The expression “desaparecidos”, or The Disappeared, comes from the Dirty Wars of Chile and Argentina under fascist governments around 1973, and referred to the tens of thousands of folks those regimes didn’t like, who just disappeared and were never seen again.

It seems fair, it seems appropriate, under the Trump regime, to bring that word back. Nearly 60,000 About 100,000 folks so far – presumably immigrants and mostly brown – have been disappeared by masked, unidentified thugs, and many of them have not been accounted for. There’s no way to know if some of these kidnappers are really working for the government – there have long been reports of ICE impersonators trying to grab women, and who knows what has happened along these lines that we never heard about. In this big and sick country who knows? We should assume the worst, in this lawless climate.

Here’s the Trump cartel’s problem – they had promised their voters “the biggest MASS DEPORTATION in American history,” receiving thunderous applause from the MAGA faithful (right) and this was also a promise they were serious about. But they claimed this would be focused on violent criminals, drug dealers, human traffickers, gang members. Maybe they really thought there were MILLIONS of THOSE miscreants who are also undocumented, but there aren’t. And it’s been embarrassingly hard for the vain and cruel Trump to keep up with the deportation numbers of Obama and Biden (who led a country that people actually wanted to come to!)

And so the ghoulish white supremacist Stephen Miller (pictured at left, camped outside Elon Musk’s home trying to woo back his wife) set a new goal of 3000 a day. 3000 undocumented immigrants must be arrested and deported every day! With all the dangerous ones gone, the bar had to be lowered to law-abiding, productive immigrants – Los Angeles Home Depots were invaded, farmworkers picking our crops were chased down, law-abiding immigrants showing up as ordered to their court hearings were ambushed.

But you probably know all that already. Just sayin’, it’s pretty clear that there are at least two other underlying reasons behind the urgency to mass-deport immigrants, beyond reducing crime or keeping a campaign promise:

For one thing, the Republicans have believed or pretended to believe, despite all evidence, since at least Sanchez vs. Dornan in the 90’s, that ILLEGALS VOTE, and that Democrats wouldn’t win without “illegals” voting. So they dream that their ethnic cleansing, for example, in California will turn the state red, LOL. I suspected that was driving this, and had that confirmed recently (lost link.)

But deeper, deeper than that, it’s pretty clear that most of Trump’s crowd, and most of his supporters, simply want to Make America White Again. But they can’t say that and usually don’t. So they still stick with that original pretext, that ICE is just going after “the worst of the worst.” The loathsome, smug JD Vance repeated this in LA, (while mis-naming Senator Alex Padilla as terrorist stooge Jose Padilla, which he obviously thought was really fucking cute) :

(Couldn’t you just punch that face? Repeatedly? How much would you pay to do that? Sorry, back on the clock…)

There you have it, at 34 seconds our vile Vice President says that when you and I and Senator Padilla stand up for ICE victims, we’re really just “standing up for drug cartels to run rampant over our country and sex traffickers to be able to traffic little kids into our country.” Do Trump voters still believe that these tens of thousands of peaceful folks, many of whom they know personally, yanked from their homes and workplaces, are all drug gangsters and sex traffickers? Maybe they can make themselves believe it, their tolerance to cognitive dissonance seems infinite.

But I’ve been interested in this:

Bounty Hunters doing Immigration?

I first heard about this from Mexicans in my Anna Drive barrio – “Haven’t you heard, a lot of those so-called ICE guys are really bounty hunters who get $1000 for each arrest.” It’s hard right now to determine that’s true, it sounds plausible, but the rumor started in January with an asshole in rural Washington who showed up at a City Council meeting claiming to be a bounty hunter named Martin Alvarado:

“You can put a price on every human being. Every human is worth a dollar amount. Tacoma called and told me… this is the first wave. The second and third wave is when they’re gonna hire us bounty hunters, and they’re gonna be giving us $1000 to $1500 per illegal. How are you gonna stop us from coming through, because we don’t have to worry about warrants, we don’t really have to follow too many of the laws, and if we’re gonna be deputized by ICE, we can pretty much do anything we want…. What are you guys gonna do, pay us more? I like doing this.”

The prick was thrown out of the Sunnyside WA council meeting, but still nobody knows if he was just talking out his ass or not. Then this fellow has done some research:

Masked ICE, masked bounty hunters, perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference, the effect is the same and it’s lawless, unaccountable and unAmerican. Rick Wilson:

Good news over the weekend though: We finally had a couple of brave and resourceful LA County Mayors – Huntington Park’s Arturo Flores and Pasadena’s Victor Gordo – directing their police forces to “intervene in unlawful or unauthorized operations.” To force these agents to identify themselves and their agency. That’s the least our police could do, to protect the people in this “sanctuary state.”

