ICE, ANTIFA, AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Yesterday, this newsletter included the violent anti-ICE ambush in Texas as an example of the anger building on the left under the presidency of Donald Trump. Much of that anger is over illegal immigration, with big groups on the left seeking to defend illegal entry into the United States against the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce immigration law. In that cause, radical forces on the left, like antifa — they were the attackers in Texas — are fundamentally aligned with more conventional activist groups on the left, as well as with the Democratic Party, from its progressive to its more moderate wings.
If you want to read a description of the ICE attack, go to the Justice Department’s criminal complaint outlining attempted murder charges against the 10 radicals accused of attacking the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on the 4th of July. It’s quite a narrative.
It started at 10:37 p.m. A group of 10 to 12 “individuals wearing all black” shot fireworks at the detention building, which was staffed with Department of Homeland Security contract employees who were not armed. A few minutes later, a couple of attackers broke off from the main group and “began to graffiti and damage vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot.” On one car, they spray-painted “ICE PIG” — they were not the most creative sort of vandals.
At 10:56, the unarmed correctional officers called 911. But before police arrived, two of the officers walked outside and tried to talk to the attackers. At the same time, according to surveillance videos of the event, a person wearing a green mask was standing not too far away, “signaling to the vandals with a flashlight.”
At 10:59, an Alvarado Police Department car pulled up. According to court documents, “Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area.” At that moment, the person in the green mask started firing, too, at the unarmed correctional officers standing near the police car. Officials say the two shooters fired somewhere between 20 and 30 rounds at the group — it was very lucky that, other than the police officer, they did not hit anyone.
By Byron York