Specter Of Dreaded East German Stasi Secret Police Looms Big in U.S.
The deadly Stasi secret police and informer network of the former communist East Germany terrorized the citizenry, and a new and equally frightening version is spreading fear among citizens throughout the U.S.
The Stasi served to maintain state authority and the position of the ruling party, primarily through the use of a network of civilian informants who contributed to the arrest of approximately 250,000 people in East Germany.
East Germany and the Stasi are no more but the same strategy that fueled the Stasi is growing in the U.S. at alarming rates. Trump’s chilling version of the Stasi is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency commonly known as ICE. Its agents, dressed in non-descript clothes, arrive in unmarked cars to swoop down on unsuspecting, horrified immigrants.
The agents invade sacred and previously safe spaces as they instill terror in schools, religious places and communities across the nation. When they seize children, the message is that no children are safe; when they enter a hospital or a school, they are warning everybody that their children are not safe; when they go into a courtroom to arrest a judge, they sound the alarm that innocent people are not immune from ICE terror and there is nowhere that the government cannot go as part of trump’s campaign against freedom.
Recently, agents entered a Milwaukee courtroom and arrested a judge after she instructed an undocumented man awaiting a hearing to leave the court so he could meet with a lawyer before he was arrested by ICE agents. Agents collared their prey outside and returned later to arrest Democratic Judge Hannah C. Dugan on flimsy charges of obstructing immigration agents.
Six federal officers had gone to the courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national who was there for a hearing on battery charges. Before the hearing, a lawyer told Dugan that ICE agents were outside her courtroom. She called the situation “absurd” and left the bench and then told the agents that they needed a judicial warrant and to speak with the chief judge of Milwaukee County.
One of the officers talked to the chief judge, who “emphasized that such actions should not take place in courtrooms or other private locations,” according to the ICE complaint. As Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer left the courtroom, Dugan told them to wait as she ushered them through a door that leads to a “nonpublic” area of the courthouse.
Agents saw Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer and watched them leave the building before they arrested Flores-Ruiz after a foot chase. A week later, the agents returned to arrest Dugan. ICE agents should have avoided the contrived drama if they had first contacted the judge for questioning or asked her to surrender.
Not coincidentally Dugan, 65, has spent much of her career providing legal services for poor people, specializing in housing and public benefits. It is a philosophy that is the opposite of the kind supported by trump. She was elected judge in 2016 and ran unopposed for re-election in 2022. Her current term ends in 2028.
In a highly unusual move, the known conspiracist and trump sycophant, FBI Director Kash Patel, quickly posted a photo on X of the judge while she was handcuffed, being escorted to a vehicle by officials. Under the photo Patel posted “No one is above the law.” Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced the judge’s arrest with similar boasting.
But there are many people, particularly within the trump scourge, who are above the law. There’s Bondi herself, who before she was named the nation’s top enforcer, accepted a $25,000 campaign contribution from trump and later dropped an investigation into the bogus Trump University.
Patel and Bondi could not have been referring to trump who has ignored a Supreme Court order to return to the U.S. a man who was arrested by ICE agents and deported with no due process to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Patel and Bondi could not have been referring to trump who pardoned a felon who, together with his wife, donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign; or to trump who brashly promoted Teslas on the White House driveway; or trump who held a private dinner for speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency.
And then there was the matter of trump escaping prosecution for goading on supporters to riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and later pardoning more than 1,000 of the rioters.
Ice Horrors
Each day brings news of another horrible action by trump’s ICE agents.
In the early hours on Friday, three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, from two different families were deported with their mothers and their home in New Orleans to a facility in Louisiana and later to Honduras. The 4-year-old has Stage 4 cancer and was deported without medication or the family’s ability to contact their doctors.
In another incident, Heidy Sánchez, 44, a Cuban woman living in Tampa, Fla., who came to the United States in 2019 and is married to a U.S. citizen was detained and deported to Cuba, leaving behind her one-year-old child. Sánchez was among 82 Cuban migrants sent on a plane from Miami back to Cuba on Thursday morning.
ICERAID
A new and even more alarming development was unveiled last week by far-right podcaster, Laura Loomer. It is a new computer app that lets people win cryptocurrency by alerting ICE to anyone they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally or should otherwise be deported.
Loomer is a prominent MAGA influencer who has supported “pro-white nationalism.” She was joined in her podcast by Jacob Engels, a Proud Boys associate and writer for the conspiracy theory-pushing blog Gateway Pundit. The app is called IceRaid.US and it is not affiliated with the government although its webpage has a misleading logo similar to the ICE logo. Users can snap photos and send them along with data identifying where and when they were taken, to law enforcement.
Loomer is a close trump confidant whose advice last week led to the firing of Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. Trump believed Loomer when she accused Haugh and his deputy of disloyalty.
In unveiling IceRaid.US, Loomer alerted wannabe vigilantes, informants and snitches that they can easily target immigrants.
