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Notes -
https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971
Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.
EDIT: I've been asked to add some relevant points, I'll say: this comment has links to various angles: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405295?context=8#context This comment mentions the "Sig misfire" angle that I've seen a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405451?context=8#context
Walz has activatedthe national guard: https://x.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/2012614253090619619 The NBA postponed the Minnesota/Golden State game tonight.
Good luck to all rightists in the next years, trying to dodge the incoming 1000 years Unlimited Immigration Reich. The problem is that immigrationism is an extremely powerful ideology, because everytime you try to go against it you need to use force, and force make normies have the ick, and reinforce immigrationism. A lesson for all future societies, if we will ever have one (Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)
Instead of luck, maybe the rightists could use some competence instead ? They have dug their own graves.
I bet if ICE roamed in suits with slicked back hair, they wouldn't have half the issues they're facing. Instead, they chose maximally aggressive optics, and they're getting the obvious reaction. You expect Americans to view ICE favorably when they dress and act like bank robbers from a crime procedural ?
Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier ? Was the white house forced to post AI memes about detention centers with alligators in them ? The right is setting themselves up to fail for no good reason.
Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged. There is a modest increase in detentions for those pending charges, but nothing ground breaking. At the same time, the amount of arrests (esp. of non criminals) has skyrocketed. The deaths in custody numbers tripled, and 2026 has gotten off to a horrifying start. More people have died in ICE custody in January (15 days) than died in the entire year of 2023 !! (This warrants 2 exclamations)
With the Somali scandal, Trump had a solid narrative for the midterms. If MAGA loses the mid-terms, it is because they are both incompetent and intensely dislikeable. Hilarious that Trump came to power by swinging non-white voters and gen Z. Now that the same voters are turning their back on him ( in polls at least), it is somehow a sign of the woke mind-virus and immigration led anti-Americanism.
While that photoshopped image was clownish behavior, I don't think it's quite right to say that they were trying to make the subject uglier. Seems pretty clear to me that they simply wanted to make her look more distraught, because an image of an arrested enemy breaking down crying is better PR (from a projecting-strength POV) than an image of stone-faced stoicism. To the (IMO limited) extent that they made the subject look "uglier" in the process, I think that was just a side-effect.
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...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?
Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.
It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.
I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.
The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.
This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The statistics I am interested in, were still sound. I deliberately highlighted the 3x number which is over an entire year, instead of the rather ambitious 2026 projection. Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.
Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.
And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?
But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?
And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.
Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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How about “ICE is under siege so violent events are more likely to happen?”
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Leftists want to identify and harass or kill ICE agents. If my brother or dad worked for ICE I'd want him to cover his face.
The memes are dumb, I agree.
I simply no longer care if people get killed while impeding efforts to deport invaders. As @Armin states succinctly, immigration is a ratchet especially when you have a rabidly pro-immigration media. If people don't want to get shot, they can stay in their countries of origin or not get aggressive with federal law enforcement trying to work in a hostile area.
MAGA will lose the house because the average normie is clueless and because the persecution complex energizes leftist. But there was really no way to avoid that as the entire media complex has gone into overdrive spinning a narrative of persecution since 2016.
I am sympathetic, it is a human impulse. However, "criminals and leftists want kill police officers" is not a new phenomenon, but > century old. If you make it "leftists want to kill authority figures", that goes back to OG French revolution, which makes it older than modern policing (as attributed to SIr Robert Peele). Yet it used to be norm that a civilized people are policed by unmasked officers. the law enforcement needs sufficient methods to stop people who want kill them (and get them when they do), but it would be vastly preferable they used the normal policing methods to get that outcome. Find the perps, arrest them, preferably for conspiracy to kill law enforcement agents before they kill anyone, throw the book on them.
Hiding your face because you are afraid of the perps has very much South American failed state energy. Wannabe criminals should be scared shitless of the idea of killing a law enforcement agent, who can show his face like an upstanding citizen (which he probably is). One step getting in that direction is managing perceptions.
