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Notes -
So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
Yeah, I'm really not pleased about this and if we see a shutdown over it the odds of me voting D in '28 will probably slip from medium back to low. Really need to see some actual compromises about actually doing immigration enforcement from Dems before I'll be happy with any further restrictions on how we execute it.
Why should they compromise? They hold all the cards. Either the Republicans capitulate, or the Democrats shut down DHS, which they're fine with.
IIRC TSA (which is part of DHS) causing domestic air travel woes was one of the things that brought both sides to the table a couple months ago. This part of the year isn't quite as busy, but I still would expect it to force eventual cooperation.
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Or the government shuts down and Trump just shifts funding around, illegally, to keep his priorities going. You know, like he has a propensity to do.
The government won't shut down. Only DHS funding. And if he tries to shift funding around every Federal judge will immediately say "no", including the Robed 9.
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Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
The "atrocities" this is supposed to stop are cases where US citizens who did not provide ID and were believed to be an illegal alien that ICE was looking for were arrested and detained until they were identified. This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Sure it would. Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
The least charitable implementation is what to expect.
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Profiling obviously works, when we abolish it cops can't stop teenagers in the hood while we all pretend it's fine that the TSA gives extra pat-downs to grandma. You profile everyone relentlessly every day of your life, it's drawing patterns from observations, it's how cognition works. Throw infinite quantities of money down a blackhole because AI keeps profiling and the principled anti-racists say it shouldn't be allowed to do that. I think this attitude is anti-civilization, if we have to jump through hoops to act on information everyone obviously knows is reasonable, what are we even doing here? We know where the illegal immigrants are coming from, we know what they probably look like. Sorry for anyone mistakenly detained for five minutes while ICE works through the exceptions, it's a minor inconvenience we promise, until the lawyers get involved. Along similar lines, we can't kill criminals anymore, because activists made the death penalty so expensive, so now they say we should just get rid of it entirely. No thanks, let's profile all the illegal immigrants so we can deport them faster and have a country again, I can put up with a little racism in the process.
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Also:
Is that "no large scale operations in sanctuary cities"?
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For a similar example to the body cam discussion, see blind auditions. It's a nice view into the mind of the left - the way blind auditions were pushed, they most likely genuinely thought they would be good. And it's hard to argue that blind auditions aren't the most fair and meritocratic approach, which was a common primary justification. But when (racial) inequality stubbornly refused to budge, it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.
On the 10 demands, without the democrats giving clear, legally binding proclamations of cooperation on being willing to enforce immigration law and to crackdown on the anti-ICE "protestors" (btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work. Very few would call a pro-lifer trying to physically interfere with abortions merely a "protestor", not even the right), I really don't see how this can possibly work out in a way that doesn't kill any and all immigration enforcement in blue strongholds.
I think you're failing to properly model DEI proponents' minds, here. They still want fairness and meritocracy, but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic. This is not sophistry, this is what a large amount of people actually believe.
Yes/No. I believe that many believe that they want fairness/meritocracy. But if you measure a process purely by getting the outcome you want, claiming that this somehow makes you process-oriented is, in my view, sophistry. And progressives have shown a noticeable incuriosity, often even marked hostility, towards a detailed investigation of the processes itself and how/why some groups tend to disproportionately fail; it always boils down only to getting the correct outcomes. See Ivy student acceptance rates; Merely just investigating the acceptance process is allegedly racist, since it gets the correct outcome, and that's what matters. Unless the outcome isn't correct, in which case you also don't investigate the why, you just change the process until you get the correct outcome.
Secondly, a decent number of progressives have in fact even fully moved on from claiming to want meritocracy, and outright use entirely different justifications, such as representativeness of a community, racial/social justice or equity over equality of chance. In many circles, meritocracy has become negatively connotated.
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I've heard people say this and I'm hesitant to claim they don't really believe it... but do they really believe it?
The same people absolutely believe discrimination occurs in culture/education/training/etc. If I cited an article showing that e.g. childhood participation in private music lessons for orchestral instruments had a race skew (which it does), would they be surprised? I really don't think so. Do they believe that lessons and practice just... don't matter? That's the only way I can think of to justify the notion that a fair meritocratic test of orchestra applicants wouldn't show a similar skew even assuming uniform innate capacity and interest.
