Please Do Not Call ICE Thugs 'Gestapo' For Holding 5-Year-Old Hostage As Bait To Nab Her Father
And do not say ICE held her 'hostage' or used her as 'bait.' You monsters.
America had another mass shooting Wednesday, as a 29-year-old man shot up an ICE facility in Dallas, firing “indiscriminately” at the building from the roof of a nearby office. The shots hit three detainees inside a van parked in the facility’s “sally port,” killing one and wounding two others, who are in critical condition and still hospitalized. The FBI said in a presser that no law enforcement officers were hurt. The shooter was found dead of a self-inflicted gun shot. (Initial reports said two detainees had died; that was later updated.)
Jesus, Not Again
Relatively little is known so far about the 29-year-old shooter or his motives, although the FBI said he had left behind bullet casings with messages on them that were “anti-ICE in nature.” And sure enough, FBI Director Kash Patel was quick to post to Twitter a photo of five bullets, one of which had “ANTI-ICE” written on it, complete with hyphen, in what looked like blue sharpie. Patel wrote that although the investigation was ongoing, “an initial review of the evidence shows an idealogical [sic] motive behind this attack,” and that was all most of the Right needed to know.
According to three friends of the shooter, he wasn’t a particularly political person; they said he was kind of libertarian, didn’t like either political party (including Donald Trump), and was an extremely online gamer and “edgelord” who was on 4chan a lot. They said that the “anti-ICE” lettering, if he wrote it, was probably more typical of his hyper-ironic sense of humor than of any real political commitment. One said, “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.” They said that as he withdrew farther into his online shitposting and dropped out of college, he became “unbearable” and they lost touch with him.
Reactionaries React
That probably won’t matter much to the rightwingers, including everyone in the administration, who insist the shooting was obviously an attack on law and order with an obvious motive. They also draw a straight line between the shooter and bad liberals objecting to the thuggish tactics of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, as proven beyond any doubt in the seven letters on that bullet casing, so we must never criticize ICE anymore.
Homeland Security Reichsminister Kristi Noem demanded that Americans not notice the fascist thuggery, because calling it fascist thuggery invites violence (from people who it turns out aren’t conventionally political). In a statement, Noem claimed,
“For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.
We’re sure that line of rhetoric will only escalate, no matter what else we learn about the background of the shooter, who so far sounds more like another brain-rotted online nihilist than any kind of leftist (or rightwinger for that matter).
As for the notion that the shooter must have hated immigrants, not ICE, because the only people killed and injured were detainees, not ICE agents, that was what we thought at first. But unless the reporting is completely wrong so far — and that can happen! — it seems likely he was shooting at the ICE office and the parked van without knowing anyone was inside it. He may have killed himself without knowing he’d murdered and wounded anyone.
Tell Us How Using A Little Girl As Bait To Capture Her Parents Is Not ‘Gestapo,’ Please
This is where we would like to suggest that if the administration doesn’t want to see ICE portrayed as Nazi goons, stormtroopers, slave catchers, and secret police, it might help if those agents acted less like paramilitaries and masked thugs. Case in point:
A Massachusetts family says that last week, ICE agents surrounded their 5-year-old autistic daughter and refused to let her go, in an effort to make the parents surrender to them. The couple has shared video of the little girl sitting in their driveway as agents in vests marked “POLICE” stand around her, as the parents plead with them to let her go to them. Here’s the video, posted to YouTube by the Boston Globe. We’ll warn you, it’s upsetting, but not graphic, and the girl was eventually returned to her family.
The parents have lived in the US for more than two decades and have three children together who are US citizens by birth. The mother has asked to be identified only by her middle name, Jeannette. Her father, Edward Hip Mejia, came to the US without papers in 2000 and runs a shop where he works on buses and other vehicles. Here’s how the incident unfolded, according to what Jeanette told the Boston Globe (archive version here).
