***in' Republican from 1968 to today, who undermined the rule of law by voting in the gang of crazed sex offenders and handmaids who now dominate the Supreme Court. 

Let's also note how many elected Republicans are now opposing the invasion of the body snatchers.

Today that number stands as 0.0, more or less.

Should we recover our democracy, in addition to reconstructing the out-of-control immigration police, we will need to reform the Supreme Court with new seats, limits on jurisdiction, and the impeachment and removal of any of these clowns who lied under oath to Congress about their sordid pasts. 

There is no alternative.  As the great Yvonne Abraham once said, “Resistance may or may not be futile. Acquiescence definitely is.”  

UPDATE:

Documents reviewed by The New York Times show that the July 15 firing of Ms. Beckwith occurred less than six hours after she told Mr. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in charge of the Southern California raids, that a court order prevented him from arresting people without probable cause in a vast expanse that stretches from the Oregon border to Bakersfield. She was removed not only from her post as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California, but from the office altogether.