A DHS report from February said the agency was looking into people who were “providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators”. The records suggest agents launched elaborate spying efforts targeting activists, protesters and mainstream progressive organizations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“Nobody should be surprised that the government would use these authorities to target political opposition rather than target criminals, particularly so under this administration,” he said.

I mean, to be fair, if the US ever tried to genuinely infiltrate organizations that are nurturing “violent opportunists”, they’d have to investigate the CIA, FBI, DHS, ICE, all cops, and every branch of the military, and they’d have no clean institutions with which to perform the investigations, so it wouldn’t go very well.

These agencies aren’t “targeting criminals” because they are dominant source of criminality in the region. That’s the part that the “this isn’t the America I stand for” style of protesters lose sight of in their rush to fall back on the “constitution” as a validation of their form of protest. I can see why they do that. Nobody wants to end up in prison or executed by the state simply for standing up for their neighbors. But the historical fact is clear enough: the US state at best flirts with concepts of popular rights, while largely treating them as optional. They keep violating those rights not as one-off mistakes, but as long-running institutional practice. It’s just that the practice primarily targets non-white peoples first, non-settler peoples first, and fringe political groups first, so people in this hyper individualist hell may not even notice a lot of the time, much less view it as impacting them.

It does impact them though, whether they are aware or not; considering these fringe “left” groups are usually the ones who are trying to make the popular rights an institutional reality instead of a worthless piece of paper (the constitution) backed by institutions that are operating on the principle of “when we feel like it / it suits our interests to go along with it”.