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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We look now more at how ICE is recruiting thousands of new deportation officers. A report by The Washington Post shows ICE plans to spend $100 million for a, quote, “wartime recruitment” strategy that targets gun rights supporters, military enthusiasts through online influencers, along with people who have attended UFC fights, listened to far-right podcasts or shown interest in guns and tactical gear.
It uses the ad-industry technique known as “geofencing” to send ads to people near military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses or gun shows. Some of ICE’s recruitment ads appear to refer to white nationalist slogans or openly quote them. After ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, an ad on ICE’s Instagram account claimed, quote, “We’ll have our home again,” and featured a song popular among white nationalists with lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.”
Our next guest is investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein. He has a new report headlined “Immigration Agents Terrified of ICE Backlash After Shooting,” that includes leaked documents showing ICE and Border Patrol are seeking volunteers for the surge in operations in Minneapolis, with one agent saying, quote, “Key word is it’s on a ‘voluntary’ basis. … If no experienced senior agents step up, they send the new guys straight out of the academy. Not a good idea,” unquote.
Welcome back, Ken. Lay out what you found.
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.
Well, one of the most surprising parts of reporting on this was seeing the disjunct between the Department of Homeland Security’s public-facing description of the shooting, this bravado they had, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeling her a terrorist and pretty much dragging her corpse through the streets as she, you know, sullied her name in the public consciousness — again, within just a couple of hours of the shooting — and then you talk to people that work for Homeland Security privately, and a very different picture emerges. They’re very conscious of the protests that are taking place in Minneapolis. They’re very concerned about it. And there’s splits within the agency about the shooting itself and the general mission. The reason they are going to these volunteers is because they’re worried about sending more experienced agents there who might not agree with the mission. And none of that is stuff you hear when you look at the public-facing officials in the Trump administration describing these incidents and the department.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the budget, the massive increase in the budget, that, by the way, could lead to another government shutdown by the end of the month — right? — because you have people like Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator who heads the Subcommittee on Homeland Security, saying they’re not going to endorse this budget. On Tuesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus vowed to oppose new funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless it includes new reforms. This is Congressmember Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis.
REP. ILHAN OMAR: We cannot, and we should not, continue to fund agencies that operate with impunity, that escalate violence and that undermine the very freedoms this country claims to uphold.
AMY GOODMAN: And meanwhile, Tuesday evening, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and others joined hundreds of protesters outside D.C. headquarters of Customs and Border Protection, said he supports the appropriations bill to push for changes at ICE.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: The United States Congress should not fund a Department of Homeland Security that is not obeying the laws of the United States of America.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Klippenstein, are we seeing some changes in Democrats’ positions here?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Absolutely among Democratic voters. Among Congress, there is some opposition, but among congressional leadership, they’ve made it very clear that they are not willing to shut down the government over this. They asked Senator Cory Booker this, for instance, yesterday on MS NOW, and he said, “No, the last shutdown didn’t work.” Chuck Schumer had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even do the shutdown earlier this year, to play hardball with the Republicans, after he folded instantly at the beginning of the second Trump administration. So, there are definitely splits within the caucus, but among leadership, there’s opposition to the idea.
That being said, among the public, there’s been a sea change in opinion with respect to ICE and the deportations. Where there was more openness to it when Trump first came into office, that picture has completely flipped, and it’s a deeply unpopular proposition. And that’s what the opposition among the Homeland Security officials that I interviewed for my story are reflective of. They’re part of the public, too, to some extent, and they also are seeing all the same videos that we’re watching, seeing the same protests, seeing the same public sentiment, and they have a lot of the same feelings about it, particularly the older, more experienced agents, who are not the beneficiaries of this tidal wave of funding.
