00:00We've been discussing the notion of bearing witness in an era of rising authoritarianism in America.
00:05We do not have the luxury, you do not have the luxury of looking away in the face of brutality,
00:11especially if that brutality is government-sanctioned.
00:15Every day, new videos are posted to social media, some of them by the administration itself,
00:19which lay bare the cruelty of the tactics used by ICE agents and federal officers deployed to America's cities.
00:24Agents are frequently seen on video being both verbally and physically aggressive with and abusive towards civilians.
00:30President Trump's decision to place federal agents in our cities has ramped up tension.
00:35This week in Chicago, protesters clashed with dozens of federal agents who responded by deploying tear gas and smoke grenades into the crowd.
00:43Chicago police officers responded to the scene to try to de-escalate the situation.
00:48In a statement to WGN-TV, Chicago PD said 13 police officers were exposed to the tear gas.
00:54DHS says the incident, quote, reflects a growing and dangerous trend of illegal aliens violently resisting arrest
01:01and agitators and criminals ramming cars into our law enforcement officers, unquote.
01:05Here's the thing.
01:07This intense scene was sparked by this dramatic car chase on the south side of the city.
01:12Security footage obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times shows that white SUV driven by agents colliding with the red car,
01:20causing it to spin out of control and collide with a parked vehicle.
01:23The vehicle's occupants are seen fleeing on foot before being arrested.
01:27DHS says the two men were both in the United States without legal status.
01:32The very same day in Chicago, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen named Warren King was accosted by ICE agents while attempting to leave a local pharmacy.
01:40King was tackled to the ground by an agent and can be heard shouting that he's a citizen.
01:44King says he was held in a car for hours before ultimately being released.
02:08A Chicago man and U.S. citizen who was only comfortable sharing his first name, Angel, says Border Patrol agents snatched and abducted him off of Chicago Street in broad daylight.
02:17Angel told his story to WGN 9 News.
02:20He said he noticed a vehicle circle back after passing him.
02:23At that point, he pulled out his phone to record.
02:25You can hear the people in the truck identify themselves.
02:27And four agents get out, telling Angel not to run.
02:35As he records, he backs up, those agents creeping ever closer.
02:40Then they grab him, knocking his phone off.
02:43I got cameras.
02:46But the cameras at his cousin's house were rolling.
02:49I got cameras.
02:51I heard the ring camera go off and I ran out there and I seen him driving off.
02:55They show Angel being led to the agent's SUV and shoved in the back.
03:01Angel says he was questioned in the SUV by agents on his legal status.
03:04Satisfied that he was a citizen, Angel says he was dumped out about a half a mile away from where he was picked up.
03:09Department of Homeland Security has not issued a statement about this incident.
03:13Angel is not the only U.S. citizen to be picked up by ICE.
03:16A new report by ProPublica found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration officers.
03:22Of those detained, nearly 20 were children.
03:26Two dozen of the detained American citizens say they were held for more than a day and were not given the opportunity to phone lawyers or loved ones.
03:34In response to ProPublica questions, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans.
03:43we don't arrest U.S. citizens for immigration enforcement, end quote.
03:47DHL, by the way, has been posting action style promo videos of its raid, like this video of an overnight Chicago apartment raid late last month that led to residents, including children, little children on camera.
03:58You can see them being dragged out of bed and zip tied.
04:00DHS has bragged about the success of its operations in Chicago, saying it arrested over 1500 criminals across Illinois.
04:07But its own recent press release provides information for only 10 men with documented criminal backgrounds, according to reporting by MSNBC's Jacob Soboroff.
04:16Now, most people find these videos difficult to watch, but it's appropriate at this point to consider that the Trump administration wants you to see them and to be horrified.
04:25And that brutality is the point.
04:27As Tom Hartman writes, quote, every raid, every body slammed to the pavement is a public ritual meant to teach us obedience.
04:35The goal isn't enforcement. It's submission.
04:38For more on this, I'm joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiott, acclaimed historian and professor of history at NYU.
04:42She's the author of the newsletter Lucid, which tracks threats to democracy and the book Strong Men, Mussolini to the present.
04:48Ruth, it is great to see you again. I've missed you.
04:50And I know you're busy doing things that are helping us save democracy.
04:54You know, Jason Sandley was here a few minutes ago and he was saying it's like they don't care what the public thinks anymore.
05:01It's not it's not about polling and about popularity. It's about something else.
05:05The messaging here is very, very clear.
05:10Yes. Well, in the case of ICE, they are supposed to, you know, be enforcing against immigration, you know, undocumented immigrants.
