Clarence Page: Chaos is the point of Trump's war on immigrants in Minnesota

There’s something uncomfortably familiar about President Trump’s jackboot approach to the immigration debate.

It brings to mind a memorable off-the-cuff stumble by Chicago’s legendary late Mayor Richard J. Daley when he was asked about allegations of excessive force by city police officers.

“The policeman isn’t there to create disorder,” he said. “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

Say, what?

Well, as Earl Bush, the mayor’s press secretary for 18 years, memorably advised reporters on another occasion, “Don’t write what the mayor says; write what he means.”

Decades later, a variant of that advice resurfaced, in 2016, when Donald Trump, a candidate known for shocking, even extreme, rhetoric appeared to be the likely next president. Here's how it was phrased this time: Take Trump seriously, not literally.

This was repeated by journalists and advisers, among others. And in retrospect, we should have been taking Trump more seriously — as well as literally. Especially as he taunted the press as "fake news," and as he urged supporters to get violent with protesters who showed up at his campaign events. ("(K)nock the crap out of 'em," he said at an Iowa rally. "I promise you, I'll pay for the legal fees.")

Barely into his first administration, Trump began referring to the media as the opposition party and the "enemy of the American people." Meanwhile, fact-checking the president became a preoccupation of major media outlets, revealing what one deep thinker of the Fourth Estate termed "Trump's Firehose of Falsehood."

By the end of his first, chaotic term, Trump's messages on Twitter became so out-of-bounds that the social media platform censored him. After losing the 2020 election, he launched a failed legal campaign to overturn it and exhorted his followers to "Stop the Steal." After thousands of those followers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, even many Republicans were ready to be done with Trump's chaos.

Yet now we find ourselves back in it. Those on the ground in areas where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Border agents mount their raids describe feelings of terror. People shelter in their homes and avoid public places — even those who are in this country legally.

The feeling for the rest of us is disorientation. Why is this happening? Indeed, what is happening?

The jackboots are only part of the chaos, of course. Another key element is the Trump administration's communications strategy, which really should be termed an information war.

Early on in the Department of Homeland Security's operations, ICE and Border Patrol made all sorts of perp walks into videos and memes optimized for social media. As violence escalated, a sort of disinformation pattern became established. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino or some administration official would make a claim about what happened, and later evidence would show these contentions to be false.

A shifting series of explanations would be provided for the missions or individual incidents, with no apparent urgency to be accurate or consistent. As litigation commenced and DHS officials were called to testify, judges became frustrated at the rampant false testimony and disobedience of the government.

To many Americans, it seems as if the various authorities of DHS and the Justice Department can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. And that is terrifying.

To take this back to Daley for a moment, after the “police riot,” as the chaos on the streets in 1968 was labeled by a special investigative commission later, governors, big city mayors, police chiefs and community leaders learned a lot and took to heart the need for reform.

Police departments and academies set clear rules about use of force and other issues. And courts have mostly done a decent job of enforcing them.

By contrast, the immigration agents Trump has unleashed on select American cities have invited more disasters because they do not seem bound by such protocols.

In Minneapolis, we see a large-scale escalation over earlier operations in Chicago, New York, Washington and other cities. A truckload of video has been generated showing roving squads of masked federal agents in military gear snatching people out of cars, releasing canisters of tear gas into crowds and visibly ignoring basic human rights as they target Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali, Latino and other minority communities.

It's possible there would be much more widespread support for Trump's anti-immigration crackdown if it corresponded more closely to the stated aim of taking violent criminals off the street.

Unfortunately, that correspondence is wholly lacking. We see violence. We read deeply reported accounts and find credible evidence that constitutional rights are being violated. And we also hear lies.

It's becoming impossible to believe that the chaos in Minnesota has been an issue of training. There certainly is no blockage that prevents Trump from grasping what Minnesotans think of it all.

On Thursday, border czar Tom Homan seemed to suggest that a draw-down of the ICE/Border Patrol operation in Minnesota was imminent. That would be a blessing, but I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, expect the information war to continue.

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)