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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups.

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.

MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states.

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.

Seriously, bro? An AP article about (N=40) agents who posted their hiring publicly, where most of the (4) "problems" are that a few of them had declared bankruptcy before? And then a single one where the problem was that one time he was sued by a woman who sounds like a Karen, with no meaningful details?

I think that just buttresses my point. "Deeply motivated investigation by top-level journalist outlet managed to find a single time where a guy was accused once of possibly making a bad arrest."

Which was dismissed with prejudice. Feel free to sign up for the 14 day free trial to read the full details.

In comparison, ICE has arrested 170 citizens in the course of some 582k arrests, which is a 0.0029% bad arrest rate. Compare that to things like the overall rate of false arrests, accidental IRS audits (10%), and wrongful executions. And that number is still an exagerration, because the cases that got enough attention to derive news articles were actually pretty reasonable, like the DISABLED VETERAN CITIZEN who was detained for three days by ICE for, er, working security at a drug farm that was using mass illegal labor include the purported use of migrant children as child slaves.

Or the kid who was technically born in the US, then taken back to Mexico as an infant to be raised in a village so remote he didn't even speak Spanish. When he came back to the US, he had no papers and hopped the border with his other illegal friends. When they were all arrested, it took an entire weekend for ICE to find a translator for the Aztec language he spoke to get his shit straightened out.

Just outrageous.

I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump.

Doing the same thing they're doing in all the other states, but it's "targeted" because "political experts say", even as they admit that the state is a hotbed for immigrant fraud.

So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation)

This is just a surge. They've talked about this as a tactic, and done it in 20+ cities. Minneapolis is just the only one that had Walz staffers and government employees actively coordinating activist harassment and likely using internal government tracking data such as license plate readers to help the activists impede and harass agents.

You are just making up the "trigger happy" accusation.

Are you arguing against the main point that ICE slackened standards? If you are, this article supports my point quite explicitly with an ICE insider (who voted for Trump) saying "they lowered standards". And again, it would be very difficult for any company or agency to hire at this rapid of a clip without cutting corners.

And I don't understand the point your making on a lot of the smaller claims.

  • Are you claiming financial difficulties are a non-issue for ICE agents? It makes them much more susceptible to bribery, which is why ICE normally wouldn't take them if they knew about it beforehand.
  • Are you claiming that a case being dismissed with prejudice somehow vindicates Penland? The county paid out 75K to settle the issue, and then dismissing it with prejudice is a routine judicial procedure where the case is ended permanently.
  • Are you claiming with the 170 / 582,000 number is the full extent of the problem? The 170 figure is a deliberately incomplete count, with reporting explicitly saying this was a (significant) undercount since the government doesn't track these incidents.

But I don't think those specific issues are particularly important relative to the overall trend.

Doing the same thing they're doing in all the other states, but it's "targeted" because "political experts say", even as they admit that the state is a hotbed for immigrant fraud.

Trump's own statements heavily implied this. It's not "political experts say". It's stuff like Trump responding to questions about Minnesota immigration enforcement with non-sequiturs like "it's a corrupt voting state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times."

Minneapolis is just the only one that had Walz staffers and government employees actively coordinating activist harassment and likely using internal government tracking data such as license plate readers to help the activists impede and harass agents.

Not a thing. Amanda Koehler had worked in D politics previously but that's very different from the Walz admin itself coordinating obstruction or leaking government surveillance data.

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