05:22But as we've seen, the goal is very different. It is to terrorize all Americans.
05:28It was interesting in one of the clips you showed, the agent stopped to adjust his mask.
05:33And of course, the mask element is one of the things that people see as making ICE akin to a kind of secret police.
05:44And it provides the agents with anonymity.
05:47And this is a very scary sight.
05:49But the mask also empowers agents through anonymity to be their worst selves and to to terrorize anyone and everyone.
06:00And in fact, the the collective footage we've seen in these months is, you know, elderly women slammed to the ground, you know, cars having their windows smashed with small children inside them.
06:14A priest wearing his collar assaulted at close range.
06:19And all of these are captured by witnesses, civilian journalists, witnesses, but also are publicized, as you said, by the government in an explicit attempt to terrorize us.
06:33Because the message is, is that we should be too afraid to protest, to speak out, to resist.
06:39Which is amazing, because that's not happening today.
06:41We're going to see a record number of people who are who are out there protesting.
06:44When Donald Trump first came down the golden escalator in 2015, he said they're going to deal with rapists and murderers.
06:50Then this administration talks about getting violent criminals.
06:53Then they talk about people who are members of gangs like MS-13 or Trenda Aragua, who, by the way, aren't.
06:58Donald Trump held up a doctored image of somebody's tattoo.
07:01Then they talk about drug dealers.
07:04Then they talk about Antifa, which is undefined because Antifa is not an organized group.
07:08The bottom line is most of the people being rounded up are people whose offenses are that they are undocumented or the second offense of using a Social Security number that is not yours.
07:18In other words, they're the things that happen when you're an undocumented.
07:21They're not violent criminals by any description.
07:24Yes, and this tracks with the construction of what some people can see as a police state.
07:34And ICE is at the center of this.
07:36And, you know, we should pay attention to the budget for ICE, which is being ramped up for next year to, you know, a tripled for next year.
07:48And that ICE not only will have the lion's share of the U.S. budget for law enforcement, detention, deportation, but also will be funded at a rate which is more than the entire armed forces of other nations, including Brazil, you know, large nations.
08:05And they're also ramping up their presence in our daily lives.
08:10The Washington Post reported in September they're looking for 300 new offices.
08:15And so this is very important.
08:17I wrote about this in Strongman that secret police in general are supposed to be everywhere.
08:22Right.
08:23Right.
08:23And so it so the idea is you're going about your daily lives and you don't know when or where they will get you or harass you or take you away or not take you away, but beat you up because they are everywhere.
08:37And this is why it's so important that today's protests and other protests are also local, because they turn our communities from sites of terror into sites of rightful protest.
08:51And that is one way that we can sensitize the public and encourage more people to come out and not be afraid, because fear is what all autocrats traffic in.
09:03And they try to get ahead of protests by having shows of force.
09:11But as we see from the history of resistance around the world, people will come out and protest and think about Iran and China in 2022.
09:20They will protest in very dire conditions because they know it is the right thing to do.
09:25And that's what we're seeing today.
09:27We're hearing from people who've never protested in their life that they're going out this morning to these protests.
09:31The use of video when you talk about the history of Italy or Germany, the one thing they didn't have is video and phones.
09:38I understand that the government's using this propaganda themselves.
09:41But the idea that people are catching this brutality unedited, it is very hard to watch the stuff.
09:45And we show it on every show because you just got to watch it.
09:49I think that's remarkable that what you call the citizen journalism is a is a remarkable form of activism right now.
09:56It is. And when I say citizen journalists, there are citizen journalist movements.
10:01And this is when when we use our smartphones to record something that's a bit different.
10:07But we are witnesses and it's very empowering to be able to capture the truth at a time and in a place when truth has become a casualty of disinformation, of government propaganda.
10:22And we also know that the government is itself equipping some agents and units with cameras to provide their own footage.
10:32They're trying to make the argument for that this is a war, that the cities are Antifa hellholes through visual means, because this is an administration that is very, very sophisticated with its messaging.
10:45And President Trump himself is very attuned to the image and understands how images operate.
10:53So we can use images in a counter sense.
10:57And people have always done this, whether it was Argentina in the 1970s, where mothers came out and held up pictures on wooden poles of their loved ones who had disappeared.
11:09We have today other means to do this, but we are in a righteous, righteous tradition.
11:27And people have already seen this, but we have never seen this, though, in a righteous place.
11:41So we have now that we have now been able to address the words that we need to address the words that we have been able to address, and we have now written them in a fair example.
11:48So we have been able to address the numbers that we have all that come from here.
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