I am also sympathetic concerning use of weapons. Like, I don't find it ethically distasteful notion for the police use violence or shoot people who interfere with legitimate policing action. My problem is that the shoots that make the news from the US rarely appear intentional and purposeful. I recall was one of conclusions I made about Jan 6 debacle (after mulling it over) was that the shoot was "directionally correct" action but whole situation was suboptimal because shitty mission parameters: the law enforcement didn't come in sufficient numbers, initially employ insufficient force to establish a clear perimeter, and no surprise, they find them in situation where they are confused and perhaps panicked and have to shoot. I found it darkly ironic that the same description and complain matched quite well the Jan 7 shooting of Renee Good. (Uncertain if it matches this recent case)
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Trump was shot a year and a half ago, Kirk was shot a few months ago. Those high profile cases of leftist violence are just the tip of the iceberg. Antifa is a real impediment for right wing politics in the US. The professional activists are not going to stop. These are the same people who rioted in 2020. Getting rid of them is a strategic victory and the price is a news story that will live for a new cycle.
The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up. There are plenty of narcotics related charges that could be used on antifa types. Rioting creates opportunities to arrest people, to search their houses and find things.
I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).
Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".
My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.
I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.
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IMO it'd be to push Congress for a bill to mandate a minimal level of local/state cooperation with federal immigration authorities in exchange for federal funding eligibility, and in return offering a stand down of current operations. I don't see another real offramp available to the right, here: they can't practically expect to focus so exclusively on Minnesota indefinitely.
What other practical political goal are they trying to achieve while they're there burning political capital like The Joker burns piles of cash?
Interesting but how does that survive anti commandeering? You would need to tie things like federal spending grants but that becomes tricky where the official policy is “help ICE” but you allow deviation from policy.
Would a straight quid pro quo tying state/local law enforcement cooperation with federal funding to those agencies run afoul of that? We manage to tie highway funding to highway drunk driving laws.
Alternatively, mandatory E-Verify, but the lack of interest there hints in a deep unseriousness about the issue overall.
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Not sure I follow the logic here, what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers taking down and beating on a citizen, seemingly just for recording them, and then shooting him multiple times while he's on the floor?
Immigration is a not a dichotomy between "full immigrant open borders" and "government thugs just executing people on the streets", there's plenty of room inbetween. The incompetence and open abuse of ICE is a fixable issue and you should be mad at the Trump admin for creating a problem that doesn't need to happen and causing unnecessary PR problems. The public was on his side for a long while, it was his failures that lead to polling shifts against.
You're right, because in-between is exactly where we are.
What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable? Because from what I can tell the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely." They may claim otherwise, but I don't believe it. If you take away ICE officers' guns, leftists will complain about "beatings." If you ban clubs and fists they'll complain about nebulous "excessive force." It's strategic and disingenuous moving of the goalpost towards their ulterior goal.
Behaving like normal professional law enforcement for one. Bad trigger discipline, widespread violation of rights ike that recent memo that was leaked trying to allege they can search houses with just an administrative warrant, which is of course a theory you know they're confident about when they kept it hush hush and told people not to take notes about it, a propensity to escalate situations with unnecessary violence and threats etc are all things that can be improved on dramatically.
I'll say the same thing I said in previous threads, go watch the British show Police Interceptors and compare their professional deescalatory polite behavior to the current thuggery of the ICE and you'll understand how much room for improvement there is while still getting a job done. They are public servants, they should be professional instead of behaving like some sort of legalized gang.
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There are those who would favour deporting some people (those who have individually done Very Bad Things), but believe that it should be done by a different agency with a less bloodthirsty institutional culture.
Prior to 2003, deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants were handled by the same agency processing documented/legal immigrants; this may have resulted in fewer xenophobes and more Lawful Neutrals.
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I freely confess that I don't know what the view looks like from the inside, but I sort of suspect a lot of the way ICE is being used is to create political pressure/optics.
