🥰

first part of it is here: thejumpline.substack.com/p/the-crime-...

@jduffyrice.bsky.social and I are doing a lil essay series with the basic thesis being that the crime panic machine is wobbling BUT the people who know how to harness it are still trying to ride it into the next era. understanding the cycle is part of how we stop getting dragged behind it!

yup totally

i know the government does all kinds of evil shit but i do think legal state killings shouldn't just be happening with regularity with the public not knowing about it

Exactly

anyway ludicrous to think the right question is “how did DHS lose its way??” and not “why did we build a domestic security super agency in the first place, and who has that power served”

there are many dangers stemming
from that framing but a big one is that it lets the surveillance state off the hook. it suggests that the agency can be “steered back” to what it was “meant” to be. but what it was meant to be is… this! immigration raids, surveillance, policing creep, all of it

the idea that trump “shifted” DHS toward deportations ignores the fact that immigration enforcement was central to DHS from day one!! it wasn’t a side mission! it was the M.O. holding the whole structure together. trump just uses the tools exactly as they were built

DHS was born out of 9/11 — not as a safety project but as a consolidation of surveillance, policing, and immigration enforcement powers under one massive post-panic umbrella. it was always built to target “internal threats” (aka immigrants, muslims, dissenters)

I enjoyed it at first but this has gone on long enough!!

!!!

deported to a country he fled under threat more than two decades ago, for live-streaming a 'No Kings' protest. his family -- a wife and three kids -- weren't even allowed to say goodbye. chilling is an understatement

today, he was deported to El Salvador. this started with an arrest for stepping off a curb and ended with a journalist removed from the country. if you cover protests, you know how low-level charges can snowball into immigration consequences, even when the charges are dropped

earlier this week, a federal appeals panel denied his emergency bid to block removal. the court said, yes, he definitely had a First Amendment right to do his reporting, but still denied the stay. Mario has been a mainstay of the reporting community in Georgia for ~20 years

the charges (misdemeanors) were dropped within days of his arrest. and yet…ICE took him and caged him for 100+ days, pointing to an old immigration case. an immigration judge even granted him bond, but DHS appealed and the immigration board reopened the case instead