How about in a different context? It's no secret that, say, chess grandmasters are not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would this hypothetical DEI proponent truly claim that chess is not a fair and meritocratic measure of chess ability? It's also no secret that just about everyone who gets to that level has played a lot of chess, almost always from a young age, and that that's not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would they claim that that experience doesn't actually make someone better at chess?
The (slightly different, much rarer) explanation I sometimes encounter is that, while applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application, they'll quickly 'catch up' once placed in a position congruent with their innate ability. I find that claim dubious -- if nothing else, it suggests that a 30-year-old who's played chess four hours a day since the age of five shouldn't be expected to be better than a 30-year-old who's done so since the age of 29 and a half -- but I have no trouble believing someone actually could believe it.
The thing is, I wouldn't want to be the person in the meeting saying 'applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application' regardless of how I follow up on it. I could see myself choosing to say the former, clearly untrue statement instead to avoid the possibility of hostile misinterpretation. But maybe I'm just being cynical and people actually do believe it?
The usual justification I hear is something you're brushing briefly against here: interest. What DEI proponents think is that the underrepresented minorities are not taking private music lessons for orchestral instruments because they don't feel welcome or invited in those fields. They feel it's a white or asian thing, not for them. Culturally, it's less of a thing they're likely to be introduced to.
So to steelman the DEI side here (which I must state I disagree with, but it still deserves steelmanning), minority enrollement in these activities requires bootstrapping; get a generation of these under-represented minorities in there or two by putting your thumb on the scale if necessary, hype the fuck out of them, and hopefully the next generation of the under-represented minority will be inspired by the DEI hires, will get on the pipeline early and the minority will not be under-represented anymore and you won't need to put your thumb on the scale.
I don't think it has ever worked, but I think that's the general idea.
*EDIT: To clarify why I don't think it ever works, is because it's extremely conceited. You have to assume that people are dumb and won't notice that your thumb is on the scale, and won't notice that the DEI hires are worse than the meritocratic ones. Which has a tendancy to backfire, if all the pro/famous under-represented minority athletes of a specific sport, or orchestral musicians are noticeably worse, it's likely to reinforce the idea that there is something innate with the group that makes them worse at that activity. Which would be worse than having only a few less-than-representative numbers but at least they perform to the same standard as others, which doesn't damage the "interest gap" potential explanation and won't discourage the people who do have the interest.
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Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.
If we went solely by disparate impact, based on the numbers we would need to assume that cops are several orders of magnitude more sexist (against men) than they are racist (against blacks). But I haven't seen a single DEI proponent arguing that we need to eradicate female privilege in arrests/prison sentencing/etc. The right has no problem with saying that men are inherently more likely to engage in criminal behavior than women, the DEI/blank slatist/etc. camp doesn't really have an answer to this.
Also Native Americans per capita commit more crime than blacks in certain categories, with similarly high arrest/imprisonment rates. And while the DEI crowd will argue that Natives are discriminated against, I don't see it claimed that the discrimination is to a greater extent than that faced by blacks. Discrimination against blacks actually gets almost all of the airtime.
They aren't optimizing for explanatory power but for political power; they still earnestly believe everything they say. Accusing them of inconsistency is like accusing a tiger of not fighting fair--it's just a misunderstanding of what you are dealing with. They are not playing the "game" of mutual pursuit of truth by rational discussion, and so they are not bound by the rules of that game. When they appeal to those rules in an argument, it is merely for a strategic advantage. They do not apply those rules because they believe in them, but because you do.
Sure, but as fun as going "On the Demons and Their Lies by Frieren the Slayer" might be, my side still needs to win elections.
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Didn't blind auditions essentially succeed at what they were meant to do, ie. eliminate gender bias in classical musician auditions?
As I understand it, it seemed to solve a gender bias, but it certainly failed to solve a racial bias. The latter was the reason it fell out of favor for progressives.
