The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez....
Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units.
He then quotes Wheeler as emphasizing
Alfredo Mancillas Jr. was found in St. Paul last Tuesday,
passed out drunk in his illegally-parked car, covered in his own vomit....
The two heavily masked ICE agents who snatched Brad Lander last June are “a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach” and “an Indo-Guyanese gentleman who lives in South Ozone Park.”
There are a lot of reasons Stephen Miller’s goons wear masks. To terrify the communities they invade. To make it harder to shame them. To make it harder to tie them to other crimes they may have committed....
But there is accumulating evidence that a big reason these goons hide their faces is to hide that the white nationalist project Stephen Miller is pursuing — like virtually everything else in America — relies on brown people to do the hard work. Miller can only sustain the myth of white self-reliance by hiding the faces of those who murder white men at his behest in the streets of Blue cities....
They’re trying to hide how much even their deeply racist project is helpless without brown labor.
I think this misunderstands the way right-wingers look at race. Some are pure bigots in the David Duke/Nick Fuentes mold. They hate anyone who isn't white and Christian. And even those who don't fall into this category want to live in an America in which white male heterosexual Christians run pretty much everything.
But the people hoping to build a white ethnostate are always in tension with those on the right who proudly point to everyone of color who seems to have "escaped" from "the liberal plantation." The organizers of Trump's campaign rallies seemed happy to have the candidate speak with "BLACKS FOR TRUMP" signs in the background. Trump embraced Kanye West before West became too toxic. And Republican candidates of color -- Herschel Walker in Georgia, Mark Robinson in North Carolina, Royce White in Minnesota -- have won Republican primaries throughout the Trump era. In the Florida governor's race, Byron Donalds leads all other candidates in Republican primary polling by more than 30 points, and in polling of the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy's lead is more than 50 points. Most Republicans enjoy pointing to these figures and accusing liberals of being "the real racists."
Wheeler's framing implies that Miller's non-white immigration agents are laboring in a state of pseudo-enslavement, or at least doing the work reluctantly because there's nothing else available. That's belied by what the ProPublica story tells us about one of the agents....
This is an accurate reading of the right and a critically important point to make. Some are "pure bigots" while a larger number are proud to trumpet (pun intended) support of their cause by blacks so they can accuse liberals of being "the real racists," as SM recognizes.
But there is something else going on. Whites generally, and conservative whites specifically, are tired of accusations of racism directed toward them, or what they perceive as such criticism. They are happy and relieved whenever individuals such as Herschel Walker, Mark Robinson, Royce White, or Byron Donalds rear their black head, as long as those individuals are on their side. They believe that proves they are not racist and legitimizes their conservative viewpoints. It's not only progressives, liberals, moderates, and centrists who want to be recognized as open-minded; the right does, also.
That was key to Barack Obama's success. Of course, few conservative Republicans- as the vast majority of Republicans are- would vote for him because they were, obviously Republicans. However, that left many moderates, and especially centrists, who comforted themselves by voting for the man who would become the first black President. It frees them, as SM argues, to accuse Democrats themselves as being "the real racists." Then in an off-year election, they could vote Republican, having already done their part to prove they were open-minded.
Yet, SM is wrong insofar as he's maintaining that we are overemphasizing race in considering the ethnicity of the killers of Alex Pretti. He says the apparent killers "shared the mindset that compels white men to become immigration officers."
Well, sure, that is accurate. But it is too easy, implying that it is a white mindset that impels such injustice or brutality. One of his readers comments "there's a lotta men who are hungry, and lack, a sense of belonging and meaning in their lives, and a sense of control and power, and being given a gun and being made part of a group with a mission can be very attractive, whatever their ethnicity." Less elegantly or thoughtfully, another realizes (emphasis his) "ALL ethnicities have assholes." And I would add: "and bigots."
These all are valid critiques of Wheeler's primary thesis, as is the one from another commenter who notes that many border patrol agents
are Hispanics whose families have been there for generations, if not since Texas was Mexican. Even more recent arrivals may despise those trying to come in now as poorer and somehow less worthy than they, their parents or grandparents were. Also, they are more likely to feel directly threatened by competition for jobs by the newcomers than most.
Doubtless, Border Parol has always been far more aggressive on the southern border than elsewhere and coverage of the aggression and illegality has been limited and localized
It's typical that it never occurred to Trump, Miller, Noem and the rest that South texas Border Patrol aggressiveness and disregard for law would appal residents of Minneapolis, nor that people in the rest of the country, including rred areas, would be outraged and disgusted by it, not cowed by it.
This seems to me a far more likely explanation for Stephen Miller "relying on brown people to do the hard work" of "maintaing the myth of white self-releance." Yet, all of this- Marci Wheeler's speculative theory, Steve M's cogent rebuttal, and the wise remarks largely buttressing the rebuttal- pertain only to the perpetrators.
Closing the circle would require consideration also of the victims, as it does in the matter of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their co-conspirators..
This, the left does not want to dwell on. And in a dirty little secret, centrists generally would be even more loathe to address it.
And that is this: Renee Good and Alex Pretti are both white. Obvious? Yes. Mentioned? No.
It was a fundamental tenet of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 that brutal law enforcement was not only focused on blacks but was directed virtually exclusively toward "people of color." It needn't have been stated; we all just knew that blacks were the sole targets of police officers acting badly.
Unlike today and especially during campaign 2024, actual critics of the protest were few.. Conservatives much preferred the slogan "Blue Lives Matter" to substantive condemnation of the movement. There was some, but relatively muted, criticsm of the blue lives matter argument. By contrast, the slogan "All Lives Matter" was consistently attacked as being racially insensitive, if not racist.
This was a response not only from the left. Moderates and centrists who should have known better, many of them probably knowing better, went along for the ride.
We now know better, yet still refuse to acknowledge it. ICE is practicing racial profiling, but much less out of racial bias than because it has implemented quotas and stopping people who appear to look Latino gets the numbers up. We've learned also that if an individual gets in the way, such as by filming an ICE agent or border patrol officer, being white will not spare the activist from harassment or worse..
So race, as Marci Wheeler believes, is a factor. It usually is. Nonetheless, as Steve M. and most of his readers evidently believe, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and thuggery is just thuggery.
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