Bulwark Takes - Trump Goons' Masked Ambush Goes WRONG As Bystanders Are THREATENED

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Andrew Egger and JVL break down the chaotic ICE courthouse raid in Virginia and why it’s a dangerous move for both law enforcement and civilians.

Hello everyone, this is JVL here with my colleague at the Bulwark, Andrew Egger and Andrew Ice. Ice is at it again. Where does Abolish Ice go to get its apology? Last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, three ICE agents showed up inside a county courthouse to arrest a gentleman. And it was kind of a shit show because these guys were all in plain clothes. They did not have any badges or identification. They did not have a warrant. One of them was wearing a balaclava like he was from Narcos or something. And as they start manhandling this this dude, a bunch of people were there thinking they're witnessing a crime or like, what's happening? What are you doing? Stop this. You can't do that. At which point they just say, oh, we're we're ICE agents.

And the people's friends like, show us a badge. Show us some identification. And they just flatly refuse. And they then begin manhandling the people who are trying to protect this dude and threatening them with arrest and saying, you know, if you don't touch me, you've got to see the video because there's this gray haired dude with a man bun and like professor glasses who you think maybe is like a protester or something. But no, no, he's the ice agent and he's in full Cartman respect my authority mode. Respect my authority. As he tells people, don't touch me.

Don't touch me. That's a violation of the law. Here, Andrew, let's look at the video. Excuse me. Do not impede me from my lawful duties. That is a crime. Do you understand? Do not touch me or impede me in my lawful duties, ma'am.

Do you understand? It is a crime for you to do so. Why? Do you have a warrant for his arrest? Do you have a warrant for his arrest? Yes. Where? Hey, grab him. Where is the warrant for his arrest?

Get off me or I am calling the U.S. attorney and prosecuting for assault on a federal officer. Show us a warrant. Back up. Show us a warrant signed by a judge. Turn him around. You don't have a warrant. Sir. Show us a warrant for his arrest.

We are officers with Homeland Security. You don't have a warrant signed by a judge. So that's the face of law enforcement. And what brings us here today is news that ICE has said that they are going to press charges against the bystanders in this video who thought that they were stopping the commission of a crime. What are your thoughts, Andrew? You're a law and order guy. I feel like you only bring me on here to, like, throw things in my face. You know, it's like, hey, explain, explain this one. This is not this is not my idea of a good time.

JVL is plainclothes guys yanking people off the street. Let me let me give a partial, I guess, steel man of the kind of thing that is sort of going on here. federal immigration enforcement has forever had to be in its bonnet about the lower level criminal justice systems not playing more ball with them in a number of jurisdictions right they they're like hey you got a guy in there who showed up to be arraigned for a crime or to have a hearing or whatever who we really wanted to pour it out of our country would you mind handing him to me please and the lower courts frequently will say, no, we're dealing with him according to, you know, whatever charges he's facing in our jurisdiction. We're going to mete out justice that way.

It would be bad for our system. People would stop showing up for their hearings if we were if if you were also just able to show up for their hearings and then throw him out of the country. So you can see there's like competing interests here. Right. And ICE is trying to step that stuff up. They're trying to put a lot of pressure on these people to, they're trying to put a lot of pressure on these local systems,

including last week by arresting a county judge in order to get them to be more compliant. So that's kind of the, I call it a steel man. As it's coming out of my mouth, it's horrifying, right? I mean, it's, what they're doing right now is trying to, is basically trying to, to twist these state and local systems arms behind their backs, these lower level courts behind their backs to get them to start complying more with, uh, federal immigration authorities on this stuff. But what we have seen in this video goes significantly beyond that because the combination of that and this other cool new thing that ICE is doing,

which is these plainclothes raids, where not only are ICE agents undercover doing investigation and stuff, but they are, from the beginning to end of the detainment process, refusing to give any identification, show any identification. We saw this back with student visas getting canceled,

people getting pulled off the streets. Arrest on the street at Tufts, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's brazenly kind of cuts against everything that you would ever, ever expect from law enforcement and free society, where there's accountability of who's yanking you off the street, who's putting you in a van, where you can have some confidence that the people doing the yanking, if they are plainclothes, are actually committing a crime. And that, you know, like, you know, traditionally, if you or I were walking down the street and we saw something like that happening, just a scuffle between a couple of people all in street clothes, group of guys throwing another guy in the van.

