(REUTERS)

An 18-year-old boy was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside LA just days before he was to begin his senior year in high school. He was walking his dog when they came for him.

ICE never told his parents. For a week, they had no idea where he was. During that time, ICE had taken him to one facility, then another, then another, before sending him to Arizona, where he awaits his fate.

This story is being repeated across the country. Federal immigration authorities are taking from churches, schools, workplaces and courts people whose crime is coming, or staying, without authorization. Otherwise, they are hard-working, family-oriented and law-abiding.

A typical reaction to these stories is that they are at odds with Donald Trump’s campaign promise of getting rid of “the worst of the worst,” those who have committed serious crimes, especially violent ones.

To continue with that reaction would do more harm than good, however, as it accepts as true the belief that Trump cares about crime and about public safety, and that the solution is for him to pull back.

The president doesn’t care about crime, except as a pretext for doing what he wants, nor is he going to pull back, even if the pretext is proven lawless and false. Indeed, it will be used by his thugs as rationale for committing crimes even greater than the ones they claim to fight – like kidnapping an 18-year-old boy, violating his rights, frightening his parents and terrorizing his community – because crime, as they see it, is not about what you do, but who you are.

And as long as there are people in America who are walking their dogs while brown (or Black), Trump will see a “crime wave” so massive it justifies commandeering local law enforcement and replacing police with armed soldiers to do what needs doing to “keep the country safe.”

Are we safer thanks to ICE?

ICE conducted a raid in Connecticut recently. It detained about 65 people living in the country without authorization. The name of the raid was “Operation Broken Trust.” It was not only a comment on my state’s sanctuary laws. It was a warning, as if to say: We can do to your people whatever we want and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.

With exceptions, Connecticut’s Trust Act puts strict limits on how state and local police cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The law, like all so-called sanctuary laws, does not interfere with federal agents. It only forces them to do their work on their own. As the office of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has said, the Trust Act “reflects the unremarkable proposition that immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government.”

But by protecting brown people (read: “criminals alien offenders”), Connecticut’s Trust Act actually breaks the public’s trust, an ICE spokeswoman told the New Haven Register. “Such laws only force law enforcement professionals to release criminal alien offenders back into the very communities they have already victimized,” she said.

The subtext here is that Connecticut, like all cities and states run by Democrats, is being hopelessly overrun by “criminals alien offenders,” that its leadership is weak, and that the only way to make things right is for the president to come in and enforce law and order. Two top state Republicans agreed that things are so bad they justified violating Connecticut’s sovereignty. “Connecticut’s streets are now safer,” they actually said in a statement. “Violent offenders are now in custody.”

But are we safer thanks to ICE?

It takes a criminal to beat “the criminals”

ICE said it took immigrants who had broken federal law, but did not cite federal crimes committed. The crimes it did cite were almost entirely state crimes – assault, rape, robbery, etc. ICE also said the immigrants it took had already been convicted of those crimes by the state. In other words, and in its own words, ICE suggests that Connecticut’s streets are safer because Connecticut enforces the law.

That ICE took them anyway tells you public safety and public trust are not its main concerns, nor is serving justice, as justice has already been served. Indeed, that they were taken anyway suggests their prosecutions were not enough, that something more had to be done, for some reason beyond criminal justice. And that should be telling.

It tells us their real “crime” isn’t what they did.

It’s who they are.

And it tells us that their very existence, according to this president, constitutes a national emergency requiring a national response such that no law should be able to stand in the way of victory. Donald Trump will defeat these “criminal aliens” if he has to break every law to do it. If he has to become a criminal to beat “the criminals,” so be it.

Dictators are criminals

Trump benefits from the appearance of good intentions – that what he’s doing, no matter how horrible it seems, is in the people’s service.

But when you strip away the facade, as I hope I have done, and see that the “crimes” in question are not crimes but rather identities, it’s hard to continue giving Trump the benefit of the doubt (unless you long to see the explicit restoration of the white-power order in America).

And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what we are seeing, in the case of an 18-year-old boy in California and hundreds of other stories like his, is a massive crime wave. If I snatched a boy off the street while he was walking his dog, and kept him separated from his family for a week, then took him across state lines for unknown but presumably malign reasons, I would be prosecuted for kidnapping and more.

The regime wants us to quibble over the allegation that this boy overstayed his visa, but the visa question fades into the background when you bear in mind that the president does not care about preventing crimes but rather committing crimes, in order to grab more power for himself and others, who will commit more crimes.

After all, dictators are criminals first.

The president seems to understand the downside of being seen as a criminal. During an Oval Office meeting Monday, in which he talked about sending troops to Chicago, because it’s “a killing field,” he said:

“They say, ‘We don't need him, freedom, freedom. He's a dictator. He's a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and I’m a smart person. When I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, and instead of being praised they're saying you're trying to take over the republic. These people are sick.”

Trump hasn’t committed enough crimes to establish enough control over the population and suppress enough dissent against him to declare himself a dictator. “I’m not a dictator.” But he’s getting close.

And he may get there if we continue to accept the lie rather than insist on the truth. There really is a massive crime wave. It really deserves a national response. But it has nothing to do with an 18-year-old boy.

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