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They surely eliminated gender bias. But the claim that they helped women (I.e. that bias against women existed without them) is not really supported by the original study on it.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/
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Apparently disputed. I'd guess the large change in hiring of women was mostly a matter of attitudes changing so that it was perfectly acceptable for women to be in classical orchestras, and blind auditions came along because of that too.
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IIRC they were supposed to ensure a perfectly blended mishmash of all races, genders etcetera and then they didn't actually lead to that
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"Obstructor"?
Pro-life direct action(entering abortion clinics to be enough of a nuisance to stop operations without actually hurting anyone) prefers the term 'activist'. Perhaps a polite euphemism, but more accurate than 'terrorist', which should be reserved for people who actually get violent.
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Interestingly I had just asked chatgpt and it proposed "obstructionist" as the top option, and a lot of lesser options including "interferer", "disruptor" and "agitator". "Obstructor" is probably a good choice.
"Agitator" was on the tip of my tongue.
Yeah, I see it commonly used, but it has a bit of a different connotation imo. On the one hand, you can be an agitator without doing any obstructing or interference, just purely based on your rhetoric, and in that sense it's actually still a lesser word. On the other hand, it usually implies agitating for violence, and as much as I dislike the obstructors, they generally stop short of that.
Vigilante is closer to the right meaning, though in this case it's not so much trying to take the law into your own hands than it is trying to take the law out of the police's hands.
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Yeah, that is an important distinction.
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This is what suggests to me that the situation is pure power politics. The reason for the face coverings is targeted harassment, doxing, stalking, and even violence.
Demands on this front aren't credible given the environment.
It's complaining about a problem that they caused.
Would love to see someone (with awareness of the circumstances!!) steel man the request.
I agree that ICE should be allowed to operate openly, under the authority of the president, in any American city. I think the real-time obstruction of their operations is bad (and a calamitous mistake as well).
But allowing agents to wear masks destroys accountability and increases the volatility of every interaction by introducing uncertainty about their authority. Lack of accountability erodes confidence that the government can carry out its commitments, which depresses future cooperation.
On a more visceral level, even the mildest encounter with an armed, masked man is scary as hell. I wager it will badly degrade Americans' view of law enforcement officers if it continues much longer.
I'm sympathetic to the interests of ICE agents: their desire for not just their safety, but the safety of their families. But masks asks too much. The tradeoff isn't worth it, especially when there are alternatives: pursue the threats against agents, investigate, throw the book at the culprits, whatever. But don't empower stare security forces to become a nightmare that no one wants their political opponents to control.
It seems to me that the reasonable compromise is for ICE agents to have clearly identifiable and displayed badges.
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These aren't plausible alternatives when local officials refuse to enforce state and local law. ETA: And federal judges show little willingness to allow prosecutions.
I agree that the intransigence of local officials strengthens the case for allowing masks, but:
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This is a problem entirely of the lefts making.
You want to have a good argument for why they shouldn't have masks? Don't be evil.
Harassment, stalking, doxxing, and violence are the tools of evil - and the left feels that way when it happens to those they support.
The need and desire for masks are caused by the actions of the same bad actors demanding that they don't have masks.
You don't like it? Fair - but fix the actual problem first.
I think obstructing ICE operations is reckless, deadly gamble. I think the people that participate share some responsibility for the injuries and deaths over the last year.
Furthermore, I acknowledge and condemn the abuse of on-duty ICE agents. Are you suggesting those incidents justify the fear of harassment, stalking, doxxing, and violence against off-duty officers?
My position, the steelman you asked for, is that we cannot absolve law enforcement officers of all accountability as a precaution.
Them wearing masks isn't absolving them of accountability.
I would certainly prefer they don't wear masks. But the behavior of "protestors" finding out who ICE agents are and getting into their private lives (most publicly with the Don Lemon church invasion), especially combined with the unwillingness of anyone who opposes Trump to allow any moves against such protestors, demonstrates they have good reason for it.
I propose that, if a government employee's targets can't even identify them, that employee is not accountable in a meaningful sense. A third party can identify them, but it's the target's political opponents, also meaningless.
I agree Don Lemon's stunt was bad, and I'm happy he's being prosecuted for it. But was it even a threat?
