When mass deportation becomes a training operation.

Trump's mass deportation has been brutal on our immigrant communities. I suppose I must forgive you as there is no way anyone could know when the media is not reporting much. You are not hearing about the gangs of cops beating people, throwing them in ICE and then quickly deporting them before complaints can be filed. You are not hearing about the sexual assaults happening to women and children. You are not witnessing the agents targeting Latino owned restaurants and grocery stores. You have yet to learn that Border Patrol is allowing militia to handcuff and seize property of humanitarians.

But it is happening.

While Trump demanded all federal law enforcement and prosecutorial power be focused on immigration to include taking agents away from drug, terrorism and other important areas, we simply are not seeing the media covering that much of this mass deportation...at least not the brutal parts of it. You have to go to social media or do the type of work I do to see the realities of his policies on families and communities.

What the media does cover well is the absurdity of this mass deportation. Whether it's Yosemite Sam's human version (Tom Homan) claiming his forces are being undermined by traitors when it is really that he and Trump cannot stop bragging and leaking information about their own operations, DHS and Trump lying about sending the "worst of the worst criminals" to Gitmo or them lying about sending convicted violent gang members to El Salvador for some bizarre outsourced torture, it does appear as if this four year planned deportation machine is more of fly by the seat of their pants sort of operation.

There is another facet of the mass deportation that few if anyone mentions. The more I watch the federal agencies work together, the more I realize the mass deportation is a training exercise.

Many of those outside of law enforcement believe that cops of all agencies and governments can just somehow work together. This is not true even when considering just the federal agencies. A Border Patrol agent cannot simply do an FBI agent's job tomorrow and vice versa. The three immigration enforcement agencies of ICE, CBP and Border Patrol have different authorities than the FBI, DEA or ATF. These authorities can overlap at times, but prior to this mass deportation, only the immigration enforcement agencies had immigration authority.

Immigration authority is different than peace officer authority. When a sheriff or police officer stops you, they have to have probable cause that you committed a crime. That means they believe they saw you doing something illegal. Immigration officers can pull you over for not being white (racial profiling) and for your proximity to the border, which is considered by the Supreme Court to be "reasonable suspicion of illegal alienage."

More than this, federal agencies like the ATF, FBI, DEA and Marshals are trained to develop casework, investigate, obtain warrants and make arrests. ICE, CBP and Border Patrol can do that, but they tend to do a fair amount of "driving while Brown" stops. I know from having been one that immigration agents believe the 4th Amendment to the Constitution is not as firm the closer you get to the border. Our checkpoints which are miles away from any border require you to violate your 5th Amendment rights against self incrimination by stating your citizenship. And yes, the 4th and 5th Amendments apply to undocumented people as well.

The mass deportation is teaching other federal agencies how to do immigration policing. That is, they are learning that they can get away with violating people's rights in a much broader sense. They will learn that they can beat, rape and even kill undocumented people without accountability. They will learn that they can accuse people with tattoos of being in gangs, and that anyone without their proper papers on them when asked is a criminal who should be sent to a gulag in El Salvador.

I believe this administration is pushing for people to become violent. Destroying the systems we all rely on will eventually cause chaos. They are waiting for something to justify their violent response, and it will be much worse than what they brought during the first Trump administration. While the military is busy guarding the border, the federal law enforcement agencies are learning to work on a level never before seen as one large federal civilian army. The mass deportation is creating the networking, infrastructure, communications, and training needed for when they will be used against us.

And then we will start to disappear.