To the Individual ICE Agents on the Front Lines, "Thank You for Your Service."

The attacks on Border Patrol and ICE agents copy and expand on the abuse heaped on Vietnam veterans. And we owe them a "thank-you" for their service.

We all have seen the attacks against ICE and CBP agents in Minnesota by people who claim to be just “protecting our neighbors.” These “neighbors” include murderers, rapists, sex traffickers, robbers and thieves, all of whom are deemed more worthy of protection than are the federal employees seeking to enforce the laws of the United States. The government employees who attempt to enforce the law by apprehending these criminals have been subjected to an escalating campaign of vilification, personalized hostility, abuse, and assaults. They are Nazis ! Gestapo !

As I see and read of these attacks on the individual line agents, I have a sense of deja vu. My mind flashes back to the abuse inflicted upon many members of our military who served in Vietnam in the ’60s and early ’70s. Like the ICE agents today, the great majority were attempting to do two things that sometimes were at odds with each other: (1) discharge their duty under highly dangerous conditions and then (2) return home alive. I shall never forget the abuse heaped upon those who did return after choosing to serve in Vietnam rather than dodge the draft, flee to Canada, or hide behind phony physical ailments. We have seen this act before, only it is worse — much worse — now.

A flashback to the ’60s for those who have forgotten or never knew

Today the “Thank you for your service” mantra addressed to military veterans is ubiquitous. No doubt even some of the “demonstrators” in Minneapolis have prided themselves at some point on their virtue signaling with a “Thank you for your service.” But this is a change from the Vietnam era. Most people alive today have no personal memory of how returning combat veterans were treated then. So please allow me to adumbrate how we were treated then by significant swaths of the “anti-war” public. I will then compare that with the ongoing attacks on the line agents for attempting to enforce our immigration laws.

To understand why Vietnam veterans were treated so vilely, we need look no further that the 1971 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by John Kerry, a speech that launched his political career. It is worth looking at because today we are again seeing individual line agents being trashed by politicians, media, Hollywood movie stars, and other prominent people.

Kerry painted a grotesque picture of the American soldier. He claimed that those who served in Vietnam were “a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.” He told Americans that their Soldiers’ crimes were “what threatens this country.”

According to Kerry, these barbarisms were “accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam, and that they were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

And just what was it that we Soldiers did? Well, listen to him.

Kerry told everyone in America that we were monsters who

had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war….

When Kerry’s portrayal of such “monsters” was televised and widely circulated, is it any wonder that Soldiers became the object of wide-spread derision, harassment and prejudice?

So, because of slanders spread by the likes of John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and their ilk, a significant number of Americans adopted their disdain, even hatred for Soldiers. A small number of ill-disciplined Soldiers committed atrocities at My Lai, so we all were branded as “baby killers” by many of our fellow citizens. Young men were frequently harassed or denied service at a bars and restaurants because they had short hair that marked them as members of the military. Curses and insults were routinely thrown at a servicemember or his uniform.

At the so-called “anti-war” rallies held on college campuses, students the age of the average infantryman in Vietnam routinely waved enemy flags and chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is doing to win.” Some of us took that personally. You win a war when you kill the enemy soldiers. So, these students — our chronological peers — were rooting for our deaths — they wanted our enemies to win.

And, yes, random people sometimes thought it was cool to spit on returning veterans. A cottage industry of sorts has grown up to deny that this ever happened, but I have friends who personally experienced it. Wikipedia characterizes this as a “persistent myth,” but the same article cites instances where it did happen, while speculating about possible reasons for the spitting. Most of the denials are based on the lack of police reports or criminal charges. What utter nonsense. There is about a zero % chance that a veteran walking through an airport after spending a year or more in Vietnam would decide to delay his return home and family by searching for a cop to report an irritating but non-life-threatening incident and potentially getting involved in the judicial system over it. Better to ‘suck it up and drive on.’

Today’s war on the troops — It is worse.

Today we see the same hatred spewed at the front-line agents. Those agents are trying to do their duty under stressful and dangerous conditions, all to enforce the laws of the United States. They are my focus here, not their higher-ups, some of whom have rushed out with demonstrably inaccurate descriptions of deadly events. That happened in Vietnam, too, from Robert McNamara on down.

Their opponents have doubled down on Kerry’s playbook.

