Is it considered out-of-bounds to call a woman a goon?
Whatever the protocol, in Kristi Noem’s case consider it done.
A conscienceless camera-chasing goon. That’s the photo-op jockey atop Homeland Security. How proud she was in her ICE gimme cap, standing before a backdrop of head-shaved, shirtless Venezuelan immigrants who’d been shanghaied off to a notorious El Salvador prison.
Reporters noted a $50,000 Rolex on her wrist as cameras clicked.
Noem called the rent-a-gulag agreement with El Salvador “a model for other countries on how they can work with America.”
Yes, from, “Send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” to, “Lend us your torture chambers.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi has earned her goon stripes, too. Now we know what “weaponizing justice” really means. This DOJ doesn’t mess with such trifles as probable cause, grand juries, bench warrants or, you know, evidence in making an arrest.
The arrest of Milwaukee state Judge Hannah Dugan for not being a foot servant for ICE is the latest abomination.
Said Sen. Bernie Sanders, Dugan’s arrest “has nothing to do with immigration.” It has everything to do, he said, with “moving this country toward authoritarianism.” Amen.
Now consider the sight of masked ICE officers grabbing Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, who’s legally in the country from Turkey. She’s in ICE detention on the pretense of fomenting anti-Jew hatred, or so we must guess. Actually, her deportable offense is support for Palestinians. She is guilty of nothing but forbidden thought bubbles.
Add all together and we have the makings of an American gestapo.
We also have an administration that is more interested in making a show with its brutal tactics than serving the people or following the law. Read the polls and know that most Americans do not approve of what’s happening, particularly a refusal to abide by court rulings.
Speaking of performative fixation, the Wall Street Journal reports that Noem’s fixation on publicity has rankled many in her department.
To her, all the world’s a stage, and immigrants are merely stage props.
She has photos plastered on department walls of her acting tough. That’s her in the cockpit of a Coast Guard plane. That’s her in a cowboy hat riding horseback. That’s her in an ATV near the Southern border. So brave. Watch for brown people.
No one should applaud the callousness of what this administration has done in deporting individuals without hearings, only suspicions.
Unbelievably, Bondi had this to say about judges who stand in her way: “I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law.” That’s a big “wow” from an enabler of a chief executive who embodies chaos and lawlessness.
The independence of the Justice Department has been a standard that has helped assure that fairness and adherence to the law prevails, often at the dismay of presidents.
This principle has applied to the FBI as well. No more, with Kash Patel our FBI director, he who coddled favor with his future boss by publicizing an “enemies list” of political opponents who should be prosecuted.
All of these are markers of a bunch of people who are not so much interested in the law but in targeting “others” – immigrants, people of color, LBGTQ individuals, political foes.
The further we go into this presidency, the more it smells of Putinism, of the Third Reich, of the very things generations of Americans fought to contain and defeat.
The reassuring thing is that the polls show a round dismay for what these people are doing. Meanwhile, court case after court case shows they have run up against a force they apparently never considered: the Constitution.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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