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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.
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'
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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.
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