Trevor Timm on the DHS coup in Portland:

Virtually all of Portland’s local leaders, as well as Oregon’s leading representatives in Congress, have condemned the situation and called for an investigation.

But so far, DHS and the Trump administration do not seem deterred. The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, released a video statement Friday lamenting that Portland had declined the department’s “offer” of “support”. So DHS went ahead and sent in its thugs anyway. DHS’s list of reasons for invading Portland and implementing its terror operation, amid what it calls “rampant long-lasting violence”, consists mostly of graffiti incidents and minor property damage.

Watch the clip. It’s extraordinary.

How does he justify his refusal to do what the governor and mayor tell him to do? By talking melodramatic nonsense about having to “defend” the federal courthouse against “violent anarchists”…and then saying he’s seen the broken doors, the broken windows, the graffiti.

Vandalism at the federal courthouse means we need border patrol in rented cars kidnapping people off the street? I don’t think so.

Portland is almost 400 miles from the Canadian border and 80 miles from the Pacific ocean, by the way. It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, allows CBP to be terrorizing the streets to hunt down graffiti artists—even if they think they can operate anywhere that’s 100 miles from a border. In other words, it’s illegal, or it should be.

So many questions. What does border patrol have to do with breaking windows at a federal building? Is border patrol legally authorized to kidnap people off the streets? Does it have any accountability to local government? How does any of this work?

Also by the way this “statement” of the acting secretary’s was made to Fox News.

And who is Chad Wolf?

He previously served in several positions in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including as Chief of Staff of the Transportation Security Administration and Chief of Staff to DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He was an architect of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

From 2005 to 2016, he was a lobbyist, helping clients to secure contracts from the Transportation Security Administration, his previous employer.

Awesome. Corrupt and brutal.

Back to Trevor Timm:

DHS, even in the pre-Trump era, has been an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, full of massive government waste and abuse, and a civil liberties disaster to boot. Back in 2015, I called for it to be abolished in the pages of the Guardian. Under Trump it has reached new levels of depravity. Its disturbing anti-immigration actions have shown agents seemingly going out of their way to be as cruel as possible to those they apprehend.

Anyone only has to read the news from the past few weeks to witness DHS’s corruption and creeping authoritarianism: in one story, government auditors have found that the CBP spent money meant for food and medical supplies for detained migrants on ATVs and dirt bikes for themselves. In another, DHS deployed Predator drones, helicopters and airplanes to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters in 15 American cities.

None of this is ok.