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As you’ve likely learned from headlines, social feed, or signs posted around neighborhoods, ICE has brought its haphazard, merciless campaign to the Bay Area. Whatever deal the mayor (with an assist from Marc Benioff and a pre-scandal Jensen Huang) brokered with the Trump administration last year is void: heavily armed federal agents are roaming the streets and snatching our neighbors.
This is an affront to our community’s values, our cities’ sanctuary laws, and the definition of designated “ICE free zones” like hospitals.
It’s also a slap in the face to all of us.
The person doing that slapping is the president’s newly promoted hand, White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been demonizing and denigrating Latinos since he was a vicious, racist, and entitled high school student in Santa Monica.
Miller is that rare person who has held tightly to his ill-formed childhood beliefs and turned them into not only his career, but his very reason for being. In 2020, he explained his zeal for arresting law-abiding immigrants, splitting families, and deporting people by reportedly saying, “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”
Fast forward six years: Miller now has a growing young family, yet breaking up other peoples’ is still his life. He must be pinching himself every day that he has a job that empowers him to dispatch goons across the country to make sweeping arrests, slash witnesses’ tires, kidnap kids, and more than occasionally kill people.
Miller’s dream come true is a nightmare for the rest of us. We’re all suffering so that this hateful, bigoted disgrace can get his twisted kicks.
Make no mistake, ICE’s rampage across our nation is at least partly for Miller’s personal kicks. As a Trump adviser told Vanity Fair in 2018. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border… He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”
And now, they’re here in our backyard.
I’m gonna put this as clearly as I can: Get ICE the hell out of the Bay. Dismantle ICE once and for all.
That’s fourteen words, so I know they’ll resonate with Miller.
ONLY ON GAZETTEER SF
- HUANG JURY: Joel Rosenblatt on a lawsuit filed against the former NVIDIA CEO.
- ICE IS: Eddie Kim on locals named in a massive ICE data breach.
- WASHED UP: Aarthi Gunnupuri on why so many sea lions are dying.
- PAY FOR PLAY: Jensen Huang should’ve just gone to a professional.
- THE RIGHT TURN: Transportation advocates want no turns on red lights.
- MONDAY WAS A LONG TIME AGO: Time travel back to Manic Monday.
SEND US YOUR TIPS
Just a reminder: Your tips can go a long way at Gazetteer HQ. Got a good scoop? A fun bit of tea to spill? A nugget of gossip you’re dying to share? Send it our way. We can assure anonymity.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FOG
- THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: Teen surfers helped save someone who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. (ABC 7 News)
- MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN ABOUT THIS MOMENT, JOHNNY: Speaking of surfers, they’re ready to die for monster waves if only Johnny Utah would let ‘em. (San Francisco Standard)
- STEAMY: Looks like the city’s getting its first gay bathhouse in a generation. (Washington Post)
- MAN BOTS DOG: Great, now robot dogs are walking dog dogs. (USA Today)
- WIND’OHS!: Microsoft outage is a harbinger of Y2K bug. (Wired)
