U.S. Senator Cory Booker, who said he voted in February 2019 to expand the authority of the “Gestapo-like” immigration enforcement agencies, has drawn fierce criticism over his suggestion that agents who are conducting paramilitary raids in US cities need better training and body cameras.
A specific, chilling pattern repeats itself when governments decide that a group of people is unworthy. We saw it in the police dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham, tools of the state deployed to terrorize citizens into submission.
We see it now in the masked federal agents and unmarked vans conducting operations in Minnesota, tools of a different kind of crackdown. The evolution from Bull Connor’s tactics to today’s is a matter of technology and terminology, not of principle.
The principle is the state’s unrestrained power to seize, detain, and remove. It is a power that has been deliberately expanded, not in secret, but through the machinery of Congress.
Critics, like anti-establishment Democrat Lisa McCormick, have labeled these federal agents “Gestapo-like,” a comparison drawn sharply into focus by the killing of Minneapolis resident Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
After the fatal shooting of the 37-year-old Minneapolis mother, Booker introduced legislation in response that would mandate body cameras and improve training standards.
The political landscape surrounding this vote is revealing.
While many Democrats would be disappointed to learn of Booker’s support from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and his vote to bolster immigration enforcement, a deeper outrage stems from his financial backing and his stated remedy for the violence.
“Booker has accepted campaign contributions from more than 50 billionaires, and his latest reaction shows how badly he is out of touch,” said McCormick. “His response to agents accused of Gestapo-like conduct has been to call for better training and body cameras—a prescription that addresses the optics of brutality while endorsing the permanence of the brutalizing force itself.”
This reflects the central failure.
The issue is not that the machinery of enforcement is poorly calibrated. The issue is the decision to construct such overwhelming machinery in the first place, and to feed it with nearly boundless funds.
The transformation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the nation’s largest federal law enforcement apparatus, with a budget that dwarfs other justice functions, is a policy choice.
It creates a system designed for removal, not justice, echoing the resource-intensive efforts of past regimes to maintain control over a subjugated class.
The legacy is long. The U.S. Border Patrol, whose agents now operate in places like Minneapolis, was founded with personnel from organizations like the Texas Rangers, carrying forward a culture of racial impunity. Its near-total lack of criminal accountability for on-duty killings is not a bug in the system, but a feature hardened over decades.
The parallel to the Civil Rights era is therefore precise.
It is the parallel of a government using its full weight to criminalize the existence of a people. Once, the so-called crime was sitting at a lunch counter; now, it’s simply living in a neighborhood without the right papers.
The punishment is not a fine or a night in jail, but the terrifying, anonymous seizure from the street and the potential exile from one’s home and family.
It is a different kind of segregation, enforced not by signs but by surveillance and sudden violence.
“In February, I voted to advance the bipartisan immigration deal to emphasize my commitment to continued debate on solving the challenges at the border,” said Booker in a press release.
The unmarked vans are the logical conclusion. They are the manifestation of a philosophy that treats certain human beings as administrative problems to be solved by force, a philosophy that should have been exiled from American practice long ago.
That it has returned, refined and rebranded but fundamentally unchanged, is a testament to a national amnesia we can no longer afford.