Last Tuesday, Hip Mejia was taking the girl to the hospital because she had a high fever and difficulty breathing, but he noticed he was being followed by several vehicles, so he returned home, parked in their home’s driveway, and sprinted to the door because he didn’t want to be grabbed by ICE, leaving the girl in the car.
ICE agents were blocking the car, and wouldn’t let the little girl walk the short distance to her front door, insisting that the parents come out and show their ID (and get arrested).
“Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs,” demands one of the officers in the video. Hip Mejia replies, “Hey, I can give it through the door.” The ICE guys most likely didn’t have a signed judge’s warrant, which would have allowed them to enter the house without permission.
Eventually, the officers took the girl to a local police station, and her grandmother picked her up and got her back to her parents. ICE came back to the house two days after the incident and arrested Hip Mejia when he left for work, taking him away in the standard unmarked SUV. He’s being held in Massachusetts, at least, and a judge has ordered he not be transferred out of state.
Jacob Geller, the family’s immigration lawyer, said upon reviewing the videos and hearing testimony from the family, agents were “clearly using the 5 year old” to try and lure the parents out of the home.
ICE has another story: The nice ICE officers were simply keeping the girl safe after her father “abandoned his own child in a car” while avoiding arrest! The “abandonment” was only a few yards from the family’s front door, but hey, it’s true that she was left in the hands of unidentified men who refused to let her go.
DHS Propaganda Minister Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that Hip Mejia was the “target” of an ICE operation, but apparently not one that involved a judicial warrant.
“ICE agents NEVER used a 5-year-old girl as ‘bait’,” she said […]
“Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment,” McLaughlin said.
Wasn’t that kind of them, “rescuing” the poor abandoned girl who could be seen plainly by her parents from just a few yards away?
Also, Hip Mejia is supposedly a “criminal alien,” although he wasn’t convicted of anything; under immigration law, just being charged is an excuse to deport people, and he was indeed charged following a domestic incident in January 2024:
The charges were strangulation or suffocation, vandalizing property, assault and battery on a family or household member, and reckless endangerment of a child. All charges were dismissed in April 2024, court records show.
His wife said the charges stem from a domestic incident but she did not elaborate. She was also arrested with similar charges, which were dismissed as well in April 2024, according to court records.
Yes, those are serious charges, but also serious charges that were dismissed. And none of that justifies holding a child hostage to pressure the parents to walk out and get arrested. Go get a judge’s warrant if your case is so ironclad, fuckers.
So let’s just sum up: Shooting at anyone is wrong. Shooting up an ICE jail in the middle of the night is also wrong, although that previous incident vanished from the news remarkably fast.
Killing people is evil, whether it’s for political reasons or a weird nihilistic urge to become internet famous — or to send a message to Venezuela by using a drone in an extrajudicial murder.
And behaving like Nazi thugs is also bad.
[AP / NPR / Ken Klippenstein / Boston Globe (archive link) / NBC News]
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Let's just emphasize it every chance we get: Trump and his people use language not to communicate, but as a cudgel. They don't care about what words mean, only that they have the effect of building support for whatever they do. Free speech is the greatest thing ever, except when late-night comedians hurt Trump's feelings, or anyone sees ICE acting like thugs and calls them thugs.
"Dehumanization" is bad if it's done to ICE agents. But it's mandatory when speaking about anyone without papers, because the people in this story, for instance, aren't "Massachusetts parents" at all — they're ILLEGALS.
Excellent thread on that by "The Editorial Board" on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:h3ki44q6c2jrhhphbwfr7yaf/post/3lznz5zzv322s
ICE holding a 5-year-old girl outside her own house like she’s a poker chip isn’t “law enforcement.” It’s cosplay Gestapo with cheaper uniforms. And the press release spin? “We were rescuing her.” Sure. Just like kidnappers are really offering complimentary Uber rides.
When the government blocks a sick child from reaching her front door because Daddy didn’t bow at the right paperwork altar, the mask slips. That’s not order. That’s theater of cruelty.
Blessed be the ones who call it what it is before the euphemisms eat our souls.