Remember the days when you could be a fucking passanger in a car and not have to show your ID.
And so this morning, in Newport, Oregon, on the Pacific, I was walking to the Bay Front for some leg stretching, and I witness some 76 old guy get T-boned, but he was going through a stop signaled road, as a hapless worker and his worker cousin were just heading home after piling fish and crab all night for Pacific Seafood.
So, the old man was okay, just coming from the hospital’s wound care facility. Jose and Aricardo where in the old Ford Explorer, and alas, the old man’s highlander was t-boned on the passanger side.
No airbags deployed (what the fuck is that, no, how many accidents I have been at the scene on where the airbags never went off . . . Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, anyone?
Both Mexican cousins (from Veracruz) did not speak much English, and the city cop came, and asked me to be translator (“Our translator isn’t available.).
Here’s the multiple dig here — Jose has insurance, an Oregon ID, but no driver’s license. Aricardo, well, his ID should have never been asked, and when they ran it, an outstanding warrant came up.
I kept asking the city pig what it was for. “I can’t see that on my computer, but I have to take him to the jail.”
I asked Aricardo five times if he had been in trouble with the law, as in assaults or felonies. Not that he remembered.
I told him that the pig system is on a computer and has all our information logged in data banks.
The fucking handcuffing head down wall of shame. I’ve been there, handcuffed, in this country, but because I am a white son-of-a-bitch, usually with a reporter’s ID and college faculty ID, and I am loud, man, I don’t look down or act contrite.
One time in Guatemala, I did the stare down of shame, but only because I did not want to make eye contact witht he drunk officer who hassseled me.
ALL Cops as Bastards/Bad/Broken/Bullies. ACAB.
Look, I write a lot, and read a lot, and I hit Substacks and plenty of alternative Podcasts and other sources, much more vital and extensive ones too. I am on the ground, and this is a fucking common story — Driving While Indian (DWI) or DWB-black or brown. The people writing this or that about Musk or Trump seemingly have no idea of real ground-truthing.
Sure, an old headline, repeated for each administration — Clinton, Bush, Trump, Biden. “How the Obama administration gives away military-grade weapons to local police.”
Fucking K12 schools, man (below), and if this doesn’t define the lobotomized USA, the goddamned flyover about to happen at Stupor Bowl U$A, with the jets and crocodile tears and stars and stripes, and hell, maybe the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Starving Polluting Poison Occupied Palestine’s Star of David religious cult symbol unfurled at the fifty yard line, man, then you are Rip VanWinkle.
And so this new Rapist in Chief, Trump, he’s all on board spending U$A tax dollars for repression, for stop and frisks, for illegal detentions, arrests, deportations of citizens who might fight for his or her rights.
“Trump Reverses Obama Policy on Surplus Military Gear for Police —Trump’s order removes restrictions President Obama imposed after the DOJ concluded the presence of such equipment inflamed violence in Ferguson, Missouri.”
[Since 1990, the Defense Department has been allowed to transfer surplus military equipment and supplies to federal, state, and local law enforcement. Though the program was originally intended for counter-drug operations, it was later expanded to include all police missions.]
+—+
So, Aricardo is in the back of the police Challenger, and Jose, his cousin, is asking me what’s next, and both the white guy and Jose get the accident report, and no citations given, even for the bad driving of the white guy nor for the driver from Mexico with no valid Oregon driver’s license.
The deputy sheriff, well, I got him to look at his in-vehicle computer, and lo and behold, the terrible crime Aricardo did, in 2016, was a third degree theft charge of illegal gathering of forest products.
Goddamn, this country.
The United States west coast, particularly the states of Oregon and Washington, as well as British Columbia in Canada, are the main countries that grow the best-quality salal.
Besides finding perfect, unblemished sets of leaves, workers have to navigate scrubby, rugged terrain full of downed logs and no clear trails. When picking salal leaves, one must pay close attention to the surroundings so you don’t get lost.
This is what Guatemalans, Hmong, Mexicans and not that many whites, do, for extra income. So, Aricardo was hit with a fine or ticket from a USDA officer or fucking Game and Fish Department Gestapo. In 2026. He failed to report to court on some probabtion check in. How many places do our undoctumented heroes end up in a year’s time. Couch surfing and never having a reliable mailing address.
I wonder if the Alsi or Siletz Indians have given us permission to take water from their creeks and rivers, take the fish from their oceans, dig up clams from their beaches, and what about that permission to build two million dollar homes on a cliff overlooking sacred mussel gathering reefs?
I bet if you asked an American Indian, they’ve be fine with Brown People from Across the Souther Border picking their salal for extra income and for grandmother’s funeral flower arrangements.
- Do not open the door if an immigration agent is knocking on it;
- Do not answer any questions from an immigration agent if they try to talk to you. You have the right to remain silent;
- Do not sign anything without first speaking to a lawyer. You have the right to speak with a lawyer;
- If you are away from home, ask the agent if you are free to leave and if they say yes, leave calmly;
- Give the “red card” to the agent and if you are inside your home, show the card through the window or slide it under the door.
Oregon’s sanctuary laws have been strengthened since President Trump’s first term, but they could run up against national and local scrutiny. Republicans in the Oregon Legislature have pushed efforts to repeal the sanctuary law, including several bills introduced in January.
