In October 30, 2020, Biden campaign workers traveling in Texas by bus and car were ambushed by a “Trump Train” on the interstate highway passing through San Marcos, Texas. (Read background story here.)
The Biden caravan had been harassed by other Trump Trains, but this was different. These Trumpers were more violent. They displayed weapons, boxed in the bus, swerved in front of the Biden vehicles, and rammed one of them. The Biden people had requested and gotten police escorts elsewhere. But this time, the police didn’t come. A San Marcos police corporal said, “We’re not going to do it.”
Instead, the San Marcos “police officers ‘laughed’ and ‘joked’ as desperate Joe Biden campaign aides pleaded for protection,” Huffington Post recounts. (See story here.)
The lawsuits came. Not only the organizers of the San Marco Trump Train, but also the San Marcos police department, are being sued in federal court for violating the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which prohibits “using fear, timidation, and threats of violence to silence political foes.”
Read the complaint, which contains photographs and images of the Trump conspirators’ messages, here and watch a video capturing part of the incident below.
When you get sued under federal civil rights laws, the case is heard in a federal court by a big-city jury, not before an unsympathetic judge presiding over jury of local yahoos and neighbors of the defendants. The judgments tend to be large. And people haven’t forgotten that small-town police were behind the worst civil rights abuses of half a century ago. This case will be an opportunity for 12 city dwellers to send a message to these modern-day Klansmen and their police enablers that our country doesn’t stand for this anymore.