'This Has To Stop': OR Senators Amendment To Bar Trump From Sending Secret Police Into U.S. Cities [View all]

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'This Has to Stop': Oregon Senators Unveil Amendment to Bar Trump From Sending Secret Police Into US Cities. "What we're seeing in my hometown is authoritarian brutality unleashed against peaceful protesters," said Sen. Ron Wyden. Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, July 22, 2020.

Oregon's Democratic senators unveiled an amendment Tuesday to bar President Donald Trump from sending "paramilitary forces" into U.S. cities as unidentified and unwelcome federal agents continue to violently attack racial justice demonstrators in the streets of Portland. "What we're seeing in my hometown is authoritarian brutality unleashed against peaceful protesters—moms and veterans and doctors and activists who are standing up for liberty and justice," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a speech on the Senate floor unveiling his amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.

-- "Secret police, unmarked, patrolling streets, throwing people into unmarked vehicles and sweeping them away—that's what you get from authoritarian dictators." —Sen. Jeff Merkley ---

"What Donald Trump is doing is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy laid out by our founders and expanded through the generations," Wyden continued. "Donald Trump did not send in this paramilitary force to keep people safe. Trump is doing this to create images of chaos, to air them on far-right television and in campaign ads, and scare the country into reelecting him."

Amendment co-sponsor Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) used his floor speech Tuesday to highlight the case of Donavan LaBella, a 26-year-old peaceful demonstrator whose skull was fractured when federal officers shot him in the head with an impact munition during a protest earlier this month. "Secret police, unmarked, patrolling streets, throwing people into unmarked vehicles and sweeping them away—that's what you get from authoritarian dictators, not a country, a republic where we have a Constitution and we have rights," said Merkley. "That's what's going on here. That's what has to stop."

According to a summary of the measure released by Merkley's office, the amendment would "limit federal agents' crowd control activities to federal property and its immediate vicinity, unless their presence is specifically requested by both the mayor and governor." The proposal would also "require individual and agency identification on uniforms of officers and prevent unmarked vehicles from being used in arrests."...

More, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/22/has-stop-oregon-senators-unveil-amendment-bar-trump-sending-secret-police-us-cities

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