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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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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.