This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 15 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
It may have dropped off the front pages a bit this week, but the heavy-handed brutality from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in cities like Chicago and elsewhere has continued every day.
We have seen video after video of armed, militarized agents and police officers harassing demonstrators and grabbing folks off the street. They are wreaking absolute havoc among the residents of Chicago, terrorizing legal residents, American citizens and everyone in between.
On Tuesday, Chicago residents were tear-gassed after a crowd gathered in response to a collision between an ICE vehicle and another car. In a video of the incident, multiple cans of the gas are visible at the scene. It looks like an active war zone with militarized agents in gas masks.
At one point, a couple carrying a baby are seen fleeing the scene to avoid exposing the infant to the chemical agents deployed against the crowd. A voice can be heard telling them to “get the baby in the house.”
According to Chicago police, they were attempting to de-escalate the situation after onlookers started throwing objects at agents. But the behavior exhibited in that video does not appear to be de-escalatory.
In fact, we’re not seeing a lot of de-escalatory behavior from ICE lately. Last week, a producer for a local news station was detained by agents. The Homeland Security Department claimed she was arrested for throwing objects at officers but, later that day, she was released without any criminal charges.
And remember that Black Hawk helicopter raid on a South Side apartment building in Chicago? The one where, according to witnesses, folks were forced out of their homes naked and children were zip-tied? ICE ransacked the building under the guise of hunting down gang members. Initially, the Homeland Security Department claimed it arrested two suspected members of the gang Tren de Aragua. Now, on its own, that would make the apartment raid wildly disproportionate. But it gets even worse. According to new reporting from MSNBC senior correspondent Jacob Soboroff, that number has already gone down to one. The agency has also refused to say how it verified that gang affiliation. It is worth remembering that, in the past, this administration has labeled someone a gang member for having an autism awareness tattoo. You do not have to take the administration’s excuses at face value. What we do know is that Donald Trump is escalating his repression of the American people — and he’s doing it right out in the open. He wants you to grow numb to the terror they are inflicting on our streets. But Americans cannot give up the fight.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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