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On Friday,<\/span> I testified<\/a> in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker\u2019s \u201cIllinois Accountability Commission,\u201d the state government body he set up after the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we\u2019re experiencing now. The body\u2019s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was called as the commission\u2019s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE\u2014a story I\u2019ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement\u2014and found myself horrified anew.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Good morning;<\/span> my name is Garrett Graff and I\u2019m honored to be here to speak about the historical challenges and problems with the Department of Homeland Security and two of its largest components, CBP\u2014aka Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol\u2014and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, let me introduce myself. I\u2019m a journalist and historian; I\u2019ve written multiple books focused on federal law enforcement, national security, and American government\u2014one of which, about Watergate, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History\u2014and published dozens of articles in places like POLITICO, the New York Times<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, and The Atlantic<\/em> about DHS, the Justice Department, and federal law enforcement, including the FBI, CBP, and ICE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My testimony today is based on, draws upon, and in places quotes from that extensive previous reporting and writing over the years and is informed by literally hundreds of conversations with agents and executives at all levels of federal law enforcement, including dozens or scores of interviews with agents and officers of ICE and CBP. I\u2019ve interviewed CBP commissioners and ICE directors in their executive suites; I\u2019ve been on patrol with Border Patrol, ridden on their boats and flown in their helicopters, shared meals with the union officials and been in the studio while they recorded their popular podcast, and observed as Border Patrol apprehended migrants crossing the Texas-Mexico border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My goal today is to outline for the Commission some of the history of ICE and CBP and, in particular, to outline what has changed\u2014and what is changing\u2014as the Trump administration floods both agencies with money from the so-called \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds\u2014from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties\u2014is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are not aberrations\u2014these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9\/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In particular, CBP has been likely<\/em> the deadliest and certainly<\/em> the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9\/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICE is an agency whose recruiting and training standards are so low that other federal law enforcement agents say pejoratively that ICE is \u201chired by the pound, from the pound.\u201d And the paramilitary CBP, especially, has been uniquely callous with human life and suffers from a deeply ingrained culture of racism and misogyny, all of which is enabled by an all-but unequaled longstanding sense of impunity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n CBP\u2014the nation\u2019s largest law enforcement agency\u2014has been plagued for two decades by a tidal wave of crime, corruption, and misconduct driven by a disastrous post-9\/11 hiring surge that flooded the force with thousands of agents and officers who never should have been given a badge and a gun\u2014including, as one CBP commissioner told me, even accidentally hiring members of actual drug cartels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP\u2019s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In total, according to CBP\u2019s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024\u2014the last year numbers are available\u2014at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before I dive in, I want to add an over-arching caveat. None of what I\u2019m about to say is meant to imply that everything was hunky-dory in DHS at noon on January 20th<\/sup> last year when Donald Trump returned to the presidency. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet something was fundamentally different before last year: ICE and CBP managed to go about their work in such a way that didn\u2019t cause ordinary law-abiding US citizens to fear for their lives; ICE or CBP agents didn\u2019t routinely operate wearing masks and deploy teargas daily against US citizens; the entire school systems of major US cities<\/a> didn\u2019t have to close in fear of CBP and ICE operations targeting neighborhoods, and professional sports leagues like the NBA didn\u2019t have to cancel games because of ICE and CBP violence in major American cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something big has changed\u2014and my hope is that this testimony will help explain what and how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, how history plagues CBP and ICE. On September 11, 2001, immigration was the purview of the Justice Department\u2019s Immigration and Naturalization Service while border trade and travel was the responsibility of the Treasury Department\u2019s US Customs Service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the wake of the 9\/11 attacks and as part of the creation of DHS and the