Anyone who tuned into the middle of Sen. Eric Schmitt’s furious floor speech on Wednesday might have been momentarily confused at why the MAGA Missouri Republican was condemning those who “deploy organized mob violence to undermine the expressed will of the people when democracy doesn’t go their way.”

No, he wasn’t talking about President Donald Trump’s damnable role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. capitol — though the line would serve as a good description of that abomination.

Instead, Schmitt was talking about protesters against Trump’s aggressive immigration sweeps. In Schmitt's telling, those protesters are the “organized mob,” democracy has empowered Trump to direct militarized brutality at immigrants and citizens alike in Minneapolis, and anyone who opposes it favors illegal immigration.

This speech is worth pausing and examining because it encapsulates the brazen alternate reality that Trump and his allies are trying to sell regarding this administration’s immigration enforcement abuses.

Schmitt’s speech begins with the premise that the Biden administration failed to secure America’s southern border, and that Trump’s 2024 election victory was largely the voters’ response to that failure. No argument on either point.

Where it quickly goes off the rails is with Schmitt’s insistence that the actions of this administration’s immigration officers are not only above reproach, but above even questioning.

“[T]he agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol ... are not villains, they’re American heroes," Schmitt declares. "They’re on the front lines of the fight to save our country and we owe them absolute, unequivocal, unflinching support.”

Setting aside that, by definition, no truly free society would ever give “absolute, unequivocal” power to masked government agents, what Schmitt glosses over here is astonishing. Has he even looked at the videos of the federal murders (no other word for them) of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti?

Good was shot to death behind the wheel of her car on Jan. 7 by an immigration officer as she was trying to pull away from a protest. Moments earlier, she had amicably told the agent, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” On bystander video, the words “f------ b----” can be heard ringing from one of the agents immediately after the shooting.

Pretti was shot to death Jan. 24 by agents who had him pinned down on the street — his legally holstered and untouched gun having already been removed by one of them. That confrontation was started by the agents themselves, who crossed a street to shove protesters who were filming and heckling them from a distance but not impeding them at all.

This is Schmitt’s definition of “American heroes”?

Schmitt’s speech dismisses these killings with a brief line about how any death is “tragic.” “It’s not on ICE, it’s not on the Border Patrol and it’s certainly not on President Trump,” Schmitt declares — an unsubtle endorsement of the administration’s monstrous stance that Good and Pretti caused their own deaths by exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

Schmitt rattles off the names and crimes of a handful of violent immigrants as if they are the rule rather than the exception. Never mind that just 5% of ICE detainees under this sweep have actually committed violent crimes, according to the government’s own figures.

He says nothing about the fact that detainees have included legal residents who have followed the rules to be here — to the point that immigration agents know which courtrooms to stand outside to nab them as they emerge from legally scheduled immigration hearings.

And he says nothing of the inhumanity of shipping of migrants, with no due process, to prisons in nations where they have no ties; the detentions of children and even babies; and the brutality that poorly trained, hyper-militarized, masked immigration agents have eagerly unleashed against peaceful immigrants and even natural-born citizens on America's streets.

No, senator, this isn’t what America voted for in 2024. Which is why public disapproval of these operations now stands around 60%.

Though it’s not remotely the “full-scale invasion” that Schmitt absurdly describes in his speech, illegal immigration is a genuine problem. But like all authoritarian-minded leaders, Trump is less interested in solving genuine problems than in using them as justification to expand his own power.

This explains why, for all the bluster and violence Trump has brought to the immigration debate, his peak deportation rates this year have actually been lower than those of the Obama administration, which expelled some 3 million genuinely criminal migrants — and did it without terrorizing cities, denying due process, ensnaring legal residents and dividing the country.

“They want the confrontations," Schmitt declares: "They want the chaos.” He's referring to Trump's critics, but his words more accurately describe this lawless president and his dystopian terror campaign against immigrants and their supporters.

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