As during Vietnam, and as exemplified by John Kerry, the fires are unapologetically fanned by many public figures. The Minnesota Governor, the State Attorney General, the Minneapolis Mayor, the local congressional representative and numerous other politicians, movie stars, and the usual left-wing media shills have encouraged attacks against individual agents by slandering them as Nazis, Gestapo, and kidnappers of five-year-old children. They have thrown fuel on the fire at every turn. In the middle of these highly charged conditions, they have urged the “protesters” to take to the streets, confront the agents, and help build the promised criminal prosecutions against them. They and their supporters assure us that when they regain power, they will hold Nuremburg-type trials for agents who have obeyed orders as well as those who have given them. The agents will get all the due process previously afforded Derek Chauvin. ‘You gonna get some due process now, white boy.’ And for those who may doubt me or who simply want to read a superb analysis of the politicized persecution of Officer Chauvin, please read “The Scapegoating of Derek Chauvin, Part I” and Part II. Written by T. J. Harker, a former federal prosecutor, it is the best analysis I have seen. After you read T.J.’s documentation and analysis you will understand why DHS shies away from Minnesota having any role in any current investigations.

As a direct result of their promotion of this insurrection, there have been widespread and highly organized “protests” not just against the senior leadership, but against all agents. (I put “protests” in quotes because these gatherings frequently resemble riots and all are intended to interfere with the discharge of legal duties, not good-faith exercises of First Amendment rights.)

When agents try to apprehend someone who has damaged government property or assaulted agents, they “put their bodies on the line” as instructed by Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, to interfere with the apprehension. They assault agents with their autos. They again “put their bodies on the line” when they physically surround government vehicles with their bodies and their own vehicles to keep them penned in.

Here is Lt. Gov. Flanagan claiming that the agents are “stealing food off of the table from seniors and children” and “kidnapping” “our neighbors.” Protesters, you must “put your body on the line” to protect “our neighbors” from Donald Trump “and his minions.”

But, of course, Flanagan also tells you to be “non-violent.” RIIIIIGHT! Fat chance. Here are some of her followers after absorbing her ersatz caution:

They storm hotels where they think agents may be sleeping. At night they bang on drums and garbage can lids, and blast air horns, all to make sure that the agents (and whoever else is at the hotel) can’t sleep. If agents manage to get away for a meal in a restaurant, the network sends out alerts and mobs assemble in minutes to drive out the agents amidst much shouting, whistle–blowing, assaults, and other disruptive behavior.

The mobs try to identify individual agents, and in some cases have succeeded. When successful, they dox and threaten the agents and their families. Democrat politicians aid their doxing tactics by threatening to shut down the government if agents are allowed to try to protect themselves by concealing their faces and identities.

When ICE contacted local police to request protection, they refused to show up to protect the federal agents. Although there seems to be some improvement in the past few days, for weeks there was zero effort by local authorities to protect the agents by controlling the chaos or preventing the riots.

In short, in the midst of utter chaos and lawlessness, the mobs have displayed their undisguised hatred of individual agents for the “crime” of attempting to perform their assigned duties. In the ’60s and ’70s we were all baby killers; now all the line agents are Nazis working for the Gestapo. And it all has been encouraged and abetted by state and local authorities and prominent national politicians and media.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Although the quotation in the heading is attributed to Voltaire, I first heard it some years ago when a client was critiquing a very extensive pre-filing investigation that I was insisting on before instituting a lawsuit. He was right: My search for pre-filing perfection was overkill, and I have periodically reminded myself of it ever since.

The same is true of any complex military or law enforcement operation. The best generals make mistakes, as do sergeants and captains. No military campaign is conducted perfectly. For all the respect that we now give Vietnam and especially World War II veterans, soldiers in those — and all — wars made plenty of mistakes. Some were the result of good faith but imperfect decisions. Others stemmed from ill-discipline and emotional reactions to the stress of combat. We know the evil that U.S. troops did at My Lai; and any serious student of history knows that some members of the “Greatest Generation” did things that would see them court-martialled today.

Yet those imperfections do not cause us to slander and attack all veterans of any wars. We honor them despite the excesses or even crimes of some.

ICE and CBP, with tens of thousands of agents each, are no different. Are they perfect? No. They are not perfect. Not their leaders, not the line agents. But the great majority are doing their best to do their duty under trying and dangerous circumstances.

Even when some make questionable or even flatly wrong decisions, the broad population of ICE and CBP agents deserve our honor and respect. They do not deserve to be denigrated as a group as Nazis, Gestapo, or the like.

So, if you see any federal agents in your town or city, don’t get in their way, but thank them. Let them know that they have support. A short “We appreciate what you do,” will go a long way to help tamp down tensions. Do your share.