Emmanuel Malion

I would hesitate to say that we don't see militarized forces on the ground already.

When we see ICE, they're out there with military helmets, flak jackets, military-grade weapons.

They have armored vehicles.

The same is true for the Minneapolis Police Department.

And so the line between what domestic policing looks like and what military looks like has been bleeding since, certainly since 9-11, when many of the

Gadgets, many of the tools, many of the strategies, much of the training that law enforcement receives now is modeled on this war on terrorism, such that our state and local police departments and our federal police departments, our federal enforcement agencies, have all become significantly militarized relative to what they were beforehand.

So while it's truly exceptional, I think the degree of violence, the scale of immigration enforcement in the interior, with the seeming total disregard for the rule of law from top officials on down, these are continuities that I think trace much of the movement against policing and police violence and movements for racial protesting over the past decade plus, right?

I think that this is just a logical continuation of a backlash to those movements.

Sure.

There's a not so discrete connection between the desires and stated policy goals of open white nationalists and this administration.

Certainly, Stephen Miller, who is in the administration and seems to be

The principal advisor on issues of immigration enforcement is and has been called by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center as someone that's openly embracing white nationalist talking points.

To be clear, white nationalist has been at the core of much of our immigration policy since the first Immigration and Nationality Act, which limited naturalization to white people alone.

And so it's not as if this is arising from the Trump administration wholeheartedly.

This has been something that has animated immigration discourse and certainly white

exclusion, the policing of borders, the policing of racial groups within the country for the entire history of our country.

I think that what we're seeing now, certainly that is renewed since

the passage of the Civil Rights Act is that Trump is openly embracing not only having people that certainly embrace and champion white nationalist talking points, but seeking to actively recruit white nationalists into doing immigration enforcement work.

There are historical precedents for this, certainly in the

1920s when there was a resurgent KKK, one of their strategies was to openly join law enforcement, internal law enforcement agencies, and recruit amongst other KKK members to join law enforcement.