2/4/25

What a time this is! By Joshua Rubin

The news comes at us so hard and fast that it makes me dizzy. It is difficult in all this shock and awe for those of us who watch, you might say witness, what is going on with the issue that we have made ours, to detect and distinguish real escalation, rather than a big show, with staged consequences. But the issue is not just ours, is it? The Trump regime has made migrant hatred its main public focus, and is trying to give us the impression that a massive operation has been engaged to deport our friends, and to do so brutally enough to keep others who contemplate coming here from doing so. (No doubt, its value as a distraction counts, too.)

So let’s see what we can figure out. As far as actual deportation goes, the numbers have not gone up, and actually there are some indications of the opposite. I have no doubt that the enemy (you know who I mean) would like to make a bigger splash, but they don’t seem to have found their feet quite yet. Let’s hope the learning curve is a long one for them, and we might take some solace from the fact that their assessment of the situations on the ground here is the U.S. is now, and has always been, more than flawed: they live in a fantasy world. But, I fear, even evil fools can learn.

And we have seen on social media ICE officers in clearly marked jackets stopping people, apparently arresting people. The difference here, between before and now, may only be those clear markings. I have been around ICE many times, and it was quite rare for the word ICE to appear on the backs of men who usually function as a sort of secret police. So, why? I think that public stunts is what they can manage at the moment.

Like the stunts of sending high DHS officials to places like New York City and Chicago, to foster panic, promising raids and family separation. “Taking out the garbage,” they have called it. Most of these raids, with the possible exception of the one in Bakersfield, CA, have come up quite short in terms of the numbers of victims they have promised. So far!

We hear of possible economic consequences that may work in our favor, like fields of crops going unpicked because farm workers are avoiding places that give the enemy an easy way to pick them off. It would seem poetically satisfying if that became a trend. You and I don’t use guns, so we need the enemy to shoot itself in the foot that way, don’t you hope?

Military transports have been brought in to do a few of the deportation flights that we have been documenting for years, but they do it less efficiently, more brutally, and far more expensively, than the private chartered ones. This move by our enemy has aroused an intense anxiety in those countries receiving returnees, because it raises the specter of invasion by the U.S., which is unsurprising since the message from our enemy is that we own the world and might just invade and take what we want.

What we know for certain is sparse, but we who watch know some things, and will keep updating it here. We are reasonably sure, based on the goals of the enemy, that things will likely get much worse. Please keep reporting what you see.

Take good care of yourselves. We are facing a formidable enemy.