Marilu Mendez said when ICE vehicles began following her and her husband Monday and then surrounded their car on Tallman Street in New Bedford, she took out her cell phone and started recording.
Her video shows a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforement agent using a large hammer to break the back passenger window of their car.
Marilu said the agents were focused on her husband, Juan, but kept calling him “Antonio”, the name of another man who lives in their building.
Juan Mendez is now being held in a detention facility in Dover, New Hampshire, with a hearing scheduled for May 7.
There’s two things here to consider. And it’s very important that this conversation starts amongst more people, and more communities.
These Nazis are coming for communities that they think are easy targets, that will give no real resistance. But what happens if that changes? What if in a flip of a switch, unorganized but deliberate violence is purposefully used to address these actions? That when they came, hypothetically, and they broke the glass, they were immediately met with fatal gunfire?
And of course this too would happen in succession other places in similar instances. When the Nazis came their foot soldiers were struck down. What would then happen?
Two things can both be true. They could be scared and forced to back down, which to some degree may be valid. But I think the worse latter would happen, which could also be good but dangerous— because these are “federal law enforcement” so they will claim they will enact the insurrection act in order to bring soldiers to heel in the cities and places and to assist the Nazis.
And this is where the chess pieces move towards an end game situation. Either the people then continue to resist the Nazis with force if need be, and then hopefully get the soldiers to realize this is bullshit and have them turn as well— which they might— or the people will cower and they’d offer up the offenders and compatriots in order to believe they’d save their own skin while simultaneously signing all their death warrants.
Folks need to understand that protesting is now a nonstarter. You have to protest and resist peacefully in every mass setting you can. The system needs to be dragged to a halt economically for the pressures to start hurting those that can make this stop in a nonviolent way.
But if this fails, violence becomes the means of resistance because it becomes the monopoly change agent. Either it will be used upon all of us, and we all inevitably die under tyranny, or it’s used by us to take back and some of us may perish but under freedom.
These games and actions have happened in other cultures and societies at different times in the past. Some with the good results some with the bad.
But rest assured if you sit behind your keyboard and do nothing. If you prepare to sacrifice nothing. You are all but guaranteed to lose everything.
Man you guys have forgotten how the US treated black people when we armed ourselves.
It’s easy to forget or not even be aware when it’s not you.
Live free or die.
If you resist arrest, you’re definitely MS-13.
Also, and this cannot go without saying often enough but… how many times have you had to kill someone in self defense? Not, like, in a video game or a power fantasy, but IRL?
Was the first time you did it easy? Like, did you feel anything when you pulled a trigger or swung a weapon and saw someone’s life end?
“Just do unspeakable things to your oppressors” is such a cringe, fantastical take, because it assumes this population of hardened killers who simply haven’t had the need to indulge in blood-drenched super-violence.
You don’t just flip a switch and start killing people. We aren’t all secretly Rambo.
Trust me, I would not even flinch if I had to watch Trump get put in a wood chipper, and hear his screams. I have less than Zero empathy for corrupt world leaders, and Epstein Island visitors.
True, but nobody knows what you’re good at until you try. You’d be surprised by people and what they’re capable of. Some of the best soldiers I saw in the army were gangly dorky looking dudes that had never fired a shot before training. In fact, those guys are easier to train than “good ol boys” because they haven’t picked up any bad shooting habits.
Trained by whom?
Your premise was that this violence was unorganized.
My point wasn’t so much for the training but how easily they picked up on it.
If you want a better example, I was at a bar in Lawton ok, home of ft sill. At a bar one night I saw a fight happen where 2 civilians took on 5 military personnel out of uniform. (Dunno what units or rank or anything) The civilians did wind up getting the shit kicked out of em but 2 of the military guys got really fucked up, one looked like rocky after the first movie, the other was unconscious on the ground. If you think about it in a life or death situation, yeah the 2 guys would be dead, but so would 2 of theirs. That means the next 2 guys who come up against this crew (now consisting of only 3 guys), have much better odds. It’s not thousands of little fights, it’s one continuous fight.