After New York City comptroller Brad Lander this week became the latest prominent Democrat to be arrested while monitoring and protesting US immigration authorities, the Trump administration trotted out a familiar refrain to justify his detention.
The mayoral candidate had “assaulted” law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted, warning “if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences”.
The accusation, which DHS has also recently leveled against a member of Congress and a high-profile union leader, have sparked consternation, particularly as videos of the incidents did not show the officials attacking officers and instead captured officers’ aggressive behavior and manhandling of the officials.
In several cases, DHS’s public accusations of assault were not followed by criminal charges. Civil rights advocates and scholars on policing say the government’s assault claims against well-known members of the opposing party, and the repetition of those accusations, nonetheless are troubling indicators of rising authoritarianism. They argued the US government is blatantly misrepresenting events captured on footage in an effort to intimidate powerful officials and ordinary citizens alike who seek to challenge the White House’s policies.
And Alec Karakatsanis, the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, argued: “By relentlessly telling the population that ‘two plus two equals five’, it helps determine who is willing to go along with ‘two plus two equals five’ and deny basic truths.
“It’s also about a longer-term and more profound assault on the very notion of truth – to get people so confused that they don’t know what is what,” said Karakatsanis, author of Copaganda, a book about false narratives promoted by police.
“This is the classic propaganda tactic of George Orwell’s 1984,” he added
Lander was arrested by federal agents inside an immigration court building on Tuesday, as he asked officers whether they had a judicial warrant to detain an immigrant he was accompanying. He was released after four hours, and so far, no charges have been filed against him.
Video of the encounter shows plainclothes officers, some in masks, pinning Lander to a wall, handcuffing him and escorting him away. Lander had held on to the arm of the immigrant who was being targeted.
Still, DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to the press and on social media soon after the incident that it was Lander who had assaulted officers.
The accusations echo those against US congresswoman LaMonica McIver, a Democrat, who, DHS claims, assaulted and impeded law enforcement when she and two other representatives arrived at a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center to inspect the facility on 9 May. Representatives are authorized to conduct this oversight without prior notice, and McIver said she wanted to ensure the facility was clean and safe and detainees had access to their attorneys.
Shaky videos of the encounter, some released by DHS, showed a chaotic scrum where McIver and others were surrounded by officers, some masked, as law enforcement and the representative pushed against each other. Soon after, she was given a tour of the facility, but a month later was indicted for assault, a charge she has strongly denied.
In Los Angeles, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested on 6 June when he showed up to document an immigration raid at a garment factory. As he stood outside, blurry footage showed officers pushing him to the ground, with multiple agents on top of him as he was put in handcuffs.
US attorneys charged him with conspiracy to impede an officer. He was not charged with assault, but even after the complaint was filed, DHS has continued to respond to questions about his case with a statement that says: “Huerta assaulted Ice law enforcement.” Huerta was hospitalized after his arrest, before being transported to jail.
And last week, California senator Alex Padilla was handcuffed and forcibly removed from a DHS press conference as he attempted to ask a question, with the FBI accusing him of “resisting” law enforcement. He was not charged with a crime.
In a statement to the Guardian on Thursday, McLaughlin said Democratic politicians were “contributing to the surge in assaults of our Ice officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of Ice”, adding: “This violence against ICE must end.”
DHS has repeatedly asserted in recent weeks that it has seen a major increase in assaults on its officers. Since May, the department has often cited the claim that Ice officers, who are part of DHS, are facing “a 413% increase in assaults against them”.
Spokespeople for DHS have repeatedly refused to respond to questions about the source of the statistic, how many assaults have occurred and what time periods it was comparing. In April, a press release had referred to a “300% surge in assaults”.
McLaughlin, of DHS, said in an email late Thursday that Ice officers were “now facing a 500% increase in assaults”, but again did not respond to inquiries about the figure.
‘Everyone is at risk’
Some experts on US law enforcement said DHS’s narratives were rooted in a long legacy of law enforcement demonizing its critics, though the Trump administration’s claims seemed increasingly brazen in their deviation from the truth.
