Why Are People Protesting ICE?

A Woke Libcuck Explainer

Here in the US we are in a liminal space. Not individually, but collectively

Many of us are pretty confident about the kind of position the nation is in vis-à-vis democratic backsliding.

Some of us are pretty confident that things are just fine, actually.

And in between you’ve got a lot of people who can’t say one way or another, for a variety of reasons.

To make my intent clear, this incredibly-too-long-to-be-effective piece is my attempt to explain to people who are confused or upset by the actions of people protesting, impeding, and otherwise opposing ICE right now. I can’t speak for all of them, but I think I can explain most of them. Because I, too, oppose the current tactics of ICE.

For the sake of simplifying my analysis of the topic, I want to set aside the group of people who tacitly or actively approve of our current situation with ICE. I do not believe I can reach you. Go with God.

Instead I want to focus on those of you who are ostensibly open to the idea that democratic backsliding could be happening, but for a variety of reasons think that the concern is overblown. As well as those of us who think alarm -and even some drastic action- is warranted. I’m labeling these two cohorts as the Not-Alarmed and the Very-Alarmed. I hope that I’m bringing some insight to both sides here, since I’ve occupied both ideological positions at different times in my life.

Let’s start with the building blocks of how we have arrived at our conclusions. There are at least six characteristic kinds of judgement calls that both groups are making, but landing on different positions.

1. What counts as evidence of democratic backsliding?
   Do statements from politicians that gesture towards anti-democratic ideas and norms count? How about dog whistles and other ambiguous signals like “roman salutes”? Or statistics? (But presented and interpreted by whom?) What about new laws passed or old laws ignored/stretched, etc?
   

2. What sources of evidence are valid?
   Certain news organizations? Historical analysis? Political party statements, eye-witness accounts, certain YouTubers, multiple camera angles on the same event, official DHS statements, your uncle’s facebook memes, etc? Everyone has intuitions about who or what they can trust.
   

3. How much weight should one put on a given piece of evidence?
   For example: the first time ICE deported a person without due process, that was a bright red line for me that signaled a profound breach of the rule of law and a clear indication of antipathy the administration holds for the rule of law. Others thought it was just a weird thing of little significance. I would say it was an 8/10 on my alarm-o-meter, and they would put it at a 1/10. I would need to see if any other breaches of this fundamental human right occurred before I could know if this is a 10/10 issue. It turns out, there have been many more breaches.
   

4. How much time should one put into learning about what’s going on culturally and politically right now?
   I’ve found that many who are in the Not-Alarmed camp haven’t heard of a tenth of the things I’m aware of. Since they don’t see the sheer number of signals that I do, their mental model of the reason for my alarm probably leans toward me being a Chicken Little. They think that I’m putting more significance on the signals than is warranted. If they saw 2 warnings that they felt each warranted a 2/10, but I saw 10 warnings that I feel each warranted the same 2/10, their alarm would be a 4, and mine would be a 20. When they see my 20, their brain searches for the category of ‘reasons to be alarmed’, and only comes back with the 2 things they know about. So they subconsciously assume that I’m drastically overreacting by giving each warning a 10/10. But no. I’m just less ignorant about the topic.

Outside of these judgement calls, there is a meta-structure of presuppositions that impact how one judges those four categories.

5. How robust are the norms and institutions that protect us from democratic backsliding?
   For those of you living outside the US, you might be shocked how large the majority of us there are who honestly think we are invincible. Many are not worried about democratic backsliding because it doesn’t matter how far any particular administration pushes past the boundaries, because the US will always snap back into shape.
   

6. How likely is it that “my side” would abuse power and contribute to democratic backsliding?
   “I personally am not a violent or abusive person, and the party I voted for shares my values and is representing me, so I doubt they would go as far as you claim.”
   or: “I know there are elements in my party that would happily go too far, but they are a minority that are not to be worried about.”
   

For those of us who are in the Very-Alarmed camp, it’s easy to lump the Not-Alarmed into the same group as those who are cheering on evil abuse. Is it better to see abuse -and ignore it/explain it away- then it is to participate yourself? So I get that impulse, but I resist it.

The reason I resist it is because all six of those characteristics are active spectrums, and people are constantly sliding around on them. What that means to me is that some percentage of people who are currently in the “Not-Alarmed” camp, could be convinced that alarm is warranted if one or more of those spectrums are shifted for them.

Here’s a simple example. The specter of the Epstein files moved a significant number of people on spectrum number 6. (How likely is it that “my side” would abuse power and contribute to democratic backsliding?) A lot of people went from something like a 1/10 on that spectrum to a 6 or higher as the obvious evidence mounted that Trump’s relationship with Epstein was not incidental. And one of the reasons that so many COULD be moved is because of spectrum number 2. (What sources of evidence are valid?) Because enough right-leaning punditry gave permission to find this topic concerning. The same could happen with due process or any number of other issues.