“These are not lawful arrests. These are abductions,” said Mayor Flores. “For more than a week, we have witnessed families being torn apart, children left without parents, and residents vanishing without explanation. Men dressed in tactical gear, operating unmarked vehicles without displaying credentials or agency affiliation, have infiltrated our neighborhoods in direct violation of our community’s values, civil rights, and the basic principles of due process.” Much more in this good article.

Can we have Mayors like that here, in Orange County? Can we have the police protect us by at least forcing these kidnappers to identify themselves and their agencies? In Sanctuary Santa Ana, and in “Welcoming City” Anaheim? For now, as THIS smart lady says, whenever we see these masked kidnappers we need to call 911, report a possible kidnapping, and film film film!

 

 

 

 

 

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Does it mean ANYTHING that Santa Ana is a “Sanctuary City,” and that Anaheim is a “Welcoming City?” Well, credit where due: The legal fund established in Santa Ana (by the progressive majority, probably under Mayor Sarmiento) has been REALLY indispensable in tracking down some of the disappeared; and Anaheim recently created an aid program for residents impacted by ICE raids, as the Voice reports, though maybe legal aid would be even better.

The Beating of Narciso Goes Viral

Santa Ana is ON THE MAP NOW, our own Santa Ana has made the world news! Yes, Mayor Valerie Amezcua’s Santa Ana is now known nationwide as the town where landscaper Narciso Barranco, while using his weed-whacker on an IHOP lawn, got chased down by seven big “ICE” guys, punched in the head repeatedly and otherwise manhandled, then shoved into an unmarked vehicle dislocating his shoulder. Oh you haven’t seen this? It’s gone viral, friend…

The LA Times wrote a good story about it. Turned out Narciso is the father of three Marines. Touchingly, when his sons managed to track him down, he didn’t complain about the beating, the macing, the dislocated shoulder, or the incarceration, but fretted over his unfinished IHOP gardening and asked if they could finish the job. Here (apologies to the LAT) is the slight, 54-year old Narciso (third from left) with his three sons:

Somehow word of this incident, and viral video, trickled up to Santa Ana’s clueless, arrogant Mayor Valerie Amezcua, and she put on this clumsy show of outrage and heartache:

The two high points to me: Valerie, reading awkwardly off a rough script, calls the agents’ brutal behavior “Wrong, wrong, wrong in so many ways,” and says if they’re gonna come here then they should “Do it the right way!” WHAT!!?? 80% of Santa Ana’s restive population responded “Come here and kidnap us the RIGHT way? What is that?”

But even more revealing, Valerie doesn’t know Narciso’s name, and she reckons she never will, and that probably Congressman Lou Correa (whose sacred name she regularly invokes as a talisman) will never know either, because DHS is SO stingy with information. Hundreds of Santa Ana residents already knew Narciso, but the Mayor doesn’t know any of THEM! Put into office by the police union and developers, this Mayor does not know her community. The Times reported on Narciso and his family right about the same time as Valerie made this video. This woman is so incapable of leading the Golden City through this crisis, it’s almost comical.

But not as darkly comical as the propaganda DHS and their spokeshole Jordan Conradson put out on The Gateway Pundit’s blog-rag about this incident: In their telling, Narciso Barranco is an “ANTI-ICE TERRORIST WHO ASSAULTED AGENT WITH A WEED WACKER! [sic]” Self-parody swallows its tail; The Onion, redundant, throws up its hands. Krusty Gnome’s agency cried out, through their spokeshole Jordan,

“He ASSAULTED federal law enforcement with a WEED WACKER [sic]. Perhaps the mainstream media would like our officers to stand there and be mowed down instead of defending themselves?”

Seven big guys getting MOWED DOWN by scary Narciso’s weed-whacker, that’s a good one. Even Cunningham was never this bad.

Welcome, Dodgers, to the side of the angels!

The Los Angeles Dodgers or “Doyers”, longtime favorite team of Southern California Latinos, got off to a rocky start this year, meeting with Trump at the White House in April, and originally telling singer Nezza not to sing the national anthem in Spanish last week (which she ended up doing anyway)… but now the team and its leadership has apparently decided to stand with the people:

Five days ago, kicking federal immigration agents out of their humongous parking lot which they were trying to use as a staging ground;

and then a couple days later pledging $1 million to help LA immigrants impacted by the ICE raids.

So welcome to the side of the angels, Doyers, although I’m sure our Angels owned by Trumpie Arte Moreno would never do anything like that. So we end – we gotta end somewhere – with NEZZA: