Letters from an American - June 20, 2025

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

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June 20, 2025. Individuals in plain clothes, with their faces covered and without badges or name tags, are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because ICE officers have seen a staggering 413% increase in assaults against them. Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently

20% lower than they were in 2024, and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between threatening to assault and assaulting. ICE would not provide evidence for their claims. Bump concludes, we should not and cannot take ICE's representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value. After Bump's article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media, new data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations. Bump noted that ICE has been eager

to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators, and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued, make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end. The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.

On Tuesday, masked, plain-clothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city's chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE's sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested. Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and assaulting law enforcement. As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander assaulted the officers in the

sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist. Lander was later released and New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped. The same pattern occurred last month when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ross Baracca with trespassing andassing. An interim US attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security investigations to

remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. No one is above the law. Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica MacGyver, a Democrat of New Jersey, charging

her with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with law enforcement during Baraka's arrest. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andres Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power. But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the long-standing Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents, voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's

emails and so on, in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America. President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former Vice President Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden's son Hunter had worked. Trump didn't want an actual investigation. He wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched.

He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration's deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden's presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the Biden crime family. Although there was never a Biden family business.

Their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization, a family business, openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent. Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this big lie, and courts dismissed the many cases

brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists' support. There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump's attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation in 2023, a grand jury made up of American citizens indicted Trump for engaging in dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials.

Despite having lost, the indictment reads, Trump was determined to remain in power. Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans' budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump's job performance, while 54% disapprove.

This week's Economist YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42 percent approve and that Trump's job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump's supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes. So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who exactly is giving orders that either are or might

be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making law breaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It's possible at least some of the drive to hide agents' faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s. There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration's defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans,

even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to reform governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, about 2,000 armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected

the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were socialists and had no idea how to run a government. On June 12th, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city. When California Senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary

Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety tried to ask Nome a question. He was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that public safety is not the point, the spectacle is. Trump is testing the boundaries of his power, Padilla wrote, and is using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it. If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor, and even local law enforcement,

they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown," he wrote. This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide. But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question, he wrote, imagine what the voices of 10 millions of Americans organizing will do. Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump's administration is cracking down on Democrats.

Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator Jose Padilla, using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism. The vice president's press secretary said, the vice president must have mixed up two people who have broken the law. ["Dead in Massachusetts"] Letters from an American was written and read

by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. ["Dead in Massachusetts"] recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.