Homeland Invasion: Update 09-24-2025 – Chuck Fager
Recent scenes from the front:
— A combat
vet protesting Chicago ICE raids, emerging from a thick cloud of their tear gas, unmasked & unruffled, bearing a large American flag.
— A fullsized, full-color roadside billboard near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, that reads: “Did you go Airborne just to pull security duty for ICE?” above a URL:NotWhatYouSignedUpFor.org
— 
Workmen in the Pentagon, walking away from a door in one of its endless hallways, to which they have just attached a brass nameplate newly identifying it as the office of “Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War.” (Emphasis added.)
— And one more: a scene for which there are only antique reporter sketches, of a Black man named Anthony Burns, being led from a Boston courtroom in chains on June 2, 1854:
Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia, but was captured by slavehunters in Boston. A federal judge, upholding the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, ordered that Burns be returned to the claimed owner.
Burns was returned. But to get him from the courthouse to a boat bound for Virginia, the court required the aid of a U.S. Marshal’s posse of 125 armed men, a full brigade of state militia, and a detachment of 140 Marines and infantry sent by President Franklin Pierce. It took this many because a Boston mob was outside, boiling with anger at the Fugitive Slave Law. As one local writer put it, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
[Burns was later freed, and moved to Canada where he was a pastor to a large Free community there til his death in 1862.]
The Burns case is recalled here as a prophetic example of the “new” idea that has lit up the dismal mists of resistance in the past fortnight, that of “soft secession.” More about it anon.
– – – – –
First, though, the bad news about the ongoing homeland invasion, or a compressed selection therefrom.
In the Gulag:
— Alligator Alcatraz continues — but hundreds of detainees have “disappeared” from it; they are not listed in either Florida or ICE databases, families and lawyers can’t find them.
— Angola reopens: not the southern Africa country, but a Louisiana state prison. The most brutal sections of this most notoriously cruel U. S. prison system, are being reopened for holding ICE detainees.
— And at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, what is meant to be the first of ten super-sized camps in the metastasizing American gulag archipelago is taking shape:
“The East Montana Detention Facility,” (“Montana” refers to the nearest named street — in what the Washington Post described as “a remote stretch of desert northeast of El Paso”; nearly 1200 miles south of the Montana state line.)
A cluster of enormous tents, each at least the size of two football fields, itis expected to hold up to 5000 detainees. The complex was begun in August, and by mid-September already held approximately 1000 detainees.
It has also been the subject of a long, scathing inspection report, “60 violations in 50 days: Inside ICE’s giant tent facility at Ft. Bliss,” reported in the Washington Post on September 16:
“When the first immigrants arrived . . . they were marched onto an active construction site. Dust swirled and excavators hummed as contractors raced to build the tent encampment, where development had begun just two weeks earlier and would go on for months.
Locked up in the unfinished facility, migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, the detention oversight unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found earlier this month in a contractually required inspection.
The detention center at Fort Bliss . . . failed to properly monitor and treat some detainees’ medical conditions, lacked basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe and for weeks did not provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints, according to a copy of the inspection report obtained by The Washington Post. . . .”
[Homeland Security (DHS) officials denied the inspector reports charges; DHS also denied the Post’s request to permit its reporters to visit the complex.]
As the media says, this is a developing story.
National Guard:
There have been as yet no reports of National Guard troops joining ICE in the much ballyhooed “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago. But there continue to be frequent, large, noisy and obstructive protests, marked by arrests and teargas, outside the depot from which it deploys raiding parties.
Perhaps that ongoing strife helps account for notable lack of alacrity with which Tennessee officials are acting on a White House executive order issued September 15, purportedly “deploying” the National Guard (NG) to Memphis, a city which the order proclaims to be
“suffering from tremendous levels of violent crime that have overwhelmed its local government’s ability to respond effectively. This situation has become dire in one of our Nation’s most historic cities. According to data from the (FBI), Memphis in 2024 had the highest rate of violent crime per capita . . . murder, robbery, and aggravated assault, and property crimes such as burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, in the country. “
This summary differs markedly from one just a week before from the Memphis Police Department, September 9:
“The Memphis Police Department reports historic crime reductions, with decreases across all major categories in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in previous years.
Overall crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, burglary, and larceny also reaching 25-year lows. Murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low, and sexual assault at a twenty-year low.”
This discrepancy may seem stark, but for the administration, two additional factors shaping the EO can’t be denied: #1-Tennessee has a MAGA-compliant legislature and governor, whereas #2-Memphis has a mayor who is not only a Democrat, but also Black, as do D.C. and Chicago, Trump’s previous targets.
So Trump, flanked by the state’s governor and hard-right U. S. Senators, wielded his Sharpie on the EO, and sent the troops marching and the tanks clanking toward Graceland. . . .
Err, well not exactly. Trump’s order only “requests” that the governor “make available” such forces as “the governor . . . may deem necessary . . . to assist . . . .”
To assist whom?
Glad you asked: The Task Force.
The what?
The order says it is creating a “Memphis Safe Task Force” which is “to make Memphis safe and restore public order.” Its director is to be named by Attorney General Pam Bondi, and then will “coordinate” with two White House assistants.
The Task Force itself is to include representatives from no less than thirteen federal departments, and from seventeen local agencies in three states (Mississippi and Arkansas share the Memphis metro region).
