Russia’s FSB is working to build a new gulag. It’s recreation, and the loud echoes of the Stalinist era may mark the moment the country returns to the status of an unashamed dictatorship (if it hasn’t already passed that grim milestone).
Since February, the State Duma has been preparing three bills — expected to pass in July, and become law in January — that would create a new prison and detention archipelago across Russia.
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The FSB is anticipating a steep rise in repression. The explanatory note to the legislation states: “With the beginning of the special military operation, the number of suspects and [those] accused of treason, confidential cooperation with a foreign state, international or foreign organization, and espionage has increased significantly.”
CEPA
Perhaps Putin is jealous of Trump's ICE regime.
And, speaking of ICE...
[ICE agents'] masks are not “government issue” or of the N-95 variety with which we became familiar during COVID. Often these masks are just large, black or green pieces of cloth, or bandanas covering the entire face, save for the eyes. A hat pushed down low also appears to be part of the required uniform.
Despite strong opposition from ordinary Americans to the appearance of a force that many liken to “secret police” in totalitarian regimes, Republican senators have doubled down on ICE agent anonymity, introducing legislation that would make it a felony to release the names of ICE agents.
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The mask not only terrorizes the victim of the attack, but it also uniquely empowers the perpetrator. [...] The mask prevents their victims from identifying the “officers.” But perhaps the anonymity offered by the mask also encourages these agents to obscure their own humanity from each other and from themselves.
This country has a unique history with the particular terror of masked attackers. The Ku Klux Klan, the violent white supremacist organization terrorized Black people in the American South in the first years after the end of the Civil War and through much of the 20th century. So rampant was Klan violence in the years immediately after the Civil War, that it threatened to derail the promise of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and was designed to ensure that Black people would equal citizens in post-Civil War America.
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In response Congress enacted the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871,[iv] which gave the federal government authority to prosecute crimes committed by the Klan. For this reason, the Enforcement Acts are colloquially referred to as the “Ku Klux Klan Acts.” Among its other protections designed to ensure access to voting for Black people, the Enforcement Act of 1870 made it a felony when:
...two or more persons to band or conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway, or the premises of another, with intent to ….injure, press, threaten or intimidate any citizen with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.
The reference to disguise was not accidental. Congress held a set of hearings in 1870 and 1871 to receive testimony about the effect of Klan violence in the South.[v] The testimony offered at the hearings was harrowing. Black people courageously stepped forward to tell in their own words what they had endured in towns and hamlets throughout the South. They told of threats, whipping, rape, arson, murder – all carried out by masked and armed bands of men who demanded that Black people do their bidding.
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A key feature of these violent mobs – sometimes comprised of five men, sometimes forty - was that they were masked or disguised.
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In the Enforcement Acts, Congress chose to address the particular outrage of masked assailants who believed that their concealed identity would ensure that they could violate the constitutional rights of freedmen and women with impunity.
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Elements of the Acts’ protections survive in three contemporary civil rights statutes that protect against violations of constitutional rights by state actors. The principal statute can be found at 42 U.S.C. § 1983, known simply as “Section 1983.”[x] This is the statute frequently invoked to sue police officers engaged in racial discrimination and brutality. It is also the civil rights statute that the Supreme Court has severely weakened by its creation of the doctrine of “qualified immunity” which often prevents law enforcement officials from facing personal liability and money damages for their unconstitutional actions. Repeal of that judge-made doctrine was a key feature of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,[xi] which advocates demanded that Congress to pass in the year after Floyd’s murder. Its passage failed because of the resistance of Republicans in the Senate to repealing qualified immunity.
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Republicans raise concerns about ICE officers being “doxed.”[xiv] But “doxing” has never been understood to include seeing the face or learning the name of a state officer. Measures may be undertaken to protect online access to the home addresses of some federal officers in sensitive roles, as many are advocating for judges who are increasingly living under physical threat because of incendiary rhetoric coming from Trump and his supporters. But concealing their identity is not a constitutional solution.
We have every right to know the identity of those officers are who are abducting migrants and U.S. citizens from our streets, and under whose authority they are purporting to act. Officers of the state should be proud to identify themselves as such. When they are not, it is a warning flag for democracy.
Sherrilyn Ifill
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