And despite Oregon law, immigration agents can still enter the states armed with federal warrants and to carry out arrests and deportations.
[New Oregon Coast Community College president Marshall Roache addresses a forum in Spanish during a meeting on immigration issues last month in Lincoln City.]
“I was a little struck when I watched the first presentation,” Dave Price said. “I was kind of expecting a warm, fuzzy, ‘We’ve got your back’, but what Kate told them was much more sobering. It was like, ‘Okay, you need to call the school district and make sure they have an updated contact number … because if you get deported, you need to know that someone’s going to pick up your kids that night.’ And I thought ‘Oh my god, this is what these people are taking home tonight’.”
Kate Sinkins, an immigration attorney from Washington D.C. who recently moved to Gleneden Beach, also advised that anyone with mixed-family legal status — where a family member let their legal status lapse without following up — to fill out the necessary documents and make plans in case a parent is deported.
“These are weighty and dreadful conversations that these people were leaving with,” Dave Price said. “It’s not all peaches and cream. This is real.”
So, Aricardo went to the Lincoln County jail, and Jose got home with me driving his rig. I will follow up. Jose’s younger cousin is a hard worker, probably doesn’t have wife and kiddos in the school system around here, and he works jobs, man, back-breaking jobs. Fish from the boats in Newport and the forests picking salal.
Here, a blast from the past, here at Dissident Voice, yours truly, how many years ago? Shit dawg! Writing about my own work 45 years ago, man!
This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens by Paul K. Haeder
April 7, 2006
“We are all illegal aliens.”
It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.
That was in the 1980s.
You know, when Reagan was running amuck ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.
We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.
We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.
We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.
But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.
Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.
We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.
Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.
We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.
But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.
Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.
Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.
Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.
But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.
Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.
The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”
But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.
These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.
Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.
But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.
This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.
It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.
Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.
And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.
The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.
Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”
Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of doublethink.
And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.
I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gun ships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.
Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.
And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.
Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.
Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.
+—+
Jewish Di Nero: Donald Trump’s mini-monster: Stephen Miller wasn’t born that way: Author Jean Guerrero on Stephen Miller’s secrets: He likes to dress up as De Niro — and wants an all-white America
As shown in investigative journalist Jean Guerrero’s new book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” Trump’s infamous adviser Stephen Miller is something different and more dangerous: he is an ideologue, a true believer in white supremacy.
Jean Guerrero — Stephen Miller was going through a tough time as a teenager. His father is a real estate investor, like Donald Trump, and he was tangled up in legal disputes and bankruptcies related to his business. Miller’s father ended up losing a lot of money and the family had to move to a slightly smaller house in a less affluent, less white neighborhood. My conversations with people who knew Miller at the time, people in his family, revealed that Stephen Miller’s life was unraveling in a small way, to the extent that he lost his place in line as a rich white male. He felt entitled to that privilege. He was looking for somebody to blame.
At the time there was extreme anti-immigrant hostility in California. The Republican governor, Pete Wilson, was talking about a migrant “invasion” at the border and blaming it for everything that was going wrong in the state. Stephen Miller is really a product of that political and social moment. Miller internalized a lot of that racist rhetoric and ended up meeting some very far-right figures, one of whom was David Horowitz. He introduced Stephen Miller, during this vulnerable time in his life, to the idea that values such as equality and freedom, and other parts of America’s civic religion and national mythos, are entirely thanks to white men.
Right, it isn’t a racist thing, these Jews in Trump’s Minyan? Right, oh right, their are “aberations for Jews.”
Times of Israel (sic) Trump taps Jewish allies Stephen Miller, Lee Zeldin for top roles in administration
A fucking shame, this rot gut country:
We are all fucked with these goddamned racists and misogynists and hate mongers with guns and tanks and stun grenades and drones and helicopters:
The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol.” The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.
“I [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.”
North Carolina Slave Patrol Oath
You fucking things have changed 2025?
The American South relied almost exclusively on slave labor and white Southerners lived in near constant fear of slave rebellions disrupting this economic status quo. As a result, these patrols were one of the earliest and most prolific forms of early policing in the South. The responsibility of patrols was straightforward—to control the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations. According to historian Gary Potter, slave patrols served three main functions.
“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves;(2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and,
(3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.”
[The Chinatown Squad, a notoriously harsh police unit in San Francisco, in 1905.]
Anti-Black Punitive Traditions in Early American Policing
From police patrols to police counterinsurgency operations, colonial and antebellum law enforcement officers labored to maintain existing race-based notions of social order under color of law. Abolitionists in the 1850s condemned the involvement of the Boston police in federal fugitive enforcement and incarceration in a similar way to how Bostonian abolitionists today are mobilizing against “white supremacist violence” and Obama-era CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) “community policing” programs in the city’s Muslim and Black Muslim American neighborhoods. This fraught and variegated throughline in early American police history underscores the pervasive manifestations of anti-black racism in police law and police work. Above all, it demonstrates that policing strategies and carceral tactics in this period cannot be divorced from an abiding anti-black punitive tradition that endures in the age of mass incarceration and the movement for Black lives. — DeAnza A. Cook
Paul Haeder, Author 
Nice post 🌅🌅
LikeLike