Rep. Jasmine Crockett Blasts ICE as ‘Slave Patrols’
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) likened Donald Trump’s militarized police forces roaming Democrat-run cities to the “slave patrols” of the antebellum South when white men targeted and arrested escaped slaves.
Crockett made the comment to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Sunday.
Velshi began, “I’m trying to figure out, how can people who like Donald Trump, don’t like Donald Trump, understand that he seems to be building a police force that is not subject to the normal rules, that either policing or military should be subject to? It’s it’s sort of a police force that’s lacking accountability.”
“There is no accountability. And it’s going after its American people, right?” Crockett said.
Crockett called the idea that anyone in American wants to be unsafe regardless of political party as “absolutely absurd.”
“None of us want to be unsafe, but we’re not looking at the facts.”
Crockett continued:
So, listen, if we want to figure out how we are going to be safer, we probably need people that have actual intelligence and actually will pay attention to data and facts and go from there. But what they’re doing right now, it almost feels like, you know, I’ve seen the memes about the purge and all these things — but as somebody who understands history, when I see ICE, I see slave patrols.
Now, I never lived through the slave patrol period. But if you know the history of policing in this country, then you understand that they were born out of slave patrols.
Crockett added that everyone in America should have a real problem with the recent Supreme Court decision to allow ICE agents to profile potential targets based on things like race and whether Spanish is being spoken, when deciding to detain and interrogate someone.
“It’s almost like you can just go grab them up — that is what they’re saying. And that is a problem. We all should have a problem with that. But when you don’t want to teach American history, that includes Black history, then you lose out on the benefit of understanding that we have been down this road before and it was not good, and we fixed it once, and it is a shame that we are relitigating this and we are going to have to fix it again.”
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.
