Over the weekend I talked to a couple of people, people who generally try to keep abreast of the news, about the Chicago apartment raid last Tuesday — and discovered that they hadn’t heard about it. And that’s extremely worrying. It suggests that many people don’t realize how fast and aggressively the Trump administration is moving to end rule of law and convert America into a full-fledged autocracy.
So while I’d like to devote today’s post to economics — you have no idea how happy I felt while writing yesterday’s primer about agglomeration and productivity — I couldn’t in good conscience avoid writing about the terrible things happening in Chicago and elsewhere, and what they may portend.
About that raid: It was reported in mainstream media, but didn’t get the screaming banner headlines it deserved. Here’s what happened, according to Reuters:
U.S. Border Patrol agents deployed to Chicago led a late-night raid on an apartment building this week, rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors in an operation authorities said targeted gang members but which swept up U.S. citizens and families. … As part of the raid, some U.S. citizens were temporarily detained and children pulled from their beds, according to interviews with residents and news reports. Building hallways were still littered with debris two days later. … Hundreds of agents swarmed the apartment building during the raid on Tuesday, including some rappelling down to the roof from Black Hawk helicopters, according to NewsNation. … One resident, who asked not to be named, reported being made to lie down on the ground by agents during the raid and having his hands zip-tied.
ICE claimed that the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua (a Venezuelan gang) members and their associates” — that is, although ICE carried out the raid, it was supposedly about crime. And they arrested two suspected gang members, while also rounding up some undocumented immigrants. But they detained everyone in the building, smashed their doors, zip-tied their children, and ransacked their homes.
This was a wildly disproportionate and illegal response, even if the raid had actually had anything to do with crime.
But none of what the Trump administration is doing in Chicago has anything to do with fighting crime. Chicago has more violent crime than, say, New York or Los Angeles, but the post-Covid bump in crime has completely receded. City officials report that this past summer had the fewest homicides in 60 years. If we’d seen this kind of decline in crime after the Trump administration began flooding Chicago with ICE agents, rather than before, they’d be touting these results as complete vindication.
But as I said, this isn’t about crime. It’s about paranoid conspiracy theories and an attempt to dismantle democracy.
Here’s Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar:
Does Miller actually believe this? The truth is that left-wing terrorist attacks and plots are very rare in this country. There have been more this year than in the previous two years, but the number is still tiny, and is normally dwarfed by right-wing terrorism:
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