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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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.

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.

You're right, because in-between is exactly where we are.

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.

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.

What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable?

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.

The British don't have to deal with anywhere near as much of an armed and belligerent population as US law enforcement, before you add the active efforts from a lot of anti-ICE 'protestors' to purposefully muddy the situations as much as possible. In both of the high profile shootings cases it's a random third-party interloper on ICE activities that's getting shot after injecting themselves into the situation, this kind of thing rarely happens in other law enforcement.

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.

The British approach of being polite and "Policing by consent" has led to large parts of the UK essentially getting to make their own laws because the dominant ethnic group doesn't consent to being policed like the rest of the country. It's not a strategy I'd recommend.

the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely."

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.

what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

given the scope of demographic replacement.

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.

This isn't some RTS where you get to micro every local unit.

That's true most of the time and something I've argued relentlessly before about various groups from Gamergate to the 2023 French protests to Jan 6th to BLM and now. You can't control every person, they're individuals not hiveminds and every group and movement has its share of dumb and violent people, yet alone third party trolls and exploiters.

Governments and law enforcement however are a bit of an exception. They're formal organizations with the ability to explicitly choose who joins their rank and an ability to actually kick out people who do wrong. In the same way, governments also have the ability to distinguish between proper protesting individuals and improper criminal individuals. Both in punishment (arresting and prosecuting actual criminals and not using lawfare against innocents) and in forgiveness (like Trump always could not have pardoned the cop beaters of Jan 6th).

Those are actual real choices that could be made without having to say "lol just use your hive mind to stop that stranger you don't know" like most discourse about informal groups tends to devolve into. Ability and responsibility go hand in hand. I can't reasonably control what my neighbor does in his own home so if he beats his wife, I'm not responsible. But a CEO of a company is responsible if an employee beats a customer and they don't get fired. The difference is, I can't do anything meaningful about the neighbor but the CEO has the ability to fire the aggressive worker.

Yes but the sheer volume of incidents, especially when certain parties are doing their best to make sure the incidents are as confused, hectic and tense as possible via interjecting random third party interference into them, is going to occasionally produce fuckups.

Especially when the definition of 'fuckup' here isn't even 'ICE behaves in a way that breaks the law' but is simply 'ICE behaves in such a way as that one person filming from one angle can post it on social media and make them look like the bad guy to somebody who has zero understanding of the realities of policework or violence'

The way it works is that ICE is held to difficult standards (and even when they meet them, are reported as not meeting them), the protestors are held to no standards at all, and any issues are definitionally the fault of ICE for being there. As long as that frame holds there's no win condition for ICE, and the frame is unbreakable.