To the editor:
The Trump administration and Pam Bondi, attorney general of the U.S. Justice Department, believe that ICE agents should have total immunity in all their brutish and illegal actions. If Bondi succeeds in passing funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without safeguards, our First and Fourth Amendment rights will be abolished.
Those rights guarantee the rights to free speech, to protest, to protection from unlawful search and seizure, and to due process for all people. If ICE agents can knock down doors of law abiding citizens, or kill legally protesting citizens in Minneapolis, then they will be allowed to do that in Hardwick, too.
Contact our Vermont Congressional delegation now and insist that any funding for DHS include all the following safeguards: judicial warrants for all arrests and detentions; accountability for all actions contrary to the Bill of Rights and professional police conduct; due process for all suspected detainees during arrests, and detention; involvement of local and state police in all gathering of evidence.
Those are the same safeguards that all local, state and federal police agents must already abide by.
Bob Hawk
Walden
