ICE Being ICE Again, Noem Lying About Everything Again
Must be a day that ends in heavy drinking, huh?
The government may still be shut down, but Donald Trump’s unaccountable, purposefully lawless secret police are still hard at work terrorizing enemies of the state, with no letup in sight. Time for another roundup of the latest fuckery.
Kristi Noem: Please Reject The Evidence Of Your Eyes And Ears, Mmkay?
In the same press conference where she insisted that ICE must keep tear gassing children over Halloween to keep them safe, Homeland Security Chief Ghoul Kristi Noem yesterday said that the current federal invasion of Chicago actually extends to five other midwestern states, surprise! Speaking at the airport in Gary, Indiana — perhaps to give the impression that Chicago itself is too dangerous for her to even visit briefly — Noem said that the Operation Midway Blitz deportation purge “includes Indiana, Chicago, Illinois and that area that the field office is covering.”
As the Chicago Sun-Times points out, ICE’s field office in Chicago covers Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas, not one of which is a “sanctuary” state, which was supposedly the excuse for sending federal goons to Chicago.
But wait, there’s more! Despite abundant evidence to the contrary collected by ProPublica and other outlets, Noem also lied that ICE isn’t arresting or detaining any US citizens at all, nosiree, not happening!
In answer to a reporter’s (inaudible) question, the head of the US agency that’s doing all the arrests and detentions dismissed the very well documented arrests and detentions of US citizens, lying quite breezily.
NOEM: There’s no American citizens that have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true.
As the Trump-era cliché goes, it’s the sort of flagrant lying that used to end careers in government, but is now routine. So it goes.
US Citizens Arrested By ICE Insist They Exist
Two activists who document ICE and other federal agents’ activity in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, both of whom are US-born citizens, have been telling local media about how federal agents arrested and detained them over the weekend. Ruben Morales and Jessi Olazaba say they were checking out a report that unmarked cars with federal goons inside were parked in teacher-only spots in an elementary school parking lot when the agents attacked them.
Morales said he backed off when an agent in one car told him to leave, but complying with the order was apparently not enough:
"I turn around to walk away and that’s when I hear footsteps coming in my direction and pepper spray hitting the back of my head," Morales said. "That’s when I felt body contact of them taking me down, hitting me.”
Morales said the agents questioned his immigration status, took him to an FBI office for questioning, and released him without charges, and also showed reporters photos of injuries to his knees, arms, and throat from being tackled.
Olazanda recorded part of Morales’s arrest, and says that when she tried to get a shot of the car’s license plate, an agent got out of the car and assaulted her. She said, “I saw he had pepper spray in his hands. He knocked off my glasses and sprayed me with pepper spray. I went down like this and he came and used his force and pushed me with both hands and that’s when I fell back and hit my head.”
She was taken to a hospital to be evaluated, and her two children, still in her car, were collected by officers and, we assume, eventually returned to her after she was charged with “impeding an arrest.”
You need to go to NBC Chicago’s website to see the station’s video report, but here’s a similar story from ABC 7 Chicago. For Crom’s sake don’t read the YouTube comments, which agree Morales looks like a criminal and that both of them had to be assaulting the agents and therefore deserve anything that happened to them.
Aurora Mayor John Laesch told ABC 7 that he’s considering an executive order like those in Chicago and in Cook County, which would ban deportation goons from city property, including parking lots, in his city.
DHS claimed to NBC Chicago that Morales and Olazaba were pounding on the agents’ vehicle and that Morales went on to “punch an agent in the face,” although he hasn’t been charged with assault. Funny how those allegations to the press so often aren’t on video and aren’t followed by actual charges. No, the feds aren’t releasing body cam video, if there is any.
Well Crap, Guess We Have To Defend Cenk Uygur This One Time
In the sort of threat that’s becoming increasingly common from Trump sycophants and other wannabe fascists, Katie Miller, the spouse of Donald Trump’s Ghoul-aide Stephen Miller, lost her shit Wednesday at podcaster Cenk Uygur during a group-squabble panel on Piers Morgan Presents: Everyone Shouting at the Same Time. We wouldn’t normally consider that newsworthy, but in addition to insults, Miller implied that for the sin of disagreeing with her about the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, Uygur just might find himself getting deported.