So here is the order’s strategic outline: thirty bureaucratic “cats,” from three states plus a plethora of feds are to be herded by three White House big dogs.
(What could possibly go wrong?)
Given the list, one better understands the dearth of available detail. A September 22 update in the Memphis daily Commercial Appeal took one fact— that they knew nothing more yet — and spun it out for several paragraphs. (Is that what AI is really good for?)
The suspicion hovers over this order that there may not be much to know about it . . . Maybe ever?
After all, this White House has excelled in projects that involve, say, chainsaws, mass firings, and big-tent concentration camps. But policy wonkery, with complex interagency and interstate collaboration —umm, not so much.
Trump still speaks of sending the NG to more cities.
We’ll follow the rhetoric down whatever mean streets and up whichever blind alleys as way opens. (Hope we don’t get stuck on an escalator.)
Hegseth-Dept. of Defense/War
One other ongoing spectacle is the multi-prong assaults by Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth. Besides blowing up boats full of people (or maybe drugs) in the waters off Venezuela, with which we may or may not be at war, his recent labors include killing off a DOD advisory committee dating from 1951 on women in the military (his ultrasensors picked up hints of proto-DEI).
Next is a biggie: he reassigned several hundred military lawyers to fill slots as provisional immigration judges, to sink their spades into the mountainous backlog of asylum and other immigration cases.
Twelve U. S. Senators protested in a September 15 letter, arguing that putting military officers into what are domestic law enforcement roles violates the Posse Comitatus Act.
The Senators’ letter noted that
“These military officers would serve under the command and control of the Attorney General . . .” They added that “these actions are inherently law enforcement actions that may not be performed by members of the armed forces.”
The Senators asked “what legal analysis the military has conducted into whether the move would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prevents the military from conducting law enforcement outside of extreme emergencies.”
(No public answer had surfaced as this report was prepared.)
And not least in this abbreviated tally, but even more of a stretch is Hegseth’s diktat to the press of Sept. 19:
It restricted media access to the Pentagon, and required all to sign a detailed pledge not to read, copy, collect or talk about
https://www.milbases.com/district-of-columbia/the-pentagon
anything, classified or unclassified, in the building, without official permission, beyond what some Defense/War officials want to tell them. Nor can they enter large stretches of its 17.5 miles [yes, miles] of hallways without an assigned, well-armed duenna at their shoulder.
(Further: “It shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map or graphical representation of the Pentagon Reservation without first obtaining permission of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency or the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs. Note that this prohibition applies to the use of apps on mobile devices that utilize the front-facing camera lens, such as ‘FaceTime’ or the taking of ‘selfies.’”)
Subversive selfies aside, one wonders how successful this new policy will be. Sections of the Pentagon were already restricted; but news seeking (& leaking) has nonetheless gone on in and around the place ever since the Pentagon was erected in World War Two 80+ years ago; its practitioners even have a name for it: journalism.
It will be interesting to see how many of the herd of media workers now covering the Pentagon will squeal, then meekly roll over, sign and follow their assigned minders, submitting any and all documents (even food court menus?) for review.
There were quick rebukes from Congress:
“This is so dumb that I have a hard time believing it is true,” Rep. Bacon (R-Nebraska) wrote on X. “We don’t want a bunch of Pravda newspapers only touting the Government’s official position. A free press makes our country better. This sounds like more amateur hour.”
The main target here is leaks. But the common experience in Washington is much like that of a humble homeowner dealing with an 80-year old roof: patch and reseal one leak, and in the next downpour, the drops will find another way.
It also brings to mind a comment on the milbases.com website:
“Due to segregation and the time during which the Pentagon was built, the building has twice as many bathrooms as necessary.”
Maybe that was true a few years ago. Yet segregation or no, the recent boom in agency BS production should keep all of them flushing frequently these days.
But another, nearly forgotten approach to pushback is now attracting renewed attention: the strategy of “soft secession.”
What’s that? The answer takes us back to Boston, Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave case of 1854 — and the many other similarly dramatic events of local and state resistance to the encroachments of slavery in the 1850s. Today we can look to Sacramento, California for a current example:
There the state legislature just passed a bill to ban mask-wearing by most law enforcement, including ICE, while at work in California.
Banning ICE masks? Can California really do that?
An upstart security consultant, Chris Armitage says yes.
On what grounds?
Simple (Swallow hard, liberals): States rights.
American federalism is still very much alive, he argues, and governors and mayors in many progressive states are putting it to work to slow the authoritarian drive. He makes a forceful case for states rights as a resistance cornerstone here:
“It’s time for Americans to start talking about ‘Soft Secession”:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cmarmitage/p/its-time-for-americans-to-start-talking?r=7jjxw&utm_medium=ios
We’ll have more to report on this approach. Meantime, read it.
There’s more to report than can be shoehorned in here. The Homeland invasion is continuing to metastasize.As this update wraps up, Hegseth has ordered an unprecedented conclave of all 800 + command generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted sergeants major to assemble in Quantico Virginia, just south of Washington. What’s up with that? Another of his prayer meetings? A coronation? Something sinister?
We’ll catch up with that next time. (Let’s hope future updates won’t be filed from a big tent in the desert outside El Paso.)