The chilling visuals of unidentified federal officers hauling protestors into unmarked vans in cities across the United States have reverberated across the globe. A little over two months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, protestors continue to press for racial equality and decisive action against excessive use of force by law enforcement and security forces, particularly against racial minorities. Yet, as their calls for justice and reform grow louder, the crackdown by the government and its cronies and footsoldiers has only become more brutal.
In Portland, it has been observed that several protestors have been arbitrarily detained without explanation and hauled away by secret federal officers in unmarked vehicles. Similar events have taken place in New York City, where plainclothes police officers have swarmed demonstrators and taken them away. These ‘secret squads’ have been operating with impunity since June, when federal agents were first deployed to areas of mass unrest, with Portland being one of the first targeted cities.
nypd is out here KIDNAPPING protesters off of the street pic.twitter.com/LCCBj0Ipp8
— Natalie (@Naddleez) July 28, 2020
There are currently 114 federal law enforcement officers present in Portland to patrol federal buildings; these teams include personnel from the Federal Protective Service (FPS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US Marshals Service, and the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Oregon Public Broadcasting says that unidentified officers have been using unmarked vans to detain demonstrators since at least July 14.
Two of these demonstrators, Conner O’Shea and Mark Pettibone, have detailed their experiences to several news outlets. O’Shea and his friend had been participating in the protests for close to two months, when, at 2 am on July 13, “four or five dudes in camo jump[ed] out and start[ed] charging at us”. Neither O’Shea nor Pettibone saw any ‘identifying markers’, such as badges, numbers, or names on the officers’ uniforms. While O’Shea managed to get to safety, his friend was pulled into a van and taken away.
Pettibone said he was “tossed into the van”, where his “beanie was pulled over [his] face, so [he] couldn’t see”. He was driven and dropped off at the federal courthouse, where the officers then went through his belongings while they locked him up in a cell after reading his Miranda rights without telling him why he was being arrested. After Pettibone demanded a lawyer, the officers stopped the interview and released him without providing him with any record of his arrest. In the aftermath of the event, he said he was “terrified” and that the whole incident resembled something “out of a horror or sci-fi” where he was “being preyed upon”.
In response to such troubling events, several politicians have demanded an inquiry into these “secret police” forces and asked for the Trump administration to seek consent before deploying federal law enforcement personnel and to require these officers to provide identification. The individuals pushing for this include Oregon Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, a former US attorney for the Oregon District, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Connecticut Senator Christopher S. Murphy, and the mayors of Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Albuquerque, Washington DC, and Kansas City.
Proponents of such merciless tactics, however, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, have said that the anger over such incidents is misplaced, as the practice is “so common it is barely worth discussion” as “literally every police department in America” has such divisions. This point of view is reinforced right from the top-down, with President Donald Trump saying that this form of federal intervention is to “help Portland, not hurt it”. However, regardless of the legality of the practice, perhaps what we should be asking is why this sort of response has been normalized. If this form of “help” is “so common”, perhaps the question we should be asking how we got here and whether this is really the most effective and responsible response to calls for equality and justice.
As the interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Oregon Jann Carson wrote: “Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping.” Zakir Khan, a spokesman for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, made the poignant remark that cities like Portland and New York are being used as “test cases” by the government to “see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country”.
Militarized Federal Agents from a patchwork of outside agencies have begun policing Portland (in rented minivans vans) without the explicit approval of the mayor, the state, or local municipalities. This is what that looks like in practice: pic.twitter.com/losap4SsgI
— The Sparrow Project (@sparrowmedia) July 15, 2020
If American citizens wish to see the path their government is potentially taking them down, they need only look at how such supposedly ‘common’ and ‘lawful’ detentions have morphed into widescale regimes of enforced disappearances and kidnappings, and even extra-judicial killings, across the globe. While comparing the actions of the US government to that of Venezuela’s or China’s or Zimbabwe’s might be somewhat hyperbolic, it does put into perspective the sheer irony of the US pushing for dialogue and action on human rights violations in those countries while simultaneously brutally intimidating its own citizens into silence.
The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and multiple other international governments, actors, and organizations have all accused the Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolás Maduro, of using enforced disappearances as a tool of political suppression. In 2019, there were 524 disappearances, up 200 from 2018, and it is estimated that these incidents have only escalated during the ongoing coronavirus-induced pandemic. Moreover, as several courts are closed, these detentions are even more prolonged than earlier, and lawyers can “no longer visit detainees” or “ask tribunals to access court documents”. In addition, some detainees are often transferred from one prison to another without their legal team being informed, under the pretext of disease control.
Likewise, in China, human rights activists point to how the Chinese government has restricted its citizens, including activists and journalists, from discussing the coronavirus pandemic, with over 5,000 people arrested during the initial stages of the outbreak and then placed in ‘medical quarantine’ under the guise of protecting public health. For instance, lawyer Chen Qiushi, who shared videos of Wuhan hospitals, and Chinese state TV reporter Li Zehua, were respectively ‘disappeared’ into medical containment and arrested. Chinese property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang mysteriously vanished in March after calling President Xi Jinping a “clown” and criticizing his coronavirus response. Additionally, doctors like Li Wenliang and Ai Fen, who tried to sound the alarm bells and raise awareness about the dangers of the virus, have been silenced by authorities for “disturbing social atmosphere”, “making false comments”, and fearmongering.
In Zimbabwe, under President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the remnants of oppression that guided former leader Robert Mugabe’s regime still run strong across the country, with dissenters facing a whole host of physical and psychological intimidation tactics. For example, in May, three female opposition activists—Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova, and Member of Parliament (MP) Joanna Mamombe—were pulled over by police in Harare and then abducted, tortured, and sexually assaulted. After they were released two days later, they were charged for violating COVID-19 regulations on public gatherings, for promoting public violence, and for ‘breach of peace’. The three women were scheduled to march in a peaceful protest on May 13 that was organized by the Alliance Youth Assembly of the principal opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change. These three women are hardly alone, and such events have become even more common during the ongoing pandemic. In fact, during the past few months, over 100,000 citizens have been arrested for supposedly flouting coronavirus lockdown restrictions, wherein the government is using the coronavirus as a pretext to silence political dissent.
In spite of there being fewer people out on the streets, enforced disappearances are also continuing unabated in various places across the world, including Bangladesh, Balochistan, and Mexico. As the focus of international organizations and countries turns towards disease control and prevention, several regimes are using this period of reduced visibility to continue and escalate their strategies of terror and intimidation against political dissent and opposition, leading to multiple cases of enforced disappearances and kidnappings.
As we cast our eyes back towards the US and the supporters, allies, and minions of the Trump administration, one must look to these other countries as examples of the perilous path the President is potentially leading the country down. The American political opposition and activists are already acutely aware of the dangers of conflating safety and protection with systemic discrimination and an erosion of democracy. It is now time for their counterparts across the aisle to take heed of this as well, as the absence of rights for some is an absence of rights for all. If Americans unquestioningly let these gross abuses of power pass them by unencumbered, they risk the US becoming the kind of country its government so frequently denounces and punishes. However, if the experience of Black Americans is any indication, America beat these countries to the punch decades ago, long before Trump.