Talking over Uygur to make it good if semi-unintelligible TV, Miller threatened, “You better check your citizenship application that everything was legal and correct. Because you’ll be just be like Ilhan Omar coming next.”
The comparison to the US representative from Minnesota is apt, since like Omar, Uygur came to the USA as a child and is a naturalized citizen. A very cursory search didn’t pinpoint when he became a citizen, and it shouldn’t matter anyway. It’s been a damn long time; the guy came to the US with his parents when he was eight and is now 55 years old. But in Trump’s America, apparently any pretext is enough to result in a threat to revoke your citizenship, even after decades. These are evil, evil people who make one wish there were a hell in which they could end up.
Update: Drunky Racist DUI Asshole ICE Guy Somehow Even Worse
A couple weeks back, we shared a viral video of an August traffic stop in which Monroe County (Florida) Sheriff Office deputies pulled over a belligerant asshole who had been driving erratically on a long highway bridge in the Florida Keys, with his two little kids in his pickup. The asshole, one Scott Thomas Deiseroth, 42, was charged with DUI and two counts of child endangerment, even though he protested loudly that he was an ICE agent, and as a federal officer was much more important than the mere deputies.
While he was at it, Deiseroth also demanded to know whether one of the deputies was Haitian, implying that maybe the deputy wasn’t American enough to be a cop at all. In a follow-up report from The Washington Post this week (gift link), new details show that Dieseroth also wanted to play the “deport someone who bothers me” game. According to the Post, additional camera footage following Deiseroth’s arrest caught him demanding to know more about the Black officer, Deputy Markens Dorestant as he harangued the arresting deputy, Jonathan Lane, from the backseat of Lane’s patrol car.
On the drive to jail following his arrest, Deiseroth continued to question Lane about Dorestant’s nationality.
“Your boy, he’s Haitian, right?” Deiseroth asked.
Lane replied that Dorestant is an American citizen, noting that people must be citizens to work as law enforcement in Florida.
“I’m going to run some checks when I get back,” Deiseroth said. He added that he would have Dorestant deported if “not legit,” according to the footage.
“Well, that’d be sad,” Lane responded. “He’s a nice guy.”
As former WaPo columnist Philip Bump puts it in his discussion of Katie Miller’s threat and Deiseroth’s racist assholery — plus another incident, a North Carolina Republican official’s threat to sic the Trump White House on a meddling ProPublica reporter — “These are all the same thing.”
Be careful what you say, America.
[Chicago Sun-Times / NBC Chicago / Philip Bump / Mediaite / WaPo (gift link)]
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Completely off topic post but important. If you come to Austin and your hungry, stop at a Kirby Lane Cafe. They are paying employees who are subscribed to SNAP extra money. And they are making it permanent. So fuck you Donald Trump. I'm going to take care of my people.
Please return to your normal wants and need. Also, you all look nice.
As someone who is not a fan of Cenk Uygur at all, that is FUCKED UP what was threatened to him. And people need to take that shit seriously. If your citizenship and "legality" are this fungible, no one is safe.
Uygur, since he ran for office, is almost certainly a naturalized citizen. A WHOLE lot of people are in danger if these fascist can unperson people criticizing them. And it proves yet again, all the First Amendment does is protect the rights of bigots to heap slurs upon minorities and to also exclude them from participating in the economy.
And of course we know the unreconstructed have large amounts of deference in the political and legal system—reportedly the order to have Bovino answer for his violations was struck down by an appeals court—we face very dark days ahead.
Where you can, you have to jump those voter suppression hoops NOW for 2026 (it's largely too late for any outstanding specials in 2025). But make sure you are active and ready, and wherever we can, work to get a Democratic impeachment+removal-sized majority. That's the only way you are going to get even a semblance of a check on this madness.