“If you’re sick and tired of the illegal alien construction workers making a bunch of noise at the house next door to yours, you can actually call it in. Get that cryptocurrency for reporting these individuals. It’s almost like a bounty,” Loomer said.
IceRaid.US was created by a cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Jason Meyers. In 2014, Meyers and his firm, ICM Capitol Markets Ltd., were suspended from conducting securities transactions and business with the investing public. The action came after Meyers was sanctioned by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Meyers did not admit guilt when he consented to a sanction because he “misappropriated at least $700,000 of funds raised from 19 investors in a series of private offerings of securities. He used significant portions of the funds raised for his own personal use, which wasn’t either authorized by investors nor permitted under the terms of the offering documents nor disclosed to customers. Myers was not entitled to any compensation.”
FINRA is a private not-for-profit membership organization that is responsible under federal law for supervising its member firms. The agency is registered with the SEC.
Myers spoke about the app in interviews with the far-right, fake news Gateway Pundit website and on the One American News Network (OANN), a far right, trump backing show hosted by disgraced, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz was trump’s pick to be attorney general but he resigned from Congress amid a cloud of sexual improprieties involving juveniles.
“We are cutting down on the amount of time taxpayer resources are used to locate and apprehend criminal illegal immigrants,” Meyers said. “This really aligns with the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) mandate — decentralized governance efficiency. Law enforcement can focus on action, not paperwork.”
ICERAID is a GovFi protocol that uses blockchain to reward users with crypto tokens for capturing, uploading and validating photographic evidence of eight categories of suspected criminal activity. Rewards will accumulate in users’ accounts and can later be claimable. GovFi protocol delegates intelligence gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be performed by law enforcement agencies.
“Innovative ideas like this…help keep our law enforcement officers honest and remain in line with President Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Safe Again,’” the website says.
The website outlines the crypto-token distribution, vesting schedule, and the deployment of the ICERAID Validator for evidence validation. The tokens are funded by public sales, which totaled 65,007,513 ICERAID tokens sold, as of last week. Purchaser also will receive a 20 percent bonus on top of their purchased amount “as a thank-you for believing in the vision of the GovFi category.”
The current price of Iceraid is $0.00477951. One Iceraid is worth $0.00224972. As of Sunday, there were just 127 token holders, creating a liquidity of $91,020.34. Over the last 24 hours, iceraid has decreased by -69.74%. It currently has a circulating supply of 999,999,996 RAID and a maximum supply of 999,999,996 RAID, giving it a fully diluted market cap of $2.25M.
Meyers said he is in discussions with officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as well as federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies regarding potential collaboration.
Meyers, who also founded AuditChain Labs AG, said that he developed ICERAID.US as part of a broader effort to integrate blockchain technology into government functions.
“The project aims to reduce taxpayer costs by decentralizing intelligence gathering and law enforcement support tasks,” Meyers said.
SignalSafe
The SignalSafe app is a platform designed to provide essential resources and tools for immigrant communities, focusing on privacy and security. For obvious reasons, the developer or organization behind the app isn’t clear.
SignalSafe posts real time information about hundreds of ICE or suspected ICE activity throughout the country. The app uses photos, videos and other information, often from anonymous sources, as users alert migrants to federal agent and local police activity.
Reports on the app include potential plain-clothes agents or police officers parked together, along with clearly-marked Border Patrol or ICE vehicles. One recent example was a listing of a suspicious ice cream truck and red van seen at Home Depot in Linden. The narrative noted, “I observed an ice cream truck and a red van at The Home Depot on West Edgar Road. Individuals in normal clothing were looking around the area.”
Another reported possible ICE activity Raising Cane’s in Riverside, Calif. The narrative noted, “I observed two officers inside Raising Cane’s on Magnolia Avenue. While this activity is not verified as ICE-related, it appears to be a notable law enforcement presence.”
Another was reported from a service station on Port Chester, N.Y., where the reporter “observed officials at the gas station by Pascuale Restaurant, where they were stationed covering one lane.”
The app also offers printed cards outlining immigrant rights in 19 different languages. Also noted are advice on what to do in specific immigration situations as when law enforcement asks about a person’s immigration status; when a person has been stopped by police or ICE; and when police or ICE are at a person’s home.
It also advises that people should not open the door if an immigration agent approaches. But if they are met with an agent, the person should say, “I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights.”
Federal Surveillance
The federal government also is using technology to track legal and illegal immigrants and to facilitate deportations.
One of the largest private prison companies working with ICE, GEO Group, uses an app to verify the location of those without legal status not detained in its facilities. GEO Group is one of two major private prison companies used by ICE, alongside CoreCivic, to manage its detention facilities. In December, GEO said it was planning to invest $70 million in expansion, with a particular focus on ICE facilities.
The government also monitors on-line activity in its efforts to arrest and deport immigrants and students who are deemed to be anti-Semitic.