Tanista
1d ago
It seems to me that ICE is the least effective way to punish Minneapolis if you consider that a worthy goal. Mass prosecutions, withholding federal money and so on surely would be vastly superior to following a policy that seems to be cratering your own popularity, is not serving to make you more credible on your top issues and will fade into mist at best when you leave office.
I'm pretty sure this happened during Biden's run. Part of the reason it worked is that there was no counter-narrative of dead American citizens.
The other thing is: the border is no longer as relevant now that Biden isn't actively paroling people. Stories of recent migrants showing up and wrecking things are naturally going to drop in number and salience.
My impression is, for better or worse, Americans don't have coherent ideas about immigration enforcement. Or not enough of them do to form a coherent policy. His approval on his strongest issue has been dropping, it just seems like people didn't like chaos at the border but once that was resolved the urgency just dropped off.
Trump using ICE to go after what are almost certainly populations of citizens (take it up with past Presidents!) in a hostile city because of topical scandals is a high-risk, low-reward strategy if you assume that a lot of people simultaneously don't like border chaos but also don't want to be mean or deal with random ICE raids and attendant counter protests.
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