Stay In Your Lane

Here’s a little suggestion to the folks at ICE:  keep deporting the illegals (a Good Thing, that we voted for), and don’t get too big for your fucking boots (which we didn’t).

Is that a little opaque?  This may clear it up:

A federal court on Tuesday ordered the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop violating the First Amendment by threatening a Rochester man over a January email in which he criticized the then-director of ICE.

Details, you want?

In January, federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse, during a tense encounter. Outraged, Streever wrote a stern email to Lyons, entitled “What’s next” and calling the official a “monstrous human being” who will “go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” a reference to the infamous Nazi official.

He never heard back. Then, five months later, Streever was in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter when his home’s front-door camera picked up the presence of two ICE agents on his porch. The Nest video shows the agents, arriving late in the afternoon on a sunny Tuesday, walking past children’s toys as they climb the steps and repeatedly ring the doorbell. But nobody was home yet. Soon, though, Streever’s wife, an Episcopal priest, still wearing her clergy collar, arrived to find the agents still present.

One of them handed her a “WARNING NOTICE” directed to Streever that claimed, “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” for sending his email to the ICE director. The notice insisted that he should “promptly … discontinue” his “behavior,” threatened criminal prosecution, and warned that the notice will be “taken into consideration” if he “continue[s] to be involved” in “criminal activities.”

Streever’s wife told the agents he was out of the country and would return to Rochester that Friday — but federal agents did not wait. While Streever and his daughter slept off some jet lag at a New York City hotel before the last leg of the trip back to Rochester, a federal agent showed up at the front desk looking for him. He left a clerk a business card to give to Streever, whom the clerk called to inform that an agent had been by. Also that night, two agents repeatedly called Streever’s phone, leaving anonymous voicemails identifying themselves only as “Homeland Security Investigations.”

If agents showing up at his home wasn’t unsettling enough, the hotel visit greatly alarmed Streever. His wife hadn’t told authorities where he was staying. Homeland Security found him anyway.

On their train ride home, Streever informed his daughter about the possibility that federal agents might confront him. The girl broke down in tears, worried about her father’s safety. Streever then resolved to fight this abuse of power.

Here’s the thing.  I may not agree with the Streever guy’s verbiage in his email, and I certainly don’t think his email was warranted, given the facts of that silly bitch’s abrupt termination in Minnesota.

But the last time I looked, calling anyone a Nazi — even one as bad as Heydrich — is not a “criminal activity” —  and ICE didn’t even attempt to defend their decision to call the slur criminal, although they did use it as a pretext to deliver their little warnings, the bastards.

In case this is still unclear, here’s the executive summary.

There is a huge divide between threatening someone’s life and calling someone a Nazi.  Had Streever done the first to the ICE Director in his email, I’d be happy to see him carted off in an orange jumpsuit and chains.  But just calling the guy a Nazi?  Forget about it.  That falls under the pesky First Amendment’s protection.

As for ICE:  stick to the deportations, step away from the fucking Nazi behavior — the threatening bullshit, I mean — and we’ll all be happy.

Otherwise, O ye of the ICE Persuasion, you risk losing the support of the people who are otherwise cheering you on.

People like me.  And you can’t afford that.