Throughout US history, officials have been in the same position as ICE employees: strikebreakers in the late 19th century, DOJ officials in charge of civil rights enforcement, and the varied law enforcement officials that decimated the mafia. All of those officials faced more urgent, demonstrable peril than ICE officers, yet the government protected the officials, they didn't hide them. (With the exception of juries, who are not government officials, and are accountable at least to one another.) Even when judges received death threats and prosecutors were tailed by mob associates, the government didn't conceal their identities, because doing so would have undermined its legitimacy.
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De-masking is obviously a poison pill in this environment. I do agree with you that in a good society they shouldn’t wear a masks. We do not live in a good society. They will be targeted by opposition. It’s a less extreme version of saying Mexican military should demasks and have badges when targeting the Sinaloa Cartel. Obviously Sinaloa would execute entire Mexican military families. De-masked ICE likely see a handful of executions and a lot of annoyance in their everyday life.
We already have checkpoints by the opposition looking for ICE in Minneapolis.
If ICE became a legitimate paramilitary organization with 100k members in some random Arkansas town then we can demask. Where all their families live on a base.
The Mexican military is an ill-disciplined conscript army that loses half its members every year to desertion- the largest part of which is literally just cartels promising better food to soldiers that join already trained.
Mexican marines do the actual cartel fighting- masked and deployed away from their hometowns. They face reprisals but also are literally operating outside of civilian control; the reason they fight the cartels rather than the army is because the cartels have too much influence over the government for forces under full civilian control to be used against them(also, the whole 'half the army leaves to join the cartels for better food every year' thing).
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I'd accept the necessity of anonymizing agents if there were a verifiable history of violence anywhere near the levels perpetrated by Mexican cartels. That appears appears to be about 400 murders alone per year over the last decade. We don't even have to get within an order of magnitude: I'd be more sympathetic if there were a ten or more independently verifiable incidents and for some reason alternative methods of deterrence didn't seem likely to work. I detest the use of masks, but I promise you I am not looking for a reason to lawyer my way out of these conditions.
I've looked for verifiable cases of harassment, stalking or violence against off-duty ICE officers and only found one so far, for threats and harassment, announced today. Perhaps there have been more: I wouldn't be surprised if major media outlets ignored them or applied maximum scrutiny before reporting on them, but I do think the Trump administration would have initiated more investigations and likely secured more arrests.
But from what I can tell, you're asking US citizens to make an enormous sacrifice to combat what evidence suggests is a minor threat, at best. Worse, this is over a year deep into the Trump administration authorizing the practice.
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Unless this is matched by a program to crack down hard on left-wing agitators and terrorists who would use this information to target and intimidate officers and their families, then it is merely a strategy for the left to empower its own masked paramilitary groups to contest policing authority. They don't want to abolish policing or borders; they just want to be the police and decide which borders are enforced.
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The Vox piece doesn’t surprise me. In the recent Pretti killing, it came out that Pretti previously got into a violent interaction with ICE where ICE acted professionally (if understated). Those interactions probably occurred hundreds of times daily. The media wants you to focus on the numerator of bad cop interactions while ignoring the denominator (the thousands of interactions with bad actors that LEO deals with excellently).
Is LEO misconduct a problem? Sure. But it pales in comparison to suspect misconduct. Vox wants you to focus on the former but not the latter by controlling the numerator and denominator.
The general public does not care about statistics. Both sides of the CW play that game. MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.
The protesters breaking the laws more frequently than cops is to be expected. They are not getting paid by the taxpayer, though. There have been two people killed in MN. Both were protesters who were objectively (with the benefit of hindsight) not going to kill ICE agents. There are certainly situations where I would expect that outcome. If protesters had also murdered three ICE agents in MN in the same time span, that would justify ICE having a high prior that someone wants to murder them, making their snap judgments more understandable.
The other problem is that the Trump administration by trying to take control of the narrative and slandering the victims before their bodies were cold effectively endorsed the killings. SOP for a shooting which looks bad would be to say that the agent involved has been put on paid leave and that it is under investigation, and that it would be premature to comment on it. The Trump admin message to the ICE agents seems to be "if you need to break a few eggs to make our omelette, that is fine. We will shield you from consequences and tell bald-faced lies in our press conferences to provide cover for you."
