There are many ways to corrupt and cripple the legal system. With the emergence of Trump’s autocratic regime in Washington, those many ways are innumerable. One of the least creative but no less effective is to base police action on the lack of evidence of criminal activity.
The obvious example is a major case about allegations without evidence unfolding in the Washington court of Judge Boasberg. On 17 March, the Trump administration deported about 250 Venezuelans purported to be members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang to El Salvador. The administration is refusing to disclose the identities of those deported and the evidence of their membership in a violent gang. Indeed, it has no evidence:
In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” (ABC News, 18 Mar)
In other words, the absence of evidence of mutual affiliation or criminal conduct by individuals is evidence that they are risks to society because they are “terrorists.” The administration’s spurious reasons—the president’s exclusive authority in matters of foreign policy and national security—cannot conceal the obvious facts of deportation unjustified by an inapplicable law and violating various Constitutional rights.
There are more parallels, notably allegations against colleges and university students for exercising their rights to associate freely, protest freely, and speak freely on certain subjects. The Trump administration is investigating them on the presumption of supporting terrorism—a word meaning whatever Trump says it means—if they oppose Israeli attacks or support Palestinians attacked in Gaza, free speech notwithstanding. But the untethered Trump will oppose dissenters outside academe marching to protest his administration’s policies on domestic and foreign issues: cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; shutting the Department of Education and USAid; weakening or leaving NATO and abandoning or trading Ukraine; and acquiring Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. Marchers on 5 April might face police or troops, arrest, charges of terrorism, and jail despite the First Amendment. The administration’s operating principle is guilty without evidence and until proven innocent, with Constitutional rights flouted or refused.
Such absurd illogic of guilt without evidence is not original with the Trump administration or confined to the federal level. Similar corrupt legal thinking pervades the LCPD. To justify five false allegations of code violations, Chief Codes Administrator James Chavez reported in a 11 Sep 2019 memorandum to Police Chief Patrick Gallagher that the warning notice reflected “the possibility [my emphasis]” of those violations. (Later in his memorandum, Chavez wrote that one allegation was wrong.) LCPD officers do not understand that the purpose of their site visits is to ascertain the actuality, not the possibility, of allegations. Just think of how many tickets the LCPD could issue on the basis of mere possibilities.
To conclude his investigations of the allegations, Sean Mullins, IA investigator, reported in his 5 February 2020 memorandum to Gallagher that Juan Valles, Animal Control Officer, justified one allegation by claiming that, though “he was unable to completely view the entire backyard….he was unsure if there was any animal waste in the parts he couldn’t view/access.” Again, just think how many code violations LCPD could allege in the absence of evidence.
Valles also reported that, at the direction of supervisors for 10 years, officers must allege two violations even if the citizen is unavailable to discuss the violations. Just think about allegations justified because of a doctor’s appointment or a bridge game at the senior center. Valles implied that such legal thinking is widespread in the LCDP; he said that any officer would have ticked off all five allegations although Mullins found all unsupported by evidence. The critical issue involved in these instances is defiance of a fundamental principle of American jurisprudence: the LCPD presumes citizens to be guilty and ignores their innocence even after proof of it.
For proof of innocence has not been good enough for the LCPD to expunge unsupported allegations. When I met with Police Chief Jeremy Story in his office in December 2023, I asked that he clear my file, as no prior police chief would, because of false allegations. As I reviewed the few basic documents, he muttered that he saw things in them which he did not like, but he did nothing. When I met him at a public meeting in June 2024, I asked him about my file. I did not call out his lie when he said there was no file. I insisted that I had a file and could prove it; he invited me to do so. I sent him the proof: the warning notice itself and email from a former city manager saying that he had found it. Story emailed me that he would check into it and get back to me. He never did, despite my reminders. Why not? First, Story, like police chiefs before him, is not a man, or man enough, to admit mistakes.. Second, he is irritated at me for criticizing the LCPD and some of its personnel. Third, he wants the file for future use (“Judge, we have had trouble with Mr. Hays before.”). Fourth, he keeps it to weaponize his antisemitism, both personal and departmental. I invite anyone who doubts my analysis to call Story to ask him why he lied about the existence of the file, did not admit its existence, and did not expunge it.
Both of these examples of guilt without evidence at the federal and local level mean that, without the rule of law, anyone is liable to authoritarian abuse. Anyone can be accused of anything and hauled off without warning to anyplace out of the way—disappeared. The Trump administration’s strategy is to use and “mediafy” these abuses to accustom the public to them. Characterizing people as “terrorists” or “criminals” or “lunatics” or “deviants” dehumanizes them so that they are alienated from respect, compassion, and support through the legal system.
What the Trump administration is doing on a large scale Las Cruces has already been doing on a small scale as practice for doing it on a larger scale. Story’s SWAT vehicles will come in handy. So all of the lofty promises of members of City Council and pledges from the city’s police chiefs will be worth nothing when the time comes—or should I say now that the time has come? The LCPD handling of my case is just an omen which the “it can’t happen here” crowd, including Council members, has chosen to ignore, at every citizen’s peril.
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