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I dont think there is much evidence supporting this assertion. Arresting people is always going to generate the possibility of "bad optics" if the media wants to portray it as bad. Illegal immigrants are concentrated in cities that are run by Democrats. With not just passive resistance by Democratic governments, but often active participation in the thwarting of law enforcement actions, things would always have progressed to this point unless Trump just went along with the program and continued to not enforce immigration law. You had that judge in Wisconsin smuggling away an illegal in court, but court is the most orderly place to arrest ANYONE! They already went through a voluntary weapons screening and/or are already in custody and have been searched. So, no. He isn't going to the max, he's barely doing the minimum proscribed by law.
Yes there is???!
This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.
This happened, and the optics are so bad
This has been happening.
Why are you in dental
The core issue here is that there's no causal relationship between the optics sucking and the behavior of ICE, though. The optics are defined primarily by 2 things: what people see, and how they respond to what they see. Former is primarily determined by people who hate Trump and hate the core mission of ICE, and the latter is highly determined by those people as well. And the past decade or so has established a pattern that these people will always make the optics bad when it comes to Trump, in a way that's entirely orthogonal to truth and fact. So it makes sense that ICE and the people who lead it, like Trump, have decided to focus little on the optics.
Credibility takes a lifetime to earn and a millisecond to destroy, and unfortunately, the media and political organizations that are against Trump pretty much blew their load within his first presidency (I'd argue within his first campaign) and are still in the refractory period 8 years later, furiously rubbing the poor flesh and wondering why it just hurts instead of shooting another rope.
ICE literally posted a montage of masked dudes blowing up doors to the pokemon theme song.
I'm not saying the media isn't a biased shitshow, it is, but it would be much less effective if ICE were acting in an extremely professional and regimented manner, they aren't.
Hard disagree. At best, it would be infinitesimally less effective, small enough that you'd need a magnifying glass to tell the difference. Of course, it's impossible to properly ascertain what an alternative universe would look like, but, based on the general reception that these official ICE-released videos got, I'd wager that the effect was net-neutral at worst in terms of Americans' perception of ICE.
the economist shows his approval on immigration is down to -10% now versus +10% in January. Nate Silver shows him going from ~+9% to -4% with now (just) over 50% disapproval.
So it's clearly not making Americans like it more!
That's not how statistics work. It's quite possible that this action by ICE is making Americans like it more, it's just countered by the other stuff around optics that's also happened in that time lowering it. In whole, we can say that Americans like it less now than they did in January - we cannot say that one individual act that happened in that time caused the net negative effect, i.e. which is why I said "I'd wager that," not "it is the case that" or even "it is evident that."
I mean sure. All we know is Americans don't like something about what's happening. Occam's razor suggests Americans opinion of this is probably being shaped by the things ICE is deliberately doing to shape their image.
I'm not sure how Occam's razor would suggest such a thing. There's nothing more parsimonious about that than Americans' opinions being shaped just as much by the organizations that have shaped Americans' opinions in the past and continue to do so through today. It's clearly being shaped by both, and it's very difficult to parse out which has more influence, and parsimony doesn't really offer us any answers.
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