Losing My Perspicacity, June 2, 2025

After a weekend of chaos, it's up to Americans to stop ICE

Author

Julie DiCaro
June 02, 2025

Good morning and Happy Monday, Happy June, and Happy Pride! Thanks for hanging out with me this morning.

Over the weekend, America suffered another horrific antisemitic attack (at least as of the time of publication), and Pride kicked off at a time when the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are at substantial risk. All of that is important, and none of it is going away.

But today I want to focus solely on what went down with ICE in various communities over the weekend, because this is behavior we’ve not seen on American soil in my lifetime. We need to figure out how to stop it.

I’ve always wondered how things got so bad in Nazi Germany without pushback from the people. Now I know. Everyone watched the Gestapo brutalizing Jews on the news, shook their heads, and said, “That’s wrong. That shouldn’t be happening.” Then they went back to living their lives. Americans love to talk about fighting for “our freedom.” Well, now is the chance to make good on that promise. None of us are free until all of us are free.

Let’s start in San Diego, where ICE stormed a popular restaurant in the South Park neighborhood, at one point handcuffing the entire staff while asking to see IDs.

Some witnesses in news reports say agents at first handcuffed the entire restaurant crew as they asked for identification. Several workers were ultimately detained, though witness accounts differ on how many.

****

The crowd of locals at one point blocked an unmarked DHS vehicle from leaving a nearby intersection; they shouted profanities and called agents fascists. Agents sounded sirens, then deployed what KPBS described as a smoke device to disperse the crowd.

To the credit of this community, they fought back. Here’s the video:

San Diego erupts at ICE raiding a local restaurant and detaining ALL staff.

— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social)2025-05-31T15:10:30.838Z

Next up, we head to Manhattan, where Rep. Jerry Nadler (D- NY) saw iCE force their way into his congressional office and detain one of his staffers. ICE showed up at the door to Nadler’s office and said they had received “reports” that rioters were being harbored in the space. When his staff pushed back, they arrested one of them.

This is an extended excerpt from the NYT, but the details here are important. I also included a gift link. I’ll bold the areas where my eyes bulged out of my head upon reading.

The episode was recorded by someone who was sitting in Mr. Nadler’s office. In the video, an officer with the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is shown demanding access to a private area inside the office. The video was obtained by Gothamist, which earlier reported the confrontation.

“You’re harboring rioters in the office,” the federal agent, whose name tag and officer number are not visible in the video, says to a member of Mr. Nadler’s staff.

There were no riots reported on Wednesday at the federal building on Varick Street, though protesters and immigrant rights advocates gathered inside and outside the building earlier in the day. The immigration court is on the fifth floor and Mr. Nadler’s office is on the sixth.

***

The agents entered Mr. Nadler’s office because they had been told that protesters were there and were concerned for the safety of his staff members, according to a statement on Saturday from the Department of Homeland Security.

When they arrived, “one individual became verbally confrontational and physically blocked access to the office,” the statement said. That person, an aide to the congressman, was detained so the officers could complete their safety check, according to the statement.

In the video, a second aide standing at a door in the office asks one of the agents to show her a warrant. The agent says the officers do not need a warrant and walks past her.

***

Robert Gottheim, Mr. Nadler’s chief of staff, strongly disputed the Homeland Security Department’s description of events. Instead, he said, it appeared the agents were angry because members of the congressman’s staff had seen the officers detaining migrants in the building, and because advocates who had also witnessed the detentions outside the courtroom had been invited by the staff members to Mr. Nadler’s office.

(emphasis added)

Thankfully, the Nadler aide who was detained was only held in the hallway before being released, as far as I can tell. Once again, we have video, and Bluesky quickly identified one of the officers in this raid as William Krejci of DHS.

NYT: “The episode was recorded by someone who was sitting in Mr. Nadler’s office. In the video, an officer with the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is shown demanding access to a private area inside the office.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/n...

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social)2025-05-31T22:48:24.150Z

We are to the point where ICE is arresting members of Congress and their staff with transparently fabricated probable cause.

Next, we go to Charlottesville, VA, where ICE agents visited the homes of area Public Defenders and began questioning them, presumably about their undocumented clients. Unfortunately, I can’t get into the story to read it, and The Daily Progress is the only place I’ve seen this reported. But here’s the link if anyone has a subscription:

FBI agents are now visiting Charlottesville’s public defenders *at their homes*. It’s naked intimidation of our justice system.

— Sally Hudson (@sallylhudson.bsky.social)2025-06-01T12:42:01.902Z

All of this, of course, is driven by Trump’s promise to deport “millions of immigrants,” a promise he’s having trouble keeping. It turns out, people don’t like it when unidentified masked men bust into people’s homes to take their friends and neighbors away without due process. Especially when these big, macho ICE men are putting kids in zip ties.

Don't forget about the kids in zip ties There definitely seems to have been an escalation in tactics this week www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a...

— Peter Butler (@peter-butler.bsky.social)2025-05-31T17:53:43.143Z

If that’s not bad enough for you, an Orlando paper got hold of an email directing local law enforcement to remove their name tags from their uniforms while working with ICE.

It reads in part: “There has been a lot of activity and many recordings of us posted online when working with ICE. For officer safety, remove your name tag from your Class B uniforms only when working Operation Closeout.”

The email goes on to direct troopers to put their name tag back on when returning to regular shift or working a non-official patrol job.

And finally, here’s video of two plain-clothes men without ID grabbing a man from a New Hampshire courthouse in February, and taking down a bystander who uses a cane in the lobby.

As we saw with the unlawful kidnapping of Rümeysa Öztürk in Boston and many times since, ICE is roaming the country wearing masks to hide their identities and refusing to follow basic law enforcement practices, like identifying themselves to the people they are physically assaulting. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) is one of the few members of Congress speaking about ICE in plain terms.

“This is Gestapo-like behavior, where plainclothes officers wearing masks are terrorizing immigrants who are doing the right thing by going to court, following up on their immigration proceedings, and trying to come into this country lawfully,” Goldman said at the conference, comparing the seizures to the behavior of Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police force.

“These are routine appearances, they’re updates, they’re administrative, there is no reason for anyone to have expected anything unusual to happen today, and yet they’re ripped away from their families, from their communities,” the Congress member added.

It’s time for all of us to stop standing by and watching, waiting for our elected officials to do something about ICE. And there’s good news: We don’t have to take it! In Kent County, Delaware, the Camden Police Department stopped working with ICE following negative feedback from their community.

Police in Camden, Delaware, withdrew from an agreement Tuesday to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents because of what the chief of police said was pushback from the community.

The decision to withdraw comes just one week after the department had signed on to the ICE partnership, which had deputized local officers to enforce immigration laws.

Our local police work for us — not for Donald Trump, and certainly not for ICE. Over at The Markup, they’ve got a list of every state and local law enforcement department working with ICE, which they update regularly. Unbelievably, it’s currently 36 pages long (Good Lord, Florida).

I highly recommend checking the list out to see if your local cops are helping ICE terrorize immigrants in your area, and letting your local law enforcement and representatives know how you feel about that.

None of what’s happening right now is okay. It’s on us as Americans to stop it. None of us wants school kids to be asking, “Why didn’t anyone try to stop it?” 50 years from now, like we did about the Holocaust.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

I don’t want to leave you without something uplifting after such an infuriating LMP, so let’s take a moment to remember why we celebrate PRIDE, and remind ourselves how beautiful this country can be when we all accept each other for who we are.

Hey, survive and advance out there today. Don’t let the bastards get you down!

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