To get more Americans to pay attention to how the Trump administration is trying to turn the US into a police state, the media needs to do a better job of describing the actions of masked ICE goons.
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Not a day goes by without new horror stories of heavily armed and masked government agents abducting or manhandling immigrants, students, American citizens, New York City mayoral candidates, and US senators.
“A U.S. citizen!” And now he’s missing.Adrian Martinez tried to defend a man ICE was harassing. Video shows six agents swarming him. He struggles but doesn’t lay hands on them. They take him to the ground & shove him into a CBP vehicle.Abuse of power. Keep recording. Don’t stop.(1 of 2)
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-06-18T12:27:17.163Z
How many times does this happen daily in Donald Trump’s America? That’s anybody’s guess.
We only know about the examples we cited because they were caught on camera (and even then, in spite of the evidence clearly showing the contrary, the administration is lying about what happened by claiming that the victims were “resisting arrest” or some other such nonsense).
To its credit, the mainstream media covers some of the high-profile cases. However, we believe that it is covering them incorrectly and would like to suggest some changes as to how these incidents should be framed.
Here is how the Los Angeles Times covered the story of Adrian Martinez, the man who is assaulted and taken away in the clip above (which you should definitely watch).
A 20-year-old Walmart employee, Adrian Martinez, was returning from break on Tuesday when he saw Border Patrol agents taking a worker cleaning the shopping center parking lot in Pico Rivera. He jumped out of the car and wheeled the man’s trash can in front of the vehicle as other passersby gathered around the truck yelling, blaring their horns.
Surveillance and spectator video captured at the scene and looped in social media feeds show an agent rushing Martinez and shoving him to the ground. He gets back up, there is more shoving, and he then exchanges angry words with a masked officer carrying a rifle, before other agents swarm him and push him back down, then drag him to their truck.
“What is he doing? He’s a f— hard worker,” Martinez can be heard yelling as more agents arrive, some in plain clothes, shoving him and forcibly arresting him.
LA’s top’s prosecutor, Bill Essayli, posted on X that Martinez “was arrested for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face after he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation.”
In normal times, that might do. In fact, this article isn’t even that bad.
But these aren’t normal times, as we can see in all of the videos linked above.
This is a time in which the US is on a fast-track to becoming an authoritarian police state. It is a time when people get snatched off the street for having an opinion that the Trump administration doesn’t like, for daring to ask questions, for peaceful acts of disobedience.
And they aren’t being arrested by cops with badges and warrants, but rather by heavily armed and masked thugs resembling the enforcement squads of some of the worst dictatorships in history.
Look at what happens 20 seconds into that clip: An unmarked truck arrives and non-uninformed men jump out of the car, one with a rifle.
How is that an appropriate show of force for arresting the janitor of a Walmart?
If that’s even what is happening.
These guys could also be cartel members. How would anybody know since they don’t identify themselves in any way?
Sure, you might say that one car is marked “Border Patrol” and some of the men are wearing tactical gear with the name of government agencies, but just last week, a guy dressed up as a cop (who even drove a vehicle that looked like a police cruiser) assassinated a lawmaker.
So how should news outlets like the LA Times cover this kind of thing?
Like this:
A 20-year-old Walmart employee, Adrian Martinez, tried to prevent the abduction of another man in broad daylight by a group of heavily armed and masked men. These men, who said they were Border Patrol agents but provided no proof to back up that claim, then assaulted Martinez and took him away as well.
That is certainly more factual.
Also, let’s just stop taking the word of anybody associated with the Trump administration on anything. Instead, it is important to point out that just about everybody from the president on down has a track record of lying.
LA’s top’s prosecutor, Bill Essayli, posted on X that Martinez “was arrested for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face after he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation.”
The video he provided to back up that assertion does not show a punch. In addition, even if there were such a punch, Martinez was clearly not the aggressor, and Americans certainly have a right to defend themselves when masked thugs jump them.
Finally, there is no reason to believe that anybody speaking on behalf of the Trump administration is speaking the truth.
It should be noted that Martinez’s family still does not have any information about his whereabouts.
Personally, we would also add a note that urges Americans to keep filming these thugs so that the right people can be held to account, not some guy coming back from lunch break who watches his coworker get kidnapped by goons.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