I wonder if it would be much more efficient (to say nothing of much less optically problematic) to just send a few guys in plainclothes to pick up each dude ID'd as illegal. I sort of suspect that "running around in camo and plate carriers" is either the idea of people in ICE who think it is cool, or the idea of admin higher-ups who think that creating a scene like that is necessary to intimidate would-be illegals and deter illegal immigration. But part of me suspects that quietly and efficiently deporting massive numbers of illegals is in its own way scarier and more deterring than these highly visible scenes, if run at high volume for a sustained period of time.
Really interested to know if there is anyone here who can speak to that though.
Don't border crossing numbers suggest that they've basically already done this even before the current drama?
Border crossing numbers started declining when Greg Abbott intimidated the Biden admin into letting him seal the border(well, most of it).
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That seems likely, but I could see the rationale being that you want to make a lasting impression.
The political pressure on jurisdictions that aren't cooperating with ICE might be much more relevant, though.
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Federal authorities have been incredibly soft by any reasonable standards given the scope of demographic replacement.
We have individual rights in the United States, you don't respond to societal-wide problems by violating the rights of individuals for no reason in isolated incidents.
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If you believe it to be important then isn't that all the more reason the Trump admin should maintain good PR and keep public opinion in support of ICE operations?
The media is a propaganda tool for the left; there will never be "good PR".
The only solution is deporting 40-50 million people over the next decade.
If you think the media is against you, then again that just makes it more important to not give over free wins for no reason. Americans all over, many independent and otherwise supportive of kicking out illegal immigrants, are going to see this video of a man being beaten, thrown to the ground and then shot multiple times and think twice of supporting your cause.
This isn't some RTS where you get to micro every local unit. One of the main criticisms against the protestors (and the reason for a growing absence of sympathy for them) is that they are intentionally engineering scenarios where violence and even fatalaties become a statistical inevitability. There is no way to avoid 'giving a free win' in that kind of rigged game, short of just packing up and leave.
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That seems like more of a media control problem. Right now an illegal immigrant who murders someone typically gets called a "Texas man" with no photo and a stub of an article in the local newspaper. Rare exceptions exist, but they are usually because Trump forced the story into the national conversation, and the national media coverage is to "debunk" whatever he said. Meanwhile these ICE incidents get weeks of breathless coverage by national media, orders of magnitude higher than comparable police shootings that happen every day. It's easy to give normies the ick, the problem is that the right doesn't own the propaganda apparatus.
Yes. A "Culmore man" is a white man. If he is a foreigner, it needs to be phrased as "A Salvadoran (or whatever) living in Culmore."
Doubt this change will ever make it to the AP Stylebook though.
What about a black man whose ancestors lived there when they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?
What about a man whose ancestors came from El Salvador during the Fillmore Administration?
What about a man who was born in El Salvador, but naturalised twenty years ago and no longer has Salvadoran citizenship?
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The right can't own propaganda in a current day liberal society. All the right can do is react to the receipts of long term progressive policy and gain power temporarily. Then the right will overplay their hands and power will switch back to progressives because liberals are completely averse to use of force and can't actually defend our society from left leaning bad actors. It's like we've contracted HIV as a society and our cultural antibodies have no clue what to do. We don't have the self-preservation instincts to protect anything worth protecting on a societal level. We see a terrible incident and shape our entire social policy based on that incident. We are extremely sensitive to seeing and doing harm, but almost completely indifferent to being harmed slowly.
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Well, the upside here is that it can't possibly remain stable for more than a generation or two before the inevitable and utterly ruthless backlash commences, after which whites will never again forget their place at the head of humanity. My two cents, I guess.
Make babies and raise them to rule with an iron fist.
Yes, this is exactly why we are home schooling all our children and live in a 90%+ white community. It's the only way to instill a sense of belonging to our Volk and to remedy the post-WW2 race-blind propaganda, especially the Holocaust narrative.
Our Volk?
The only 'Volk' I consider meaningful is that of the scions of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve.
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I think you are joking but would endorse entirely and ask you why you don't.
I don't follow. Why I don't what?
Contingent on you having been insincere, I ask why you are insincere. Maybe you've been forthright, in which case I'd like to know that too.
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