massive reshuffling of government, both INS and Customs were broken apart. ICE brought together the \u201clegacy INS\u201d deportation and detention officers, which were renamed as what\u2019s now known as Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), as well as the \u201clegacy INS\u201d and \u201clegacy Customs\u201d special agents to form the Homeland Security Investigations division, HSI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other parts of INS and Customs were reshuffled into the new, supposedly \u201cunified\u201d border agency of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The green-uniformed Border Patrol were in charge of patrolling the border in between legal ports of entry while a team made up of \u201clegacy Customs inspectors\u201d and USDA agriculture inspectors were combined and renamed into the blue-uniformed Office of Field Operations to handle legitimate trade and travel through \u201cports of entry\u201d like land crossings, seaports, and airports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PROBLEM #1: A HIRING SURGE GONE WRONG<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the first things Congress did with the new agency was to super-charge its hiring. The agency\u2019s own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have \u201coperational control\u201d over 97 percent of the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plan to remedy this lack of control of the border was audacious\u2014and remarkably ill-conceived: During the eight years of the Bush administration, the Border Patrol surged from 9,200 agents in 2001 to some 18,000 agents\u2014and eventually peaked in the Obama administration at 21,000 agents. Add in the officers of the Office of Field Operations and the air and marine officers, and CBP had a gun-carrying workforce of about 45,000 agents and officers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was plenty of evidence even before the hiring surge to believe it was a bad idea. Police departments in Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., had all been beset by systemic misconduct scandals after they had tried to grow their force rapidly in the 1980s and \u201990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Border Patrol hiring surge would be no different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The surge meant the agency had to search far and wide for increasingly less qualified candidates. The agency raised its recruiting age limit from 37 to 40, and regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. Agents in the field pejoratively referred to the new hires as \u201cNo Trainee Left Behind.\u201d By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This hiring surge collided with two other fundamental and foundational problems with CBP\u2014its legal authorities and its culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PROBLEM #2: LIMITED LEGAL AUTHORITIES<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding both ICE and CBP requires starting with the difference between two US government \u201cjob codes,\u201d known as \u201c1811s\u201d vs. \u201c1801s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So-called \u201cGS-1801s\u201d are the federal government\u2019s street cops\u2014the bottom ranks of law enforcement. The positions come with less training and lower education requirements\u2014usually only a high school degree or equivalent\u2014as well as more limited authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of CBP, including both the Border Patrol and Office of Field Operation, are \u201c1801s,\u201d as are all ICE ERO deportation officers. All of them have strictly limited arrest powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there are the \u201cGS-1811\u201d positions, known as \u201cSpecial Agent \/ Criminal Investigator.\u201d These are the government\u2019s detectives\u2014think the FBI, Secret Service, US Marshals, and, notably, ICE HSI agents. These positions usually require more work experience and a college degree, and come with far more training (months, not weeks), and more broad investigative authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The difference between 1801s and 1811s may seem minor, but it\u2019s incredibly important in understanding why CBP and ICE are as rogue and poorly trained as they are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For one thing, that subtle difference in job code meant that CBP was entirely set up as 1801s, which inadvertently meant that it had no authority or power to investigate wrongdoing by its own agents and workforce\u2014to make that point more sharply, in the post-9\/11 reorganization, we created the nation\u2019s largest law enforcement agency and didn\u2019t give it the power to have the internal affairs capacity that one would expect at even a mid-size local police department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a key ingredient in a recipe for disaster\u2014one that would not be fixed until the final months of the Obama administration, more than a decade after the creation of DHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings me to the third fundamental challenge and problem with CBP and, especially, the Border Patrol\u2014its fiercely independent and closed-rank culture and tradition, borne of policing and protecting a largely unpopulated, harsh, and isolated region along the US-Mexican border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PROBLEM #3: TRADITION AND CULTURE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Border Patrol\u2019s culturally and traditionally something akin to what I\u2019ve described as \u201cpart police force, part occupying army, [and] part frontier cavalry.