I'll admit, that got under my skin more than anything else. It took the typical trump lying from tiresome bullshitting buffoonery to, well, hackneyed villainy.
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“ MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.”
Maybe the median MAGA wants you to think this but I feel like the median MAGA has instincts that the intellectual MAGA could express better and with data. Assimilation doesn’t happen. Twitter recently had a thread showing Italian American have a 60% higher criminality rate than Scandinavian Americans. Ellis Island was a long time ago. I am Italian American. We are different. If Nancy Pelosi wasn’t constrained by a larger majority her politics wouldn’t be New Deal it would be Evita Peron since Italians are the dominant force in Argentina. https://x.com/garettjones/status/2018766833134751869?s=46
I came across some writings by Wang Hunig whose basically the chief ideologue and theorists for the CCP and when he has a quote that struck me, “ all political power runs downstream from shared values, culture, and tradition”. Then I bought his book and will work on it this weekend.
I don’t believe Amerindians will assimilate into America. We have multigenerations now an education gaps remain quite large. Criminality is a little more mixed. I don’t believe you can bring in a population group whose descendants will be stuck in a servant class and not change the culture and politics of a country. If they are non-competitive for becoming elites in a country then they will vote for communism.
I think Indian Brahmins and Asians are more mixed. The current debate seems to be on striver culture. And heritage Americans seem to think the country has the right amount of striving. Certain immigrant groups strive less than whites and certain groups strive more than whites. For people like me America had the perfect amount of striving so why would I want it to change.
MAGA doesn’t want the other side to believe every deportation is a rapists. They want the other side to be racists like us. It’s a dog whistle. They want the other side to realize that if you import a lot of Amerindian your country will turn into Brazil or Mexico. Mexico now has a shared culture with its people but all the rich people are European or Lebanese. Their servant class is brown.
And yes my background is a typical urbanite with a lot of highly filtered black, brown, and yellow friends who sometimes play the token Nazi role. The elitists city of highly selected globalists can function. I don’t think it works once you get past the top 5%.
I tend to believe America’s original sin is the primary reason we developed suburban culture and we can primarily only build walkable urban environments in areas with extreme wealth is because of an intense desire to prevent the social dysfunction in schools and public spaces associated with our Origional Sin. To this day any progressive with money who flies all the correct flags will do anything in their power to make sure the bottom 50% of blacks can’t be in their neighborhood or in their schools. If America didn’t have black people private schools would basically disappear.
Centuries later group differences and favoritism never disapear. Bias in juries to favor your own race still exists. A recent interview with an OJ Simpson juror said they voted him innocent despite thinking he was guilty because of Rodney King. A black man can butcher two white people and a black juror won’t convict him. The more you start to see that group differences between populations that evolved in different areas are permanent the more anti-immigration you become.
What MAGA wants you to believe is to be racists like us.
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The problem is that Minnesota and co. believe that these officers are illegitimate by default, and they treat ICE like an occupying force. That framing alone will undoubtedly make incidents more likely to occur.
The plan for the anti-ICE crowd is to continue with their current formula, because current the incentive structure encourages escalation. If I as an indignant protestor can blow whistles, shout profanities, follow and block ICE vehicles with my vehicle, and then have some other indignant protestor record the exact moment an ICE agent crosses the line or arrests me, then I win no matter what. I either get to disrupt your operation (which is supported by state and local government) or you arrest me and I can access one of probably hundreds of civil rights attorneys and a local politician or two to oversee my case and ensure no real harm or deterrence comes to me. Obviously anything that results in me being injured on video by an ICE agent is almost certainly good for the cause.
The comments and tweets from Noem and Bovino were politically disastrous, and that plays into the strategy employed by the anti-ICE crowd. You just need one or two optically terrible missteps by the other side to negate tens of thousands subtler, yet intentional provocations. As long as you can continuously point to isolated incidents that look bad, you can endlessly recapture the narrative.
