Newly unearthed emails show a top Trump administration official’s thirst for violence against people protesting the administration’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown last summer.
Donald Trump has a long history of publicly fantasizing about police violence. The emails, which were shared with the Los Angeles Times but have have not been viewed by MS NOW, speak to the culture of violent intimidation that the president has helped fuel at the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that has become a megaphone for white supremacist propaganda.
The emails in question were uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act request by watchdog group American Oversight. They reportedly show Joseph Mazzara, a State Department employee who at the time was DHS’ acting general counsel, suggesting that federal agents should have beaten demonstrators who tried to breach a protective line at a federal building while protesting Trump’s authoritarian deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles.
On June 11, he wrote: ‘Every time I read about the battering ram incident I’m just floored at how wild that is.’
Referring to law enforcement as ‘they,’ he continued: ‘They should have, when they brought the line in, just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away from them. No one likes being hit by a stick, and people tend to run when that starts happening in earnest.’
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mazzara was later appointed deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The Times cites reporting from Politico that said Mazzara was among a group of employees Kristi Noem took with her to work at the State Department after she was ousted as homeland security secretary. DHS didn’t immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
This story, of a top legal official at DHS being found pushing violent extremist rhetoric, bears similarity to this piece I wrote in January, concerning a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyer who returned to work despite being linked to a social media account known for promoting bigotry and fascism.
The Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown became so brutal last year that even some popular figures who have supported the president compared it to Nazism. That reputation is only bolstered by these revelations of violent bloodlust by a top lawyer formerly tasked with advising the people waging that crackdown.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