Andrea J Ritchie, co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, a group of organizers that advocates against incarceration and other forms of criminalization, said US law enforcement has frequently prosecuted people who had been abused and injured by officers. “How many videos exist of cops yelling, ‘stop resisting’, while someone has their hands up and the cops are beating them?” she said. Civil rights lawyers who take on police misconduct cases often refer to the “trifecta” of charges – resisting arrest, assault on an officer and obstruction of justice, she said: “The harder you get beaten, the more likely you’ll get those charges.”
What’s new under Donald Trump, she said, was the frequency of these kinds of accusations against high-profile figures.
Lauren Regan, an Oregon-based civil rights lawyer who has represented activists facing prosecution, said she saw arresting elected officials as part of an “authoritarian playbook” designed to make people widely afraid that they, too, could be targeted, regardless of their backgrounds.
“You keep it chaotic and random so no one thinks they’re safe,” said Regan. “When elected officials with privilege, power, education and training get thrown to the ground and cuffed or jailed, then what is going to happen to us? Everyone is at risk.”
It’s a point that wasn’t lost on Padilla, who said after his detention: “If they can do this to a United States senator who has the audacity to ask a question, just imagine what they’re doing to so many people across the country.”
Indeed, since the recent protests against immigration raids began in LA, hundreds of demonstrators in southern California have been arrested by local police. Federal prosecutors have formally charged a handful of them assaulting officers – though soon after moved to dismiss two of the first cases they filed.
In an incident of two protesters arrested at a 7 June demonstration, a video of the chaotic scuffle showed one of the protesters being shoved by an agent just before the arrests, and officers taking both protesters to the ground. US prosecutors charged both men with assaulting officers, but filed a motion to dismiss the charges a week later after one of them told the Guardian he had not attacked the agents, and was himself severely injured in the confrontation.
Others have been blasted by DHS amid immigration enforcement actions in LA. Last week, the Los Angeles Times published video of border patrol agents detaining a 29-year-old US citizen outside his car repair shop. In the footage, the man repeatedly said he was an American citizen, but an agent pushed him into a metal gate. He was eventually released. After the LA Times published a story documenting rising “fears of racial profiling”, DHS sent out a press release calling it “fake news”, including a screenshot of video of the man’s arrest, and saying: “THE FACTS: “The facts are a US citizen was arrested because he ASSAULTED US Customs and Border Protection Agents.”
DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions asking for clarification on what constituted assault in these incidents, instead re-sending the statements it had originally posted and shared on social media in the immediate aftermath of the arrests.
Alex Vitale, sociology professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, said that while the public thinks of “assault” as causing injury, in the context of arrests and prosecution, it can be a “nebulous category” that includes “unwanted physical conduct”.
Cases can drag on for months, he added, no matter the strength of the evidence the government is presenting: “Police understand that the arrest and the process is the penalty even if there’s no conviction in the end.”
‘They are trying to manufacture reality’
Mike German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit, said that the government’s repeated misinformation about violence against officers risks backfiring: “Officers do at times get assaulted, but if agencies continue to make patently false claims and suggest that any physical contact is an assault, you’re going to undermine legitimate cases.”
He said he was also concerned about the impacts of officers using heavy force in arrests that don’t require it: “Three or four agents tackling a US senator clearly isn’t necessary. That kind of force compels resistance. It’s hard to let yourself be violently attacked without your natural reaction of trying to defend yourself, and then if officers say that’s assault, that undermines public trust.”
Ritchie, author of Invisible No More, a book about police violence against women of color, said she was not surprised that out of the recent prominent arrests, the only politician who continues to be prosecuted for assault is McIver: “Black women get punished for speaking up and it’s framed as assault.”
She said it was crucial that communities continue to forcefully reject law enforcement narratives: “They are trying to manufacture reality. It is upon us to say the government is lying to us. This is a message they are trying to send and we’re not accepting it and certainly not normalizing it.”