\u201d The traditional job of Border Patrol agents has been hard\u2014they often work alone or in pairs in rural, rugged terrain, with backup and help often miles and sometimes even an hour or more away. Agents developed a strong tradition of frontier-style justice; its agency motto, \u201cHonor first,\u201d is as much a statement of machismo as it is about integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This fierce independence manifests itself in distinct areas worthy of note, which combine to make it particularly susceptible for a would-be authoritarian\u2014its approach to its daily work and use-of-force; a deep-seated institutional culture of racism and misogyny; and a pugilistic approach to politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Use of force: <\/strong>This is an agency that is uniquely callous about human lives\u2014both of US citizens and migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Racism and misogyny:<\/strong> The racist and nativist roots of the Border Patrol are well known, as scholars like Kelly Lytle Hernandez traced in her book \u201cMigra!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what is remarkable is how the seeping cultural corruption since 9\/11 has taken an agency founded a century ago to enforce explicitly racist policies and managed to make it even more<\/em> racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This underlying racism, misogyny, and nativism has contributed to the third area of the Border Patrol\u2019s culture I\u2019d like to address\u2014its unusually pugilistic participation in national politics. The Border Patrol union has particularly resisted transparency efforts and attempts to rein in use-of-force. When CBP announced it would recognize officers and agents who de-escalated confrontations and avoid using deadly force, the union called the new award \u201cdespicable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The union has also especially carved out a unique relationship with Donald Trump since the earliest days of his presidential campaign. It was the first union to endorse Trump\u2014later followed by ICE\u2019s union\u2014and Donald Trump actually first wore his now signature \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hat during a summer 2015 tour of the border initiated by local Border Patrol union officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The entirely predictable result:<\/strong> It wouldn\u2019t surprise any seasoned law enforcement leader that doubling the size of CBP without adequate vetting, training, oversight, or management led to a host of problems\u2014not the least of which was the stunning arrest statistics I cited earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hugely elevated misconduct, crime, and corruption problems continue to dog CBP to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, CBP\u2019s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES<\/a> higher than other federal law enforcement agencies. CBP\u2019s corruption problem was so bad that, according to what two CBP officials told me, DHS leadership under Janet Napolitano ordered CBP to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a story that too much of the public still doesn\u2019t know and too many policymakers still don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me add one more caveat here: It\u2019s not my goal here to paint all of CBP with a brush of misconduct, racism, and corruption. Many agents and officers are excellent\u2014serving our nation in hard jobs in the best possible tradition. But as one female agent told Mother Jones<\/a><\/em> in 2024, \u201cI was a loyal agent and employee for 27 years and I see the good in the agency. But I can\u2019t deny that the worst that I\u2019ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we\u2019re supposed to arrest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A BRIEF HISTORY OF ICE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let me turn my attention for a moment to ICE. In the reshuffling of DHS, ICE got the job no one wanted\u2014immigration enforcement domestically is arguably the country\u2019s most fraught and unsettled policy area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of its roughly 20 years of existence, ICE has faced a clear problem\u2014there are way way way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than Congress funded ICE to find, arrest, and deport. For many years, ICE was budgeted for around 400,000 deportations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICE\u2019s ERO side has long relied upon and focused heavily on what\u2019s known as \u201cprosecutorial discretion.\u201d Under that strategy, ICE ERO mostly focused on deporting people with a so-called \u201cfinal order of removal\u201d\u2014e.g., people who had exhausted all the legal process and ignored the binding decision of the immigration courts to leave the country\u2014or people with criminal records above and beyond simply being undocumented\u2014e.g., the much-talked murderers, drug smugglers, gang members, rapists, and the like who are always cited as the Trump administration\u2019s main targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That meant\u2014generally speaking, and again with the all caveats I listed above\u2014that if you were an undocumented immigrant but weren\u2019t on the government\u2019s radar, you didn\u2019t have to worry much in your day-to-day life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The strategy of discretion worked. By 2011, nearly half of the 400,000 people deported by ICE had a criminal