First of all, we'd hope we wouldn't see that at all in the United States of America. Second of all, if you did, you'd be like, ah, something shitty is going on here. Should I intervene? Yeah, call the police. Yeah. Like get, get the, get the cops in here. And, uh, and, and there's nothing preventing them from doing that as a matter of policy. There's nothing, I mean, they, they're there to arrest the guy, right? They, they know he's going to be there. They're already putting on all this kind of institutional pressure. There would be no reason for them not to show the badges and stuff. Just wear the badge and have the warrant in your hand. Yeah, yeah. Unless part of this, well, there's really two possibilities, right? One of the

things they get into this in the story a little bit. One of this is that ICE is just deputizing people left and right to help them with these operations. A lot of these people are like total rookies, amateurs off the street who just like are not familiar with the way this is typically done in federal law enforcement or has been typically done in law enforcement. Perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So that introduces all kinds of instability and uncertainty and opportunities for chaos, which, again, ISIS is maximally putting its foot down on. If you if you're there and you're like, what the heck's going on? There's a good chance you may end up getting arrested too for interfering. But the other thing is that all this, you have to imagine that all this is a deliberate policy choice, right?

That the goal is to ratchet up the bleariness and the uncertainty around who's doing what. You don't want clear lines of authority if you are Donald Trump, right? You want to be able to mobilize the brown shirt army in plain clothes because you want people just in fear. You don't want people to know where they stand going into encounters with these law enforcement officers.

You want people to have a reflexive flinching away from really any interactions with people who are identifying themselves as federal law enforcement because they're adopting this maximalist posture of we're going to get you no matter what. What do you think the balaclava is all about? So this is the thing we're seeing often now with some of these high-profile ice raids where not only are they plainclothes, but agents covering their faces. Now, maybe in, I don't know, where's the worst drug? From what I know from watching Clear and Present Danger, the drug cartels can target

legitimate law enforcement officers. And so from time to time in like the harshest jungles of Central and South America, the police have to wear balaclavas like Batman to protect their friends and family. I don't think that's the case in America. Yeah, it's not super clear to me that that is a top consideration when you're yanking like a Tufts University student off the street that like they might have high level gang contacts who are going to retaliate. I think it's I think it's a lot more prosaic. I think these people know that there are smartphones around and they don't want to be like personally identified and and and seen as like individually responsible for what they would prefer to see as just sort of the the anonymous arm of the state coming down on these people, which, again, is completely contrary to the whole point of badges and ID numbers.

And the idea that even though the courts are totally stacked in the favor of any law enforcement officer who's ever charged with anything or ever accused of anything, even though the whole system is already set up to really privilege and prioritize those agents of authority in that way, at least you are able to know who you're talking about. At least, you know, maybe social stigma can play a role here. And as we have seen in an increasing number of cases like this, ICE and other federal law enforcement who are part of this mass deportation operation are trying to kind of short circuit and do away with that. a law enforcement officer and you are carrying out your job as an agent of the state uh if you are not happy to have your name and face attached to the actions you're carrying out maybe you shouldn't be doing them yeah yeah i mean this is maybe you should find a new job right i mean this is a right if if if you think that you could get in trouble for doing what you're doing then you

shouldn't do it and this is why like people like you and I write with our names attached to it and not anonymously. Yeah. And it all ties into the argument that the Trump administration is making kind of consistently and across the board that, that fundamentally these deportation proceedings, we should all set them, we should all compartmentalize them in our brains, set them aside, get rid of whatever gag reflex we might have about, you know, getting rid of due process foranger, you know, terrorist, MS-13, non-person, you should just take, like, an ice cream scoop and get rid of the part of your brain that has any of those concerns as far as those people are concerned. But the problem is that even if that were fair or, like, defensible from the point of view of the person being deported, which it's not. It is plainly all the time, continually implicating all kinds of people who are around

the situations. I mean, this is exactly what we saw with this headline, right? I mean, you have these people there who are who are putting their bodies between these between this this plainclothes DHS officer and this guy who they are trying to detain um who obviously uh have like everybody should agree they should be able to identify whether the person who is in front of them is an actual officer of the law in which case they should probably get out of the way or that they're not and if like if if that's all they ask for here in the video they're just saying show us a badge show us a warrant yeah that's all yeah and uh so here i got so this is a one of the persistent themes of trumpism is to claim to be acting on

behalf of one group while treating that group like shit uh and so you know like we're here for the forgotten men and women and we're going to impose tariffs on everything to make their their jobs uh you know make make their trucking jobs disappear and make the cost of goods go up. Yesterday, they put out one of their new executive orders, the text of which is like, you know, our brave men and women in law enforcement, we have to protect them. Doing things like this is incredibly dangerous to the brave men and women of law enforcement, right? This is trying to put them into a maximally dangerous position where their identities are ambiguous.

And in a country with like, what, 300, 400 million guns in it, we're going to put them in positions where it could look to any bystander as though they were themselves criminals. It just, it is needlessly dangerous. And here's my, my maybe conspiracy theory. You tell me if I'm crazy. Yes, I agree that doing plainclothes raids with balaclavas and all that is partly to be done to create a climate of fear. I think another part of it is they're looking to get a tragedy and a provocation that they can use to justify ratcheting up to whatever the next level is. They're waiting to do a raid where some innocent bystander who is got a concealed carry permit and in a state withstand their ground laws like opens fire on law enforcement officers because they aren't clearly identified and thinks that they're stopping a crime. At which point you have like tragic.

