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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.
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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