Masterson, Kansas Republicans embrace federal overreach with ICE bill | Opinion
During the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, bystander video showed America an out-of-control federal immigration agent essentially executing a protester in cold blood for no good reason.
And Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson wants to make sure that never happens in Kansas.
The video part, specifically.
Masterson is the mastermind behind Senate Bill 452, designed to establish a 25-foot buffer zone around federal enforcement officers carrying out what they perceive to be their duties — with criminal penalties for any Kansans who might wander closer and record their often brutal tactics.
It’s the ultimate irony that Kansas Republican politicians, who’ve built their entire careers campaigning against “federal government overreach,” have lovingly embraced it in the Age of Trump.
Senate Bill 452 is basically an open invitation to the Trump administration to “surge” Kansas with the kind of aggressive and violent enforcement tactics they’ve inflicted on cities across the country.
Film ICE, go to jail
The bill creates a new crime of “unlawful approach of a first responder,” which is defined as being within 25 feet of them and “distracting” them on the job.
The bill specifically adds federal agents to the list of first responders, which has never been the case in Kansas law.
As police lobbyist Ed Klumpp explained in a House hearing on the bill Monday: “The advantage to this is that if we have a situation like what’s happening up in Minnesota, for example, and you have people interfering with federal officers, then local officers can step in and deal with those people creating that interference.”
Speaking of Minnesota, that’s where on Jan. 24 anti-ICE protester Alex Pretti, a nurse at the local Veterans Administration hospital, was gunned down in the street after moving to assist a woman who’d been shoved to the ground by an agent. It was part of “Operation Metro Surge,” a deployment of at least 2,700 federal officers who frankly terrorized the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in the name of immigration enforcement.
After the shooting, Trump and administration officials sought to label Pretti as a domestic terrorist determined to shoot agents, but bystander videos clearly debunked their lies.
Pretti had a permit to carry his gun legally and the video record showed he didn’t threaten officers or attempt to reach for his back holster. The videos also showed he was already disarmed, on his knees and in the grasp of agents when an officer fired at least three shots into his back at point-blank range — then backed away and pumped more shots into Pretti’s body lying on the ground.
So if you’re protesting or observing ICE and something like that happens to someone next to you, and you record it, S.B. 452 would allow local police to arrest you for “distracting” the agents and seize your phone as “evidence” against you.
It sends a loud clear message that this state will have the feds’ back and use local police powers to help cover up any acts of brutality they might commit.
In my book, that’s a far greater federal overreach than telling oil producers not to service their rigs from dawn to 9:30 a.m. during prairie chicken mating season — a relatively recent example that had Kansas legislators’ hair on fire for years.
Phony scenarios used to justify bill
It’s near certain there will be increased ICE activity, and protest, in Kansas in the not-too-distant future — especially since the Leavenworth City Commission decided last week to let private prison operator CoreCivic reopen a closed-down federal pen as an ICE detention center.
Lawmakers supporting S.B. 452 are trying their best to fabricate scenarios to pretend this is about anything but protecting immigration agents if they decide to bring their Minnesota tactics to Kansas.
Like this little bit of make-believe spun up in Monday’s hearing by state Rep. Tom Kessler, a Wichita Republican and chairman of the Fed and State Committee:
“I’m just thinking of … a dire situation where, a medical emergency, who knows what, and you got a crowd of people in there, you just need to back everybody up so that, so the medical team can get in and do their thing and kind of have some room . . . I was going back through some of the testimony that just throughout the entire testimony, was nothing but ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE. I don’t think the bill actually really directly talks about ICE in here, but I get the correlation.”
In 40-plus years of journalism, I’ve been to countless emergencies, from single-car crashes to earthquakes. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one where people didn’t stand back and allow paramedics to do their work.
Rep. Kessler, there’s a simple reason so much of the testimony you’ve received is “ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE.”
It’s what the bill’s about.
Quit blowing smoke and own it.