I mean, they have more money than they know what to do with. They have tripled ICE’s law enforcement budget. And the reason they’re doing all of the — you know, you described in the previous segment the lengths to which they’re going to try to staff up. The reason for that is, again, they have more money than they know what to do with, and they need to fill those roles. And they’re doing everything they can to create them, so that the actual personnel head count can match the resources that they now have.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken, you’ve also read ICE’s “deadly force” documents, that you say, quote, “are bureaucratically dense and elastic to the extreme, offering every possible excuse for ICE’s killing of Renee Good. But they are also stark in their failure to address any aspect of the dramatically new environment created by ICE’s expanded mission.” What do they reveal, these documents?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: This was maybe the most alarming part of this entire story for me, was seeing that they have not changed the use-of-force policies for ICE whatsoever since Trump came into office, despite the fact that, again, they have tripled the budget for the enforcement part of it and, in addition to that, just militarized the entire thing. They’re wearing masks. They’re being deployed in states where the majority of the state population doesn’t support them. They’re being used in a far more aggressive, sweeping and ambitious manner than ever before. So you would think that there would be some kind of reflection of that in policy, at the very least, not just to protect the public, but to protect them, as well. There’s nothing in its use-of-force documents — which you can, you know, go on my newsletter and read in full — that addresses protesters, civil unrest, even rioters, which Trump is always talking about. There’s absolutely — you can search for those words; none of those words appear in the document.
And what’s more, we only know what the document says because it was accidentally uploaded by the Trump administration over the course of a federal court litigation. The entire thing was blacked out, redacted, until December of last year. And that’s a failure on Congress’s part for not compelling ICE to release these things and make them public, especially with an administration that made very clear that this is going to be its signature policy, these mass deportations.
AMY GOODMAN: Last question. You’ve done a lot of reporting on Trump’s new presidential directive, NSPM-7, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, a sweeping order that directs federal agencies to treat political dissent as a form of “domestic terrorism,” a term that Kristi Noem is throwing around right and left, accusing also the deceased, accusing Renee Good of domestic terrorism. Can you put these latest developments in perspective?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah. So, there’s a straight through line from the shooting of Renee Good to NSPM-7, this presidential memorandum, that, as you said, redefined “terrorism” around a number of what are called indicators, because you have to try to — terrorism is about precrime. You’re trying to predict a crime before it has happened. That’s what the word “terrorism” is for. And so, how do you predict a crime? Well, you got to look at speech. And what are the speech indicators you’re looking for? If you go and read the actual presidential directive, it literally says things like anti-Christian sentiment, anti-American sentiment, anti-traditional family sentiment, anti-capitalist sentiment. And it describes one of — one of the things it describes is anti-ICE protesters and sentiment, which is exactly what we saw.
Moreover, the Justice Department released a sort of follow-on memo citing NSPM-7, and one of the things that it was concerned with was, quote, “impeding or interfering with ICE operations,” which is exactly what Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and the Trump administration accused Renee Good of doing by having her car parked in the middle of the road. So, there is a straight line from NSPM-7 to the tragedy that we saw unfold last week.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, you say ICE is OK with Renee Good’s killing. Why?
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN: Because its policy all but allows its ICE agents to carry these things out, and the only thing restraining them is their own perceived sense of being in danger. That is not a policy you have in place if, you know, you want them to carry out their responsibilities in a circumspect way, because not only can they say whatever they feel they perceived, because we obviously can’t — we don’t have a window into their mind — but in addition to that, all the propaganda you’ve been describing earlier about them being deployed to war zones — and literally, that’s how they’re recruiting ICE agents at that point — that creates a psychological environment in which they genuinely believe that.
And that has been another aspect of reporting on this that surprised me. They don’t see it as rhetoric. They think that that’s actually describing the conditions on the ground. A war zone — as your previous guest described it, you know, “the war on terror come home” — that is overwhelmingly believed by the younger cohort that’s joining ICE now. And they need to be restrained by firmer policies than that their own perception was that they were in danger.
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Klippenstein, I want to thank you so much for being with us, investigative reporter. We’ll link to your recent articles at democracynow.org.
