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I'm not sure you really appreciate how this looks and feels for someone like me. I would say the current equilibrium on illegal immigration is weird and it isn't desirable to have large numbers of people without proper rights and responsibilities in society nor to select for people who are willing to break or skirt rules. But my genuine honest opinion is that the impact of illegal immigrants is net positive even if you ignore the utility of the immigrants themselves in your calculus (which I don't), and most of the negative effects are the result of NIMBYism and problems in policing and the court system that should be fixed regardless.
From that perspective, what I see is that the right has created a scapegoat in illegal immigrants (and in the farther reaches of the right, non-whites), and has decided that removing them is the fundamental cause that will fix all of the problems in society (much as 2020-era wokeism decided that prejudice is the fundamental problem with society). The administration clearly cares more about increasing deportations than respecting constitutional rights, following court orders, upholding freedom of speech, and otherwise maintaining the things that have made Western society prosperous while also mostly treating citizens and people around the world morally. I find this really, really scary.
In Minneapolis, what I see is an administration sending in an unaccountable paramilitary force to intimidate its political opposition and frog-boil the country into authoritarianism. Yes, they ARE deporting illegal immigrants including many people I am glad to see deported, but that is not the ultimate goal. What I see in Pretti is someone who was rightfully mad about this, and got slightly carried away during an honorable protest and spit on an officer and damaged their car. I would not be opposed to him facing minor criminal charges for this. But that doesn't change my perspective of his death. We have it on video and what I see is that the federal agents were repeatedly the ones who escalated the situation into violence. I'd be interested to see more footage from before what we have seen, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of minor violence by a protestor, but I don't expect it to change my views significantly.
As you say, it is unarguable that Pretti was taking actions that increased his risk of being killed. You'll certainly see plenty of coverage on the left claiming false things about his actions (e.g. that he was not seeking confrontation), just like we are seeing people on the right claiming obviously false things (e.g. that he was trying to kill agents). But we can look past the bullshit, and what I see is a courageous man trying to defend someone from being assaulted by thugs.
I don't agree with much of this comment but I appreciate you sharing it.
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I was mostly indifferent to immigration in the US. I am quite surprised that Trump could run on a fairly stomach turning immigration policy and win the election. My attitude is that it's now time for the people to get what they wanted, good and hard, as fans of democracy might put it.
This is all to say I mostly don't care for what Trump is doing.
I see something much more tragic. A courageous, probably mentally unwell man (and woman, in the case of Good), being unwittingly deployed as probabilistic martyrs, radicalized by stories that are mostly fictional.
I hope a few deaths will bring down the temperature, but signs are worrying. A lot of people in my city's subreddit are talking about getting guns, which is the absolutely wrong lesson to take from this weekend.
I have to wonder if disinfo managers at the Russian FSB are watching and saying "hot damn, did we do that?"
Deaths will only bring down the temperature if people feel that the risk of death is worse than the thing they are fighting. I think a pretty large contingent of the left is well beyond that point. With nobody in charge, the only way I see the left backing down is if there is some tragedy that is unambiguously the fault of protestors. Or maybe the threat of the midterms gets the administration to actually back down. But I think mounting civil unrest is probably the way this goes. It's pretty interesting to see from a historical perspective even if I'm genuinely worried and come down squarely on one side of the conflict.
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This sentence is full of sound and fury signifying nothing. "Paramilitary force" here is just used as a snarl term; pretty much all uniformed law enforcement, except that which is part of the military, consists "paramilitary forces". ICE is not "unaccountable"; they have a defined chain of command (goes along with being paramilitary), and are additionally accountable at least to Federal courts. ICE does not appear to be confronting the administration's political opposition -- just the opposite, the opposition is confronting them -- so intimidation seems quite unlikely. And enforcing immigration law is an established thing; if it's authoritarianism it isn't NEW authoritarianism so there's no frogs being boiled here.
The (non-)uniforms, the masks, the limited training, the recruiting efforts for people of a specific ideology, the mass deployments, feel like qualitatively different things to me. Perhaps paramilitary is not a useful word here but that's what I'm talking about.
That chain of command stops with Donald Trump and his people, and they seem to be the only people whose opinion matters. For example, the state of Minnesota has been actively blocked from involvement in investigating these incidents.
ICE continues to deny members of Congress their legal right to inspect detainment facilities: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/judge-is-asked-for-emergency-hearing-after-congress-members-blocked-from-ice-facility-in-minneapolis/
ICE is routinely ignoring court orders: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/judge-threatens-hold-acting-ice-director-contempt-flouting-court-order-rcna256107
Intimidation does not require that you have been directly affected. The reason they are in Minneapolis in such quantities is because the president resents Tim Walz and Minnesota in general, and because of a news story about fraud that has little relation to illegal immigration.
Sending thousands of masked agents to roam around a city and stop people based on their race is absolutely a new thing.
This is a step change from what we've seen before, under a president who continues to support an insurrection done in his name, continues to muse about third terms and cancelling elections, uses the legal system as a cudgel against people he doesn't like like Powell, etc. I'm sure you could quibble with all of these things too. I don't expect to convince you, but surely you can see why people are worried?
Words have meanings. Using them just to indicate something bad that you have in your head is not useful.
On the court stuff, I am sure the administration is of the opinion that they are indeed following the laws; that will get worked out in court (the Supreme Court if necessary) and has no real bearing on what ICE is doing on the ground in Minneapolis.
Again, words have meanings. Even if ICE was sent to Minnesota because the president resents Tim Walz, that does not mean they were sent there to intimidate him.
Fortunately, this isn't actually happening; it's just a lie.
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