Like I'm kind of shocked that something like that hasn't happened yet. And it's, it's great that it hasn't happened yet. You know, fingers crossed. I hope it doesn't happen, but you do enough of these things. Uh, like, I don't know. We, we had somebody in the comment section the other day, um, who was like, you know, my, my, my wife is not a citizen. She, you know, she's a legal resident. But if, you know, he's like, I got a concealed carry permit. Like if we're walking down the street and three guys in masks

jump out of the van and grab her, like, and they don't have badges and they don't have warrant, like, am I supposed to just let that happen? Or am I supposed to stand my ground? Like, you know what? And this is just asking for trouble. It's needlessly asking

trouble it's it's putting law enforcement officers in harm's way when they don't have to be it's a choice to make it as dangerous as possible for them i think maybe in the hopes that we wind up with some horrible situation that they can then use to justify going to the next level, whatever that is. Am I crazy? Yeah, I think it's not an implausible reading of this stuff by any stretch, because obviously that's one real danger here. I guess one kind of caveat that I would add to that is we still don't really have a great sense of how widely spread this practice is most most of the

individual instances that we're seeing kind of bubble up which are all they're all controversial when they come out so i feel like we have a pretty good sense of of when it's when and how widely it's happening or maybe maybe that's pollyanna ish but like it's it's this it's a tufts university student it's like a young woman kind of alone on a street in i don't know what state's tufts in i should know that uh it's b. She was in San Francisco. Yeah, like in Boston, Massachusetts. Or it's, you know, it's this guy who they're detaining coming out of a courtroom, like in the middle of a courthouse, right?

Like these are not yet, I would say, kind of like the maximal playing with fire type arrests that you might see if something similar were playing out like in a busy street in Florida or Texas or something like that, right? But the danger is obviously there. arrests that you might see if something similar were playing out like in a busy street in Florida or Texas or something like that, right? But the danger is obviously there. The danger is constantly there. And the point, again, there's no genuine benefit. There's no actual state interest that is preserved or genuine state interest. There's a governmental interest. There's a regime interest in doing all this for the reasons we've discussed. But there's no genuine

state interest in this happening that would outweigh, that would justify the increased risk of all those things that you describe, even though we have not yet seen kind of like a maximally risky situation or, God forbid, an actual tragedy. So who knows? Who knows where all this goes?

Can I ask you a question, Andrew? Why aren't the cops involved in these raids pushing back on their superiors and saying, no, I'm going to wear my badge because this is dangerous. You're trying to put me in danger. And again, we don't know who's telling, whether it's orders, are they deciding on their own not to wear badges? But you would think, again, our brave men and women in law enforcement would be well within their rights to push back against their superiors if they are being instructed not to display badges and say, no, I'm in the middle of a courthouse. I can fucking just have the badge hanging around my neck. That's not going to impede my ability to do my job. And you, if you are, if there is a superior telling them not to wear a badge, like I'm going to go to the press and tell them they're trying to make us, they're trying to put us in harm's way.

They're trying to put us in danger. I haven't seen any of that from law enforcement officers on the front lines. Have you, Andrew? Yeah, well, I think some of this, again, comes back to the idea that people are kind of like being deputized for a lot of this work. Like these are true believers who are kind of signing up to do it. Right. And again, we don't, we don't necessarily know that these guys in this video are, are among those people. I was kind of suggested by, by a couple of people who are, who are close to the, the encounter. Um, but, but that's a, that's a concern, right? That's a, that's a, like, basically, if you have just kind of like real gung-ho, like pro-deportation, we're going to

make it happen, guys stepping up to do the work, not, not only are they going to have fewer concerns along the lines you mentioned, because they're just kind of like, ah, Costa doing business, baby. But like, but also you, you have to kind of wildly inflate the risk of, of just kind of regular sorts of,-affiliated violence with people who have not been trained as much, people who are newer to the job, and people who are ideologically motivated by the specific kind

of people that they're arresting, not just like preserving law and order, but like getting those kind of people out of the country, right? So that's, yeah, that's just me hazarding a guess, but that's kind of where I'd go with that. All right, well, before we people out of the country. Right. So that's yeah, it's a it's a that's just me hazarding, I guess. But that's kind of where I'd go with that. All right. Well, before we get out of here, Andrew, so you're in favor of abolishing ICE now, right? Ha! Kidding. Don't answer that. Don't answer that. But you guys can fight about it in the comments if you want. Stay with us.

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