For little men, it’s always about size
Stephen Miller’s masked shock troops in camo are not happy with “arresting gardeners” off the street:
Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.
“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”
Nick Miroff writes in The Atlantic that Miller’s demand that ICE arrest four times as many undocumented immigrants to meet his demand of 1 million deportations annually has morale “is in the crapper,” per one of a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers.
Attorney Adam Boyd resigned last month. He tells Miroff that some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving.”
“I had to make a moral decision,” he told me. “We still need good attorneys at ICE. There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”
Some ICE officers see the loosening of restrictions under Trump as liberating.
Other ICE veterans, who long insisted that their agency was misunderstood and unfairly maligned by activists as a goon squad, have been disturbed by video clips of officers smashing suspects’ car windows and appearing to round up people indiscriminately. They worry that ICE is morphing into its own caricature.
“What we’re seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that,’” another former ICE official told me.
Meanwhile, national-security and public-safety threats are taking a back seat to random roundups and intimidating the public with pointless shows of force.
One former ICE official told me that the Biden administration treated the agency’s workers with more basic decency and appreciation, even as their caseload grew.
“Giving people leave, recognizing them for small stuff, that kind of thing. It went a long way,” the official said. “Now I think you have an issue where the administration has come in very aggressive and people are really not happy, because of the perception that the administration doesn’t give a shit about them.”
Some, at least, know they are being used and don’t like it.
What I want to know is where is ICE getting the irregulars in plain clothes? Craigslist? What sort of training do they receive before being armed and sent out in masks to smash car windows and snatch people out of immigration and medical appointments, or just off the streets? If the director of Trump’s White House Office of Presidential Personnel is Russian-born and got the job without a security clearance, god knows what vetting, if any, thousands of freshly minted ICE Snatchers receive.
Miller is a psychopath. Trump is an addled and delusional wannabe dictator. We know what his game is:
Trump bypasses any reluctance from Pentagon professionals about deploying troops against civilians. Since DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has tricked out ICE as soldiers, it’s like deploying soldiers without that bothersome Uniform Code of Military Justice or the restrictions of Posse Comitatus.
He just wants his dictator reality show to get good ratings.
Update:
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