It makes perfect sense that the administration fired FBI agents who kneeled with protesters during the demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It hurt to read about it, but it made sense.

Just the mention of the summer of 2020 evokes a visceral response in me for multiple reasons. It was difficult to produce news coverage, day after day, of protests and police response, in a media place where the outrage over property damage caused by protesters felt disproportionate to the moment. When thinking of the summer of 2020, my mind goes to law-enforcement on horseback in downtown DC to clear Lafayette Park for the president to walk to a church to hold a Bible upside down and say absurdities. I think of the rubber bullet marks I saw on my child who was in those protests. I could not protest and keep my job, but I was very much in the streets. Those FBI agents and all local police who chose to kneel gave me hope.

The summer of 2020 was this generation’s summer of 1968. And during the latter, Chicago police officers intentionally brutalized protesters at the Democratic national convention. That’s the kind of throwback law enforcement this government wants, and it’s not as if they are trying to hide it.

Since the moment Donald Trump was inaugurated, the government has been intentionally using brutality to deport people who came into the country illegally, including those waiting to make their case for asylum. There’s evidence of it every day.

A homeland security officer was removed from his duties in the field when seen on camera shoving a woman up against the wall and then to the floor when she was not even the person he was detaining. She was the wife of the man the agent had come to take into custody from his asylum hearing, and she accused the officer of not caring about anything. That was enough to trigger a violent response.  Though this particular man is out of the field pending an investigation, there are countless masked agents assaulting people outside of Home Depot stores who are not.

This is what they want. This is what law enforcement is supposed to be under the regime of Donald J Trump. This is a man who has declared his desire to let cops bust a few heads, to have at least an hour of really rough policing that he believes will dramatically decrease any impulse to commit a crime. This in-Justice Department fired lawyers who did their jobs at prosecuting the people on tape breaking into and defiling the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

 While there was plenty of pain reading about it, once again there was no surprise to see that this administration fired FBI agents who kneeled in solidarity with protesters over the murder of George Floyd. Theirs was a display of compassion. It was a display of belief in justice, true justice. It was a display of humanity.

Donald Trump’s law enforcement officers are not supposed to have humanity. The firing of those FBI officers made perfect sense.