conviction, up from a third in 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That work was manpower intensive, but it also meant that they were making a real difference in terms of crime in the United States. They were actually finding, arresting, and deporting the \u201cworst of the worst,\u201d while, for the most part, leaving the day-laborers and abuelas<\/em> alone to await whatever political solution to America\u2019s immigration crisis Congress could someday find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Donald Trump was elected president and took office a second time last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, that \u201cprosecutorial discretion\u201d is out the window. Last spring, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller set an arbitrary target of one million deportations a year\u2014which translates into immigration officers making 3,000 arrests a day. That new quota meant ICE and CBP had to abandon any pretext of targeted enforcement operations; it took too long and required too many officers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those raids where Greg Bovino\u2019s heavily-armed CBP agents storm into Home Depot parking lots are a necessity of this new quota because it\u2019s the low-hanging fruit of immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, ICE and CBP officers around the country\u2014and particularly in targeted operations in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis\u2014are stopping, detaining, and deporting people with no criminal records who are following all legal procedures for their asylum, immigration, or citizenship proceedings. These actions aren\u2019t because any of these immigrants pose a threat to the United States\u2014it\u2019s because they\u2019re easy pickings and ICE and CBP have embraced \u201cquantity\u201d over \u201cquality.\u201d The terror and trauma of theses arrests is the point\u2014not the safety of the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That shift is reflected in how most people<\/a> now detained by ICE have no criminal record. A CATO Institute roundup<\/a> in November found that \u201cnearly three in four (73 percent) had no criminal conviction\u201d and just \u201c5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not how ICE has traditionally been used, and CBP wasn\u2019t supposed to be routinely policing the streets and cities of America\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Border Patrol and ICE are just not trained, prepared, or accustomed to patrolling \u201cregular\u201d America and rolling through neighborhoods, school grounds, parking lots. They\u2019re not regular police, and they don\u2019t know how to behave or navigate urban civilian environments. They don\u2019t have the muscle memory or de-escalation skills of dealing with angry citizens or innocent people. It\u2019s clear that many lack real-world policing skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that they\u2019re instead approaching their work not as law enforcement but as an occupation military force is clear in the language officials are using; yesterday alone, Greg Bovino gave an attaboy video calling for agents to \u201cTurn and Burn\u201d and Tom Homan referred to agents deploying to Minneapolis as being \u201cin theater.\u201d This is not the mentality we want guiding or inspiring a federal law enforcement agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their poor training and sense of political impunity is contributing to and driving their \u201cArrest First and Question Later\u201d approach, which is the exact opposite of what would you expect in a free and democratic society, and it has had entirely predictable outcomes. ProPublica found in October that more than 170 US citizens had been arrested by immigration authorities<\/a>, some disappearing into ICE\u2019s apparatus for days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I believe that American exceptionalism\u2014the sense that \u201cit can\u2019t happen here\u201d\u2014blinds us to the realities of our current political life. The behavior of ICE and CBP over the last year is one such case. In any other foreign country, if a US reporter was writing about these raids and the occupation of Chicago last fall or Minneapolis right now, we wouldn\u2019t hesitate to call ICE or CBP as a \u201cparamilitary force loyal to the regime\u201d or \u201cmasked right-wing militia\u201d (and that, by the way, is exactly what other countries\u2019 media<\/a> are calling it here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, as an even larger cohort of even less qualified and less trained ICE and CBP officers begin to hit the streets, this is all almost certainly going to get worse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to <\/span>focus my final section of remarks about what we can expect in the months to come as ICE and CBP together see a flood of funding that is unprecedented\u2014even measured against the wild amounts of money thrown at immigration and border security after 9\/11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2014, my Border Patrol reporting was titled \u201cThe Green Monster<\/a>.