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Disagree. The Right's problem on immigration really isn't that it lacks viciousness that the Left supposedly has. It's that it's bad at harnessing popular anger against immigration mismanagement under Biden into durable political change. Part of that problem is Trump Cultism. Another part is valuing the optics of dunking on the Left over long-lasting results. The Right had plenty of political capital to do this, it just spent it ineffectively.
This critique would be significantly more effective if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit. To date, your argument appears to begin and end with "Pass more laws", in a context where the laws in place have been systematically ignored and subverted for multiple decades without cease. This has been pointed out to you, at length, many times and by many people, and you remain incapable of explaining how passing additional laws will succeed against the opposition's well-established tactic of ignoring or refusing to enforce laws it doesn't like.
These discussions generally tend to come down to a basic question of the nature of the problem the culture war presents to us. A popular answer, once upon a time, was that our procedures needed updating and then the problems would essentially go away. It does not seem to me that this is an argument that can be credibly made, given the last decade's-worth of evidence.
The problem, as I understand it, is that large portions of the population have incompatible values, and consider those holding opposing values to be an existential threat that must be neutralized. Further, even if such a belief is mistaken, once that belief is embraced and acted upon, it is no longer a mistake for the other side to perceive those who have mistakenly embraced conflict to be an actual existential threat. Given that democrats are willing to run on criminalizing significant portions of Reds' way of life, have demonstrated an ability to win elections while arguing that nits make lice, and that their grassroots broadly supports ideological murder as a solution to the present situation, it seems to me that we're a bit past the point where formalism and norm-respecting carries the day.
For Reds, there is no livable future where we go back to letting Blues run society with a blank check and zero accountability. Coordinating a legitimacy crisis for the current regime is the single most valuable use of political capital available to us, and if you cannot see that, it seems to me that you are going to continue to find reality a very surprising place for the foreseeable future.
If I had a magic wand to control Republicans on immigration, I would do the following:
Enforcing immigration policy at all is maximally inflammatory to many Blues. There are numerous videos from MN of ICE officers explaining that they are trying to apprehend a literal convicted child rapist while some liberal white woman screams that she doesn't care. The one actually bad shoot from that scenario seemed like more of an accident than "trigger happy" and it took something like 100k acts of deliberate provocation to conjure up by what was functonally deliberate Blue policy of trying to generate martyrs and bad press.
And when that was stopped (which was mostly just a matter of going elsewhere for a while before going back), the Blues switched to trying to instigate riots and shit at ICE facilities themselves. You are assuming a level of reasonableness, media-savvy, good faith and mistake theory from the pro-immigration people that is just not in evidence.
Desantis will be portrayed as a corrupt buffoon Nazi by every media outlet to the left of Fox News in that scenario.
Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.
It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy. To some extent it can be chalked up to bad luck but Trump did a number of things to make the bad luck more likely:
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.
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 citizensin 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.
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.
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.
But I don't think those specific issues are particularly important relative to the overall trend.
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."
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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