Something happening here
“What we're dealing with now, grabbing people like they did in Charlottesville, is downright scary,” says constitutional attorney John Whitehead.
April 26 Update: VPM reports that the two men arrested by federal agent at the Albemarle County courthouse on Tuesday are Honduran national Teodoro Dominguez-Rodriguez and Mexican citizen Pablo Aparicio-Marcelino. They are being held at the Farmville Detention Center.
Enough people were sufficiently alarmed by a video and accompanying story by Daily Progress reporter Hawes Spencer on Tuesday, which described and showed the arrest of one of two men inside the Albemarle County Courthouse by three men claiming to be federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security (one of whom was wearing a mask to conceal his identity), that a protest broke out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse the following day.
Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney James Hingeley later told Newsweek that "ICE operations conducted in the manner of the courthouse arrests on April 23, where lawful authority to arrest was not displayed, constitute a grave danger to our community."
State Sen. Creigh Deeds and state Del. Katrina Callsen have made a FOIA request for records from Albemarle County concerning any communication or coordination government officials might have had with the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out the detentions, but members of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and Charlottesville City Council have remained silent about the detentions. The DTM reached out to all members of both government bodies for comment, but no one has responded yet.
However, constitutional attorney and author John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, has plenty to say.
"Any government agent that would approach me wearing a mask, or a hood, trying to hide their face,” says Whitehead, laughing at the absurdity. “I would go, gee, this is not the American government....who do you work for?"
The agents in the video also struck Whitehead as “amateurs” who “weren't trained very well.”
"Obviously, they had little understanding of the Constitution, especially the fourth amendment,” he says, “ which also protects immigrants on American soil.”
Increasingly, however, the American government under the Trump administration is trying to bypass basic constitutional protections.
As recently reported, ICE agents are being told by the Trump administration that they can enter homes and detain immigrants without warrants based only on suspicion. And, of course, immigrants are also being detained, denied due process, and sent to foreign prisons in the middle of the night. Predictably, ignoring due process has resulted in horrible abuses, such as mistakenly deporting Kilmar Ábrego García and even deporting a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process,” according to a federal judge.
“What we're dealing with now, grabbing people like they did in Charlottesville, is downright scary,” says Whitehead. “All you have to do, especially if you're brown-skinned, and it's very racist in my opinion, is look the wrong way if there are ICE agents around…and you’re gone.”
Whitehead says that federal agents he’s talked to in the past always told him they didn’t like the Fourth Amendment because it blocked their ability to arrest and detain people. “The fourth amendment, that's what protects us from people who become monsters in the government,” he says.
Whitehead mentions historic purges like Stalin’s Great Terror, in which people were arrested for writing a poem or creating some kind of art critical of the regime and whisked away to forced labor camps, mental institutions, or executed.
"That may be the next step by the way, I don't know," he says.
What’s more, the media tends to unintentionally normalize such things in the manner of their reporting. For instance, Charlottesville Tomorrow summarized the story about the detentions, presenting the known facts from various media, but the tone and urgency of the report appeared no different than a following report on Charlottesville City Schools buying a building. In an effort to get the facts straight — did they have the authority to arrest the men? did they follow proper procedure? did they properly identify themselves? what do local officials say? — journalists run the risk of merely describing something they should be shouting about.
“Charlottesville today handed local control of its government to federal officials. Local leaders expressed concern about how it would be handled…”
As public defender Nicholas Reppucci, who represented the man in the video — 41-year-old house painter Teodoro Dominguez Rodriguez — in his court case before he was handcuffed and whisked away to an unknown location, told the Daily Progress: “I’ve been here since 1999, and I have not seen anything like this before…it’s horrifying for the person being detained and it’s horrifying for the community members watching it.”
Video first posted on the Daily Progress website:
Albemarle County Sheriff Chan Bryant tried to give some validity to the detentions in a prepared statement by saying the three men had shown their credentials as federal agents, including badges and the required paperwork, to bailiffs on duty as they entered the building. Bryant even tried to smooth over the fact that one of the agents was wearing a mask in the video by saying the agent wasn’t masked when showing his credentials and masked up only after someone began filming the detention. As the Daily Progress pointed out, concealing your identity in public with a mask, hood, or face covering is a felony in Virginia, no matter who you are.
"Even if the sheriff says the bailiffs saw paperwork, the terrified public who saw yesterday's sudden, violent detainment have no way of knowing who these masked men were,” ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Mary Bauer told The Daily Progress. "Courthouses are places where crime survivors, witnesses, and everyone should feel safe and secure,” Bauer added, “ but ICE’s campaign of intimidation and secrecy has the opposite effect."
Whitehead mentions Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, who was arrested Friday by the FBI for allegedly helping immigrants avoid arrest. Attorney General Pam Bondi, blowing right past the principle of due process, immediately appeared on Fox News to shame the judge for her behavior.
Again, this is way not normal…
“They’re going in and arresting judges now,” he says. “It throws fear into people. The way they are doing the arrests, and the way they are acting throws fear into a populace. I mean, Hitler said it, fear is how you control the populace. But we should not be afraid of our government because we the people, as the Constitution begins, are the government. Not the other way around.”
Whitehead cites a recent Washington Post/ABCNews poll that shows 53 percent of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration. “People are seeing it now, saying this is looking worse and worse,” says Whitehead.
Indeed, protesters quickly gathered in downtown Milwaukee to support Judge Dugan and condemn the government’s actions.
"This is insipid fascism that needs to be stopped," 77-year-old Milwaukee resident Michael Rosen, whose aunts survived the Holocaust, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It's what our fathers fought against in World War II."
"Local governments can stand up and say we're not taking this stuff...and fight back," says Whitehead. "And Charlottesville, of all the places, the home of Jefferson and Madison…”
Indeed, the friendship between Jefferson and Madison helped enshrine the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth,” argued Jefferson in a letter to Madison, who was still on the fence about including it. Both men were also frequent visitors to the Albemarle County Courthouse and Jefferson once referred to it as the community’s “common temple” because both civic and religious events occurred there.
Of course, the buying and selling of slaves also occurred outside the courthouse, where the sales were recorded, and it wasn't until last month that a historical maker was placed in Court Square acknowledging that history. Still, the Bill of Rights, and what it entitles people, is everyone’s to claim and defend.
“The only hope we have is local communities standing up and fighting this battle against government overreach,” says Whitehead. “...the 10th amendment, which gives them the right to tell the federal government to back off. I keep saying the tenth amendment, the tenth amendment, the tenth amendment....that's the key."