Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – DHS Says It’s “Working On” A Black Lives Matter Crackdown

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

To view the entire series of Rising Up for Justice! posts, insert “rising up” in the search bar above.

DHS Says It’s “Working On” A Black Lives Matter Crackdown

By Caleb Ecarma, Vanity Fair

September 1, 2020

After months of Donald Trump recycling Fox News lines equating those protesting racial injustice to domestic terrorists, the president’s acting Department of Homeland Security secretary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday to tease what sounds like the department’s potential mass-arrest plan. Carlson pressed DHS chief Chad Wolf on why “the leaders of antifa and BLM” have not yet been rounded up, suggesting that they should be “arrested and charged with conspiracy under, say, RICO like the heads of Mafia families were.” 

“Well, this is something that I have talked to [Attorney General William Barr] personally about. I know that they are working on it,” said Wolf, adding that officials have made “about 300 arrests across this country regarding civil unrest,” including about 75 who have been charged in Portland alone. (Several of those arrests occurred when federal officers barreled protesters into unmarked vans.) “The Department of Justice is also targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country,” he said.

It’s unclear exactly who the DOJ views as the leaders of nebulous political movements like antifa and Black Lives Matter, as the past few months of nationwide protests sparked by police shootings of Black Americans are largely grassroots, often spontaneous demonstrations organized at local levels. But Wolf described BLM as a hierarchical movement and suggested that the group uses a methodical and far-reaching process of organizing. “We know [protesters] are moving around,” he said. “We have seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere. They are organized.… I know that the Department of Justice is also looking at that as well.” He also noted that out of the “175 arrests in Kenosha, almost 100 of them were from out of state.” 

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