American fire and ICE

HE PROMISED to pursue felons.

Instead, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after TikTokers.

“We’re going to get the criminals, the murderers, the drug dealers,” Donald Trump said on the campaign trail.

But on June 6, ICE picked up Khaby Lame, 25, the world’s most followed TikTok star.

Mr Lame’s “crime” was overstaying a visa.

However, all Italian nationals, of which the Senegal-born influencer is one, may be in the US without a visa for 90 days. Or at least they should be. He was in the US only since April 30.

Thus has the goalpost shifted under America’s 47th president.

Guilty of crime, not guilty of crime; visa-holder, non-visa-holder; national or non-national – it no longer matters.

The initially peaceful protests that broke out in GDP-rich California on June 6 came after ICE had swept up ordinary workers at places like donut shops, garment factories and car washes.

Forget rapists or members of Tren de Aragua.

In response to the protests, Mr Trump on June 7 issued an extraordinary memo, pre-emptively calling out the National Guard to locations where protests “are likely to occur.”

Seeking to squash any expression of dissent, he deliberately poured fuel over fire: at least 4,000 personnel have since been deployed, as well as 700 marines.

The Republican politicians who enable Mr Trump see his actions as serving law and order and protecting state property.

But it is not the rule of law that is enforced when ICE deports people without due process; when its lawyers tell judges they do not have to obey court orders; when a president deploys the military in defiance of the Democratic state governor; when that president is also the one who pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol and whose barrage of executive orders seeks to expand his powers at the expense of the US constitution itself, which protects the freedom to protest.

And when Caucasian South Africans fleeing a fictitious “genocide” are welcomed by Mr Trump as refugees, the actual face of his radical right-wing agenda is laid bare. He is deploying forces newly cleansed of diversity initiatives.

Provided by history is a graphic warning of the dangers of this use of US military on US soil.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed students engaged in Vietnam protests. That event turned out to be the precursor to the fall of Richard Nixon.

Mr Trump’s fascist overreach may yet become his nadir; he is threatening more action if people protest his military parade planned for Washington, DC, on June 14. That day will be his birthday. But in a land once defined by liberty, it might mark the birth of something else.