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It's somewhat callous, but I can't help but think similarly overall. The Renee Good shooting was imo somewhat understandable, since she was spinning on the ice with her wheels pointed forward. That would have scared the shit out of me as well and shooting her before she gets grip is objectively a plausible way to stop being run over. But it still also was a bad shot, in the sense that, as you say, with the benefit of hindsight we know he wouldn't have gotten run over. Pretti was arguably the kind of guy who gets shot, and the left usually has no problem with this if they don't agree with their politics. But again, it was a bad shot in the sense that no ICE agent was factually under threat.
And while there has been a lot of questionable behaviour by obstructors, ICE agents generally rarely get injured and it is claimed that literally not a single agent has been killed in the line of duty in the past few years. Unless we assume superhuman competence for the ICE agents, that does point in the direction that the obstructors do not intend to seriously hurt or kill ICE agents, no matter how little one may like their other goals and/or their rhetoric.
And this simply matters a lot for PR. If you want to convince a normie that ICE agents are in sufficient danger to allow these shootings, you need to be able to provide examples of at least some of them actually being killed. Yes, this sucks, I don't really like it, but I also see little way around it.
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
Not for lack of trying.
Nothing would change if a few ICE agents had been killed. The Twitterati would lie and say they weren't, and the actual media would ignore and downplay it.
If the officer could reload a previous save game and redo that event knowing what he does now, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't shoot. It may have been a justified shoot in the moment, but that doesn't mean it was a good shoot in a more general sense. Perhaps on a better day, or maybe if the same officer hadn't been dragged by a car recently, then he would not have shot. I don't think he could honestly answer the question "if you could do it over again, would you do the same?" with an unqualified "yes", though he may be advised to do so for legal reasons.
Which is equivalent to precognition. There was no way for him to know at the time he made the decision to shoot that the car would hit him but not seriously injure him. Making judgements based on knowledge that nobody at the time had is a completely unreasonable standard.
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Yeah I was just thinking that. If the recent Minneapolis kerfuffles had been two ICE deaths I feel like they'd have made a far smaller dent narratively than what occurred.
Like even if Good had legitimately run down one of the ICE guys obstructing her I can't picture it generating much interest.
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In the EU, there's a concept called the "right to be forgotten", intended to recognise the idea that a crime or misdemeanour which one committed a long time ago and for which one has served one's sentence should not haunt one forever. There is a legal precedent that you can appeal to Google to remove articles containing your name from search results, and in some cases they will honour this request (funny story: several years after leaving school, a guy who was the year ahead of me in secondary school was convicted for possession of large amounts of illegal drugs which could not possibly have been solely for personal use, and in his trial his actual defense was that he was not a drug dealer, but simply a "sucker for a good deal". At some point after his conviction was spent he must have requested all articles about the case be purged from Google search results, because I can no longer find them.) As with anything else, this has its limitations: in the UK, sex offenders are forbidden from changing their names via deed poll. If an adult was convicted of a sexual offense involving children, I do think it's reasonable that this information be made publicly available, especially if they're seeking employment involving children. Likewise if someone was convicted of a severely violent offense and they're seeking employment in a job that involves safeguarding.
But broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, if a person has a mental health episode in a public place, or if a university student has too much to drink and makes a fool of themself, that incident should not follow them around for the rest of their life. It should not be the first thing you see when you Google their name. I agree with Jacobin that police officers uploading bodycam footage of this sort of thing to their official YouTube channels is an improper use of bodycam technology, but really, police bodycam footage is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever anyone has a mental health episode in a public place, you can be assured that smartphone footage of it from at least three angles will be uploaded to TikTok and Instagram within the hour. Videos like "Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired" being uploaded to official police YouTube channels are only a symptom of a broader cultural problem: everything is just #content now. Woman having a mental health episode in a supermarket? #content. The building you're inside catches fire? #content. Man gets struck by car? #content. Soldier stabbed to death by Islamist nutters? #content.
The canonical example of the casual sociopathy of bystanders is Kitty Genovese, a case which was widely misrepresented by sensational journalists. In light of this, it ought to be retired in favour of any of the above examples.
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