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I have seriously considered this possibility and it just doesn't align with how the administration actually acts. When the administration succeeds, such as when they removed Maduro, it's not something that requires competence on the part of the administration themselves, they just have to give the word, because conservatives already wanted Maduro gone and the US military's already the best in the business. But when anything requires competence on the part of the admin, especially things like Liberation Day, DOGE, they're just poorly executed and don't particularly accomplish their stated goals or any obvious secret ones.
If this is true then you've already lost! Your premise is that anything you do that actually removes enough illegal immigrants to matter by your values, to cause the real changes to the American economy and society, by your values will be blocked by business interests who don't like those changes. And your response to that is - how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something? Why even bother at that point? I don't think the premise is correct, a lot of things are possible, things happen today that didn't seem very possible a few decades ago. I think it's possible a more competent Trump could succeed with mandatory e-verify, and also possible that he could fail, and that Trump mostly just doesn't care enough about generic illegal immigrant laborers (as opposed to criminals from insane asylums in the Congo) to take the risk, and also is acting through the lens of an entertainer and e-verify just isn't good TV.
That's not my premise at all, nor is it my response.
My response is more "don't fight your enemy on ground where you can't win". You're saying that if Trump were competent he would fight the entrenched interests on their terms. My response is that fighting entrenched interests on their own terms is actually pretty stupid, and that their are paths to winning other than "remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter".
To illustrate, at no point in 19+ years of warfare was the Taliban in any position to contest US air superiority over Afghanistan. The Taliban still ultimately won that war though because they didn't even try to fight us in the air, instead they chose to fight us in box-canyons and back-alleys. I am telling you that there are people in Trump's administration who think like this and I am holding up the DoT's audit of Diver's Licenses as an example of what "back-alley fighting" looks like in this context.
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I really feel like that's where we are right now, except I'd remove the word "feel" and replace it with "look". Trump is all about spectacle. Miller may be a true believer and he and the president may be working at cross purposes.
But everything I've seen about what's actually happening on the ground is about (1) arresting really bad people that they were going to arrest anyway without a surge of personnel or budget and (2) treating random brown/yellow people with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness with the specific intent of horrifying and spurring to action the soccer moms and VA nurses.
The latter is the spectacle, both the action and the reaction, and it overwhelms every news cycle. Trump loves that, as far as I can tell. It's all part of his "suck the oxygen out of every room" approach to governance.
Which random brown/yellow people are being treated with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness? The closest I've seen there was the arrest of the one Hmong guy, who refused to identify himself and who they thought was a different really bad Hmong guy they were trying to arrest. They arrested him in the cold when he had only boxer shorts and a robe on, I think -- this is cruel but it's not "over-the-top" cruelty, arrests that aren't pre-arranged surrenders are almost always "come as you are". He was released the same day, I believe.
Sorry, the way I stated that made it unclear what I meant. If I had broken it up into multiple sentences rather than one long one it could have been clearer.
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
I don't know what is true and what is not true about this story. Yes, there's video evidence, but there could easily be other information that would make the federal agents' actions seem less extreme. In any case, when I read the news (which is a mix of mainstream left and right leaning outlets as well as lots of twitter threads for hot takes and substack posts for analysis), I come away with the impression that someone wants me to believe that the federal government is acting with cruelty and viciousness for no damn good reason in Minnesota, except that they want to piss people off.
Whether that's because it's true or because of a concerted propaganda campaign, or a mix of the two, is beside the point. If that's the way it's widely perceived, that's all that matters. If, that is, you buy into the idea that the administration's true goals are for spectacle, an idea that makes more and more sense to me as the term progresses.
You can find a clip of the arrest. It seems to be a fairly professional arrest. No clip of any beating. No clip of him bleeding in a Walmart parking lot a mile away (or 8 miles away, as that tweet claims). The same clip shows SOMEONE crying later who might be the same guy, it's not clear where, and the clip avoids showing his face clearly, and doesn't show bleeding either. You can find another clip showing why he was arrested, though; the ICE agent was entering the store and Garcia ran in and tried to physically prevent him. He wasn't arrested because he was brown or because they thought he was an illegal alien; he was arrested because he deliberately interfered with their work.
There's tons of stuff like this -- atrocity stories where the key events are not actually backed up by the videos.
I agree with this. I'm typically good at not jumping to obvious conclusions on just one data point. The world is complex and messy and no less so in the realm of law enforcement. But I'm still of the impression that the administration wants all of us to believe they are acting in an untethered way. Why that might be, I don't know, but claims that's it's an excellent way of distracting some of us from what we'd otherwise be concerned about seem plausible. And the remainder of us are the ones posting "this is exactly what I voted for" on Xitter.
Someone wants you to believe that. It's not the administration. It's the people posting (and in some cases staging) these videos. It's the people making up atrocity stories.
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