Trump’s deportation police ICE had the American Renée Good on January 7th just like that shot in her car. On Saturday, the authorities once again shot and killed Alex Pretti, an obviously innocent and defenseless American lying on the ground. There are videos of the ICE attacks in Minneapolis that show that both cases were cold-blooded shootings in which the victims offered no resistance.
While there is great horror in the USA and here, the AfD parliamentary group in the Bavarian state parliament is inspired by the illegal and violent actions of the American deportation police. At the end of her closed meeting at the end of last week, she called for the creation of a special German police force based on the model of ICE.
The AfD parliamentary group in Bavaria calls this AFA (“Asylum, Search and Deportation Group”), which they want to create within the Bavarian police. A position paper available to taz states that the specialized unit “similar to the ICE in the USA” should significantly increase the deportation rate through “focused work”.
“Focused work” means here: Trump’s ICE agents, masked and often illegally, arbitrarily arrest people in the style of an armed vigilante group based on racist criteria, thereby spreading fear and terror in the USA. An AfD demand for unlawful state power could also become relevant with a view to a possible ban procedure. Most recently, AfD member of the Bundestag Matthias Helferich called Trump’s ICE agent right path for a “more robust deportation policy”..
Competition of atrocities
In Bavaria, Prime Minister Markus Söder’s CSU has been trying to undercut the extreme right-wing party for a long time with a right-wing course. However, this only led to the AfD rising in the polls and now tightening its migration policy positions again five weeks before the local elections. Söder even has announced the construction of a deportation terminalwhile the CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt at the federal level with his “migration turnaround” in cases of rejections at the border EU law and court orders ignored.
This is probably one of the reasons why the AfD Bavaria has clarified things once again: they not only want to deport people who are required to leave the country, but also German criminals and people “who have fraudulently obtained a German passport”. It’s not the first time that the AfD Bavaria differentiates between first and second class citizens. And if that wasn’t unconstitutional enough, parliamentary group leader Katrin Ebner-Steiner called for “evening curfews for asylum seekers” in order to “increase public safety.”
And while you’re already looking at how the authoritarian state restructuring works on the other side of the Atlantic, you can also copy other things: The AfD Bavaria, in line with the libertarian Argentine head of state Javier Milei, is calling for “afuera” (“out”) and the “chainsaw for Bavaria”. They want a 25 percent reduction in state administration and plan to abolish three ministries: environmental and consumer protection, science and art and the digital ministry. For details and implementation However, parliamentary group leader Katrin Ebner-Steiner did not comment when presenting the paper.
The anti-police association Better Police clearly criticized the move by the Bavarian AfD faction. The association said in a statement: “A special police force using Trump’s ICE as an example is a significant threat to human rights. It has no right to exist in the USA, nor should it be implemented in Germany.”
The agency is using the most brutal methods to hunt down people in the USA, Better Police criticized: “ICE officers are extinguishing human lives completely arbitrarily. This is the normalization of state violations of the law. This is the political instrumentalization of police and security authorities. This is fascism.” Isolation creates enemy images. Structures such as the special police unit called for by the AfD shift the focus in migration policy from relationships and communication to control and defense. Asylum seekers would be seen as pure risk, not as people with rights. This increases dehumanization and reduces empathy, criticized Better Police.
It goes on to say: The AfD logic and law-and-order policy reduced social problems to enforcement and sanctions. This has a psychologically relieving effect, but is dangerous because it ignores the real causes of crime (poverty, exclusion or trauma) and instead combats symptoms, according to Better Police. In the long term, this will lead to more conflicts, not more security.