by CMay | 2026-01-31 06:10:15+00:00
> The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.

I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do, but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training. That is part of why it is so dangerous and stupid for local government to prevent the local law enforcement that does have that training from helping keep these environments safe.

The local policies are getting people killed. The local posture of hostility and delegitimization of ICE creates a dangerous environment and it is divorced from reality.

As far as I can tell by this tracker map, Minneapolis is the only place in the entire country where protesters have been shot and killed. Filter it to fatal shootings: https://www.thetrace.org/2025/12/immigration-ice-shootings-g...

> I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.

I don't know that I'd say it's embarrassing. Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people. It's also not as critical, because people are making claims about what the videos show that are not supported by the videos themselves. As far as I know, Stephen Miller was not present during any of these events. He wasn't shot. He wasn't shooting. He wasn't protesting. He wasn't in these videos. Forcing some kind of arbitrary need to know other people to delegitimize thoughts seems very much like an emotional argument especially since no strong reasoning has been provided for why knowing him is critically relevant for making an observation within the videos.

> Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?

It's complicated, because there has been evidence of Minneapolis court corruption. In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out. You cannot have an impartial investigation in the place that handled the disastrously corrupt case around George Floyd.

It looks like they're going to do something similar here even though I think people said this was CBP rather than ICE. Here again the FBI was already involved, but they're now taking the lead on it in cooperation with the DOJ: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-pretti-shooting-fbi-invest...

> Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?

I have no idea what a subjunctive is. It doesn't help when you try to misdirecting attention to some random guy who wasn't there and various public statements. None of it matters. If people make a claim about a video that isn't supported by the video, they have to provide other evidence that does support their claim. People here were just making absolute statements about what the video definitely shows as if the video by itself is the entire proof of their claim. All I'm saying is that they're incorrect. It will be true 100 years from now, because information has limits.

> I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.

You could make a fair argument that he is employing a strategy that makes it easy for activists and politicians to attack him which stokes anger. A lot of what he does is rhetorical devices and monument building to achieve deals. It wouldn't be so messy if he limited dealmaking to regular deals, but he makes everything a deal. Even Trump himself is a deal, so he builds himself up as a monument the same way he does every other thing.

He believes monumental deals are easier to get people to pay attention to and get investment in, so they are in many ways easier to do than small deals. He inflates everything to get things done, whether that's walls or greenland deals. The problem is, it actually works. He's not always right and his strategy doesn't always pay off, but it pays off often enough that there's no reason for him to stop.

Some people go into a maniacal moral panic over it and emotion oriented news and comedy media abuses it, which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump. These terrible late night shows and opinion news networks are so lost in their bubbles that they are far worse for the country than Trump could ever be. You could argue that it's Trump's fault that these shows got so bad, but in a way I've always gotten used to politicians being wrong or flexible with their words, but I still had the expectation that the news would be straight with me about what events were occurring on a day. That illusion was destroyed.

I don't have to like Trump or align with his morals to appreciate that many of the things this administration is getting done are basic fundamental national interests that a lot of the normal establishment politicians have been trying to achieve for decades without luck. He's unconventional, but the threats we face have gotten so large that we no longer have the luxury of doing things slowly.