Concern at the way Trump’s administration is undermining the rule of law - Yorkshire Post Letters

I am very concerned at the way in which the Trump government is undermining both the rule of law in the USA and the commitment to ‘due process’. In a frantic attempt to rid the States of illegal immigrants an armed paramilitary body has been established in the form of I.C.E. operatives.

The Department of Homeland Security has tasked the I.C.E. operatives with rounding up and incarcerating 3,000 alleged ‘illegals’ per week and has incentivised them by threatening to sack the worst performing 10 per cent of teams.

In consequence teams are performing in a high-handed fashion that has nevertheless been endorsed by the government. The parallel with how Hitler deployed his S.A ‘brownshirts’ in the mid-1930s is frighteningly close.

Do I exaggerate? I invite your readers to make up their own minds. I would strongly encourage them to log onto a podcast by two American clinical psychologists, Gartner and Segal. They call it ‘Shrinking Trump’ and the recent episode (‘Trump Parade Tanks’) provides ample evidence, a case in point being the appalling treatment of Alejandro Padilla.

Padilla is the senior senator in Congress for California. For weeks he had been trying to get questions answered by Kristi Noem, Trump's cabinet member in charge of Homeland Security.

This is an elected representative doing his job, attempting to exercise scrutiny over the executive. Noem had been unforthcoming. Recently Padilla found himself in the same federal building as Noem, who was giving a press conference.

Padilla took the opportunity to walk into the press conference, announced himself and started to pose his question.

The reaction of Noem's security team was to seize Padilla, frog march him out of the room and into the corridor where they took him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Footage of this is available on ‘Trump Parade Tanks’. He was not arrested nor charged and soon released. But no apology was forthcoming.

What did happen was that the Trump administration gave a grossly distorted version to the media, attempting to justify what had happened. In short, they lied as part of the cover up.

To repeat, you can go online and see all this for yourself. It is chilling.