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I'm skeptical about most of that list, but I don't really trust any polling at this point in a cycle. Most of the polling from before suggested that a straight majority of Americans wanted every illegal gone (and a supersupermajority for illegal + criminal history), but yes you can probably show some women pictures of a crying Guatemalan and they'll report not liking that. I'm not sure there's any takeaway beyond "Dems still have a hell of a propaganda machine".
From the people I talk to, it isn't so much women being sympathetic for crying Guatemalans as it is concern about what the objective is. When you sell a policy based on the idea that these people are all parasites and criminals, it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk. Especially after elections are sending a clear signal. You don't want to be in a position where you get your doors blown off because you decided that inconvenient information was simply incorrect, based on nothing but gut feeling.
No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble. What they're seeing is context-free clips on Facebook and TikTok elaborated with straight up lies, posted by activist Karens who assault and harass federal law enforcement with near impunity due to their overwhelming privilege. OTOH, DHS and ICE don't ever shut up about the prior criminal convictions of the people they're deporting, but that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy.
Maybe some conservative billionaire needs to start shelling out a grand for every woman who posts a crying fictional sob story video about how she was raped by an illegal immigrant.
Not wrong, but I'm also super skeptical of this "Better stop doing that stuff you were just elected by promising to do because we've suddenly gotten better at narrative control!" line.
Like, yeah Sherril just won, but she did so while disavowing everything she'd ever said as a progressive, dumping a fortune into painting Citarelli as a tax-and-spend liberal and swearing to fight against her own Democrat economic policies.
Maybe ignore that at your own risk?
Have you considered that you, too, are affected by a propaganda bubble?
Just a couple days ago there was an ICE raid at a car wash right down the street from where I live. They didn’t have a warrant to enter the building so they simply arrested all the employees who happened to be outside at the time (which is to say, the ones who were drying and vacuuming cars). Many of those arrested said they had legal work permits in their lockers inside, but they were not allowed to retrieve them. In fact the owner insists that ALL of the employees had proper work permits and has been pretty furious to the local media. (For what it’s worth I find this believable, because the car wash is a relatively bougie one for the area, the kind where people bring their nice new BMW— I don’t even always use it, even though it’s good, because it’s more expensive than the others nearby— and so I honestly don’t think the owners are short-changing the workers, which is the primary motivation for hiring illegals.)
This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested! Trying to convince people this stuff isn’t happening (and it’s good that it is) is
ridiculousan extremely ineffective messaging strategy.I am not completely unsympathetic toward ICE, I don’t want to see it abolished and I certainly acknowledge the reality of the problems we have with illegal immigration. Most people being deported very much deserve it, and I have limits on my sympathy even for the sympathetic cases. But the impunity being given to ICE is genuinely very bad, and raids like the one I’ve described (which very much ARE happening) are pretty much indefensible. If nothing else, people need to have the opportunity to show their papers if they’re being accused of not having papers! If the response to that is “well we can’t let them go get them because they might run, and we can’t escort them to their locker because we have no warrant to enter this building”, too bad, you should’ve thought of that before you started.
I honestly don't believe you. If this were true, I would expect it to lead the national news. Every leftwing journalist in the country would be talking about it. We've had nine months of these stories being falsified or collapsing under scrutiny, to the point where I'm genuinely baffled at how on point ICE seems to be. Maybe we should just put Tom Homan in charge of the entire government.
But the grand total number of arrested and deported people so far is something in the ballpark of 500k. Many of those will not have been in super visible locations, so round that down further. The overwhelming majority of Americans (99%+) have never seen anyone getting loaded into an ICE van. The number of people who have watched with their real eyes as a "hardworker just trying to make a buck" gets picked up for deportation is probably something like 0.01% of Americans as a highball estimate.
If I seem to offer them impunity it's because I've been having this conversation for 9 months, and as best I can tell their error rate is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude better than any other branch of the government.
I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?
Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.
The problem is there's a million of these, where someone says ICE came in and arrested everyone even the American citizens who didn't do anything but ask the ICE agents some questions. And the stories often place front-and-center irrelevant details like the people detained not having a criminal record. But there's never any follow-up showing that all the relevant stuff is actually true. Instead this reporting is all simply repeating the claims of advocates. Which means that even someone like myself who is biased against law enforcement and believes they tend to be generally brutal starts to disbelieve the stories.
If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that. By which I mean they need to make that information available to media either via press release or simply giving all the details when they ask. They can't just not comment or simply confirm that they executed a search warrant. Local news these days won't even hire copy editors; it may be a journalistic best practice to verify everything, but in today's media environment they aren't going to have a guy looking up criminal records, especially when these stories go out the same day. That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof, or anything about the victims for that matter. People aren't going to just assume that someone has a criminal record. If that's part of the story, you have to tell them.
Nobody who believes all those stories will listen, and any denials will just be taken as confirmation by them. There's no point in trying to satisfy those acting in bad faith.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/zero-criminal-record-nine-workers-detained-by-ice-boston-car-wash/UXQPWN3VUNAZHMYMBIK7K4MS6M/
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