I'm buried at work these days, so only watching all of this from afar, but I'll lend my perspective, briefly, without the time to edit it for everyone's benefit (including my own):
Nonviolent protest met with strong police resistance almost always turns violent to some degree. In our own country, you can go back to the Brits shooting into the protestris in Boston in 1770 to see examples of this.
There are absolutely agitators and criminals who take advantage of large non-violent protests to do stupid (including violent) stuff. (And people do weird things when instilled with the feeling of power that comes from acting in a large group.)
Currently, the left and the right are choosing and tailoring their own narratives over what is going on regarding these ICE raids and the resulting protests. If you're on the right, it's easy to point to examples of lawlessness and violence and claim that those crazy leftists are sparking open rebellion in the streets. If you're on the left it's easy to point to the facism inherent in sending armed people to confront protesters, inevitably leading to violence that is then used as an excuse for martial law (and more).
From where I sit--comfortably in an office building in a major city in California--I'm more sypmathetic to the left, but I'm wary of buying too much into the conspiracy theory that this is all intended to bring down our democracy. And undoubtedly unsavory characters are doing unsavory (and violent) things that appear aligned with the protests that I do not approve of.
Probably my friends on the left would claim I'm some kind of milquetoast supporter of facism because I'm not all in on the facism theory--notwithstanding that I think the Trump administration's conduct predictably led to these protests and show that the anti-immigrant rhetoric is absolutely not limited to just hardened criminals, and absolutely does include some inherent racial bias. It's hard to explain the conduct of these ICE raids and the quotas any other way.
I guess that's my way of pushing back on the narrative that takes hold on this generally right leaning message board, without buying into what I see in my social media feed, which is extreme in the opposite direction.
I think the Trump administration is plainly not focused on just deporting hardened criminals; I think sorting out who should be able to stay and who needs to go is far more complicated than whether a person came here with proper documentation; I think the Trump administration is intentionally sparking violence in large cities where the populations are plainly anti-Trump; and I'm not suprised by any of it--nor do I think that the Trump administration is going to suspend our democracy. Next year they will lose the House, and in three years, Trump will be the lamest of lame duck presidents, with an open presidential election taking up all of the new cycle.
Rant concluded. For now.
