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Every vaguely politically aware Blue was being bombarded with agitprop about the MN ICE surge. I had random strangers histrionically rant at me about it from nothing. It was protrayed as the Trump Gestapo kicking in doors to kidnaps, exile or just disappear anyone who was brown.
I'd really like to see how well you keep your cool when dozens of people are given free reign to be as stress-inducing as possible while continually flirting with and threatening violence against you. Or how well you can distinguish "I've got his gun!" from "He has a gun!" after I spend an hour blowing an alarm whistle in your face.
Absolute nonsense. Pure, empty, bad faith talking point. Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups. You're about a hundred times more likely to have a "jumpy" IRS agent accidentally audit you.
MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states. The difference is that most of those other states had some level of cooperation, even if it was quiet so as not to enrage the Blues. What made MN special was Tim Walz and Keith Ellison doing their best George Wallace impersonation, which is exactly why Trump made some comments to drive the point home.
States don't actually get to openly flaut black-letter federal law. This is well established precedent.
Citation needed. ICE had an enormous surge of agents to hire to hit Trump's goals in an arbitrarily short amount of time. It'd be almost impossible for any agency to hit targets like that without slackening standards to some degree. And that's exactly what happened, though I wouldn't claim the Pretti shooting was responsible for this, it just generally added gas to a combustible situation.
I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump. MN wasn't "flaunting federal law", they just weren't actively cooperating, so the George Wallace comparison doesn't work here. Part of Trump's ire against MN was for not cooperating, but it was also a target before that too, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation), while much of it was tangled in Trump's preexisting grudge with claims that he actually "won the election!" in MN, his personal hatred for Tim Walz, and the Somali welfare fraud stuff.
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