\u201d Today, we\u2019re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency\u2014one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels. This time, unlike the money for the Border Patrol after 9\/11, ICE\u2019s giant new supercharged ranks will be focused not on America\u2019s borders, but America\u2019s streets, neighborhoods, and businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are set to repeat as a nation every single mistake we made after 9\/11 with CBP and the Border Patrol\u2014but worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The goal for growing ICE with 10,000 new officers is both a larger total number than the Border Patrol tried to hire during its surge and also represents a larger total percentage of the existing ICE force. ICE is set to receive $30 billion in new funding for this hiring surge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, we should have specific fresh concerns about WHO<\/em> is applying for these new jobs at ICE and CBP, which also has plans to hire thousands of new agents. After 9\/11, the Border Patrol played on patriotism in its recruiting. Today, DHS and ICE are relying are explicitly white nationalist rhetoric and imagery in their promotion materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As one of the first moves to revamp its training, ICE proved that it\u2019s building a Trump cult of personality as much as hiring for a law enforcement agency\u2014it cut its previous five-month training academy to just 47 days, a period chosen, according to what three officials told<\/a> The Atlantic<\/em>, \u201cbecause Trump is the 47th president.\u201d ICE is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them and swearing them in virtually, promising that it\u2019ll catch up on their background checks later, CNN reported<\/a>. The training has already been cut a second time to just 42 days to speed getting officers into the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that as DHS deploys CBP and ICE in new ways in American life that it is actually CUTTING<\/em>, and not increasing, training, shows that DHS has no intention to have them up to the basic national law enforcement standards\u2014they are being designed to be a blunt instrument only, a roving paramilitary force that serves at the pleasure of the president himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lastly, news headlines are also beginning to feel eerily familiar about what the early warning signs of CBP\u2019s tidal wave of misconduct and criminality looked like in the late 2000s. There are major warning signs that ICE\u2019s workforce has a similar misconduct problem today. In December, a detention officer at an ICE facility in Louisiana pleaded guilty to raping a Nicaraguan detainee<\/a> for months, and an off-duty ICE officer who shot and killed<\/a> a man in L.A. on New Year\u2019s Eve had been accused of \u201callegedly whipp[ing] his sons with a belt and ma[king] racist and homophobic remarks in the past.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n And again\u2014the hiring surge is just getting started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, there are two specific new concerns I see looming on the horizon that I have not addressed previously in today\u2019s testimony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First is ICE and CBP\u2019s giant investment and deployment of surveillance technologies\u2014some of which have been leading to mistaken arrests in the field and much of which, as currently envisioned, is not consistent with policing in a free society. ICE is extensively using data-mining<\/a> and facial recognition<\/a> technologies with little public understanding of the safeguards behind their use. In particular, there\u2019s a facial recognition app called \u201cMobile Fortify,\u201d which ICE is using and claiming is the \u201cbe-all-and-end-all\u201d of whether someone is in the United States legally. There are multiple documented instances<\/a> where this app has returned false or contradictory information and yet ICE has relied on it to make detentions and arrests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, I have not spoken much about ICE\u2019s detention centers; the Trump administration and ICE are in the midst of enormously ambitious plans to double the capacity of detention facilities, from about 55,000 beds to more than 107,000 beds, as part of the plan to pour about $45 billion into detention facilities. I would expect and predict that over the course of 2026, we will see this plan become the center of new scandals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me leave you today with a final point: This doesn\u2019t change unless we demand change and make it change\u2014the way that the funding for ICE has been allocated, it can spend this money straight through 2029. Congress is going to have to act to turn that funding and hiring spigot off\u2014otherwise, this continues on autopilot for the next four years. But the damage we are doing to our own country is long-lasting. Remember we are two decades removed from the start of the CBP hiring surge and I can still find you a news story or headline every single day that traces its origins back to the mistakes made in that surge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year\u2014let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.<\/p>\r\n
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Part I: The History<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Part II: What’s Changed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Part III: What’s to Come<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Source link www.motherjones.com<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff\u2019s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here. On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker\u2019s \u201cIllinois Accountability Commission,\u201d the state government body he set up after the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we\u2019re…","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":69,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}