from the but-your-honor,-lying-is-all-we-have dept
Gregory Bovino’s star will continue to rise. Admitting you lied to a court no longer matters when the entire administration does it on a daily basis. All that matters is that you serve the fascist cause. And the Border Patrol commander sent to handle things in Chicago certainly has the right look for the job.
Between the alt-right hairdo and the wave the looks a lot like a Nazi salute, the guy who used to patrol the southern border in California is now the face of Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago, Illinois. The arrival of federal officers and federal troops has been greeted with protests, public statements, and lawsuits.
Bovino hasn’t actually been sued personally, but as the commander of the collective of bigots engaged in hunting down non-whites and removing them from the country, Bovino is definitely the source of the rights violations currently being litigated.
Bovino prides himself on answering to no one and perpetrating as much violence as possible against those who oppose him. He put his face out there willingly and seems to welcome as much press attention as possible, even as he continues to be the worst version of himself.
His actions have already gained the attention of a federal judge. The unprovoked violence engaged in by federal officers has already been hit with a federal injunction. And Bovino himself was one of the first to violate the court order, captured on camera tossing tear gas into a crowd of protesters despite not doing any of things he was supposed to do before throwing around crowd control munitions: issuing dispersal orders, giving people time to disperse, etc. When caught, he claimed someone had hit him in the head with a rock and suggested the presiding judge had no business telling him what to do since she herself hadn’t been hit in the head with a rock.
Well, this bit of pretense has already been exposed. Bovino admitted to the court he lied about being hit in the head with a rock thrown by protesters, as noted by Judge Sara Ellis following Bovino’s testimony:
“Mr. Bovino and the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had been hit by a rock in the head before throwing the tear gas, but video evidence disproves this. And he ultimately admitted he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas,” Ellis said Thursday.
And now Bovino has talked himself and his goon squad into the receiving end of an expanded injunction — one that Bovino will presumably violate as soon as is inhumanely possible:
The injunction granted by Judge Ellis on Thursday extends temporary restrictions that she issued last month. Judge Ellis ordered federal agents to wear body cameras, give at least two audible warnings before using riot control weapons, and to use those weapons only to “preserve life or prevent catastrophic outcomes.”
She said the restrictions were necessary because immigration agents in Chicago had pointed guns at civilians who were not presenting a physical threat, used pepper spray, deployed tear gas and shot pepper balls.
“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” Judge Ellis, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, said in a ruling from the bench. She added: “The use of force shocks the conscience.”
Her new order [PDF] says Bovino only part of larger problem — one that takes the form of pretty much every bully and bigot that currently serve as part of Trump’s mass deportation machine:
Plaintiffs have also presented evidence that makes clear that senior officials have encouraged and endorsed federal agents’ targeting of non-violent individuals exercising their First Amendment rights. For example, Defendant Noem has instructed federal agents to “go hard” and “hammer” individuals for “the way they are talking, speaking, who they’re affiliated with.” Defendant Bovino followed this up by informing federal agents that a “free speech zone” outside of the Broadview Detention Center is “now going to be a ‘free arrest zone.’” He later stated in an interview: “If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them. Don’t protest, and don’t trespass.” And during his deposition, he confirmed that he believed federal agents’ uses of force throughout Operation Midway Blitz were “more than exemplary.”
That much makes it clear the administration (in whatever form) will lie about the dangers it faces just so it can continue to amp up its own violence and violent rhetoric. You know who else does that? Bullying children, which is pretty much the entirety of the anti-migrant workforce, as Lisa Needham notes in her rundown of this year’s deportation efforts:
The federal government keeps painting a front-facing, meme-driven picture of ICE, one where they are impossibly tough and skilled, and they get to crack heads because it is so violent out there. But when they are forced to tell the truth in court, their injuries are comically minor, the kind of thing you wouldn’t even go home from work for.
So, which is it? Well, it really is both.
When DHS’s goons are a roving band of masked armed men, they’re tough as hell. And why not? They spend their days arresting schoolteachers and tear-gassing kids from a safe distance away. They’re pretty impervious to harm. That said, they also are little babies, because they don’t believe there should be any consequences for their actions, and even the smallest harm they suffer is an outrage, something they simply can’t comprehend.
And that’s completely expected. It’s an administration filled with some of the most childish people ever to hold high-level government positions. They’ve modeled themselves after Trump’s infantile belligerence and they’ve been rewarded handsomely for prostrating themselves in front of a man who is the embodiment of the phrase “lowest common denominator.” You’d never give a toddler the power to deprive people of their lives or freedoms. And yet, here we are, overrun by toddlers with lots of power and ambition but deliberately unwilling to grow up, even when there’s an entire nation at stake.
Filed Under: bigotry, border patrol, cbp, chicago, doj, gregory bovino, ice, liars, mass deportation, trump administration