While I’ve been pretty caustically confrontational in my conversations with the Not-Alarmed crowd over the past couple years, my heart remains that of an ambassador. I sincerely seek to understand why people believe what they do. (That’s what led me from being very far right to being very far left on many topics.) The current frustration that drives my caustic confrontation is, I believe, rooted in the incrimination of my own past.

I know what my heart was back when I was a fierce debater against marriage equality and for laissez faire capitalism. It was the same heart, but co-opted by bad ideologies and ignorant of the suffering that they caused. I’m intimately aware of the position my six spectrum sliders were positioned at the time. And I can’t say for sure that if I were still in that cultural ecosystem I would be in the Not-Alarmed camp.

I think it would be useful for me to articulate exactly what my concerns are, so that there’s no ambiguity, given how easy it is to accidentally strawman. To illustrate, here is a meme that makes a case I disagree with.

I think it’s valid to clarify that there are many distinctions between ICE and the Gestapo. The concern we (I’m using we as short hand for those who are alarmed and protesting ICE) have about ICE is not that we stupidly think that these two organizations are identical. It is the alarm we have that many elements and tactics that used to be perceived as extreme violations of norms, the rule of law and due process are happening.

>And this is the more important part<

These violations are being PRAISED. LOUDLY. By the administration.

These violations are being PRAISED. LOUDLY. By people who used to rattle sabers and fear-monger about the government busting down doors and secreting people away to camps.

THIS IS LITERALLY HAPPENING NOW

Is it happening to the same extent, with the same disregard for rule of law and due process as the Gestapo? NO. We aren’t idiots. We also know that obviously, some of the immigrants in this dragnet are actually bad, violent people. That’s going to be the case in ANY group of thousands of people. It is not in the slightest case a justification for these actions. If it was, then the police should be busting down the door of every citizen. They will absolutely find some bad, violent people that way.

The problem is the precedent, and the administrative infrastructure and rhetoric that supports it. It is demonstrating to us -who have eyes and recognize that the U.S. is not impervious to democratic backsliding- that whatever safeguards we THOUGHT existed between ICE (or any other politically-weaponized law enforcement agency) and the Gestapo; those safeguards don’t exist. Let’s be clear: this is a form of slippery slope argument. But one that is not fallacious because it has so many historical precedents. By way of comparison: an illegitimate slippery slope argument that used to work on me was the marriage equality argument that went “If we let same sex couples marry then there is nothing to stop people from marrying multiple partners, then siblings, then animals, then children.” The difference between these two slippery slopes is that this one does not have historical precedence. And that that the vital guardrail of “consenting adults” remains. But when due process is removed, there is no such guardrail remaining, since literally any citizen could be arrested and whisked away to a foreign prison, never to be seen again. So the people protesting and putting their bodies at risk are trying to literally BE that guardrail.

Those who are on the side of ICE/this administration are demonstrating to us that they can’t perceive the danger of this lost guardrail for whatever reason. The reason could be ideological. It could be that they actually want a totalitarian government. It could be that they are just plain evil racists who get off on the suffering of minorities and think it won’t ever affect them. It honestly doesn’t matter. The point is that we can’t trust their judgement.

Now, let’s say we Very-Alarmed are wrong. Let’s say that ICE will never go further than their current abuses, murder, extra-judicial kidnapping, concentration camps, illegal deportation to non-origin nations, etc. (Note that this list requires a robust inventory of news events and a particular interpretation of them.) Given these issues, the extent of the protest we’ve seen so far is still valid, whether or not the slide to totalitarianism continues.

What I’m NOT claiming is that Trump is literally going to install himself as president for life and the government will suddenly toggle to a fascist dictatorship. Trump is far too old, unwell, weak, stupid and easily manipulated for any of that to happen. Further, no one in the current orbit of Trump who could ostensibly take his place has the charisma and symbolic stature to keep that coalition of hatred and chaos harnessed towards anything coherent. But that’s the thing about democratic backsliding. It does not require a coherent, well-coordinated or articulated vision holder. Democratic backsliding is simply the entropy that happens when the energies that maintain institutions, norms and rule of law are weakened.

So while I am not afraid that Trump or Vance or anyone else is going to become the next Hitler, and that the US will literally become a nazi fascist state, I recognize the signs of backsliding and understand that a whole lot of very bad outcomes become more likely because of the administration’s words, policies, actions, appointments and priorities that are absolute wrecking-balls to the rule of law and justice.

But I’m not going to speed by this assessment without acknowledging that every one of these things that I am convinced are destructive, can be interpreted multiple ways. You see, there’s a trick that anyone can play on themselves so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes when admitting ‘your side’ is being evil. I call it the Leaf Inspector strategy. These are the people who are smart enough to stand back and see the whole forest for what it is. But rather than doing that, they spend all their investigative energies meticulously scrutinizing technical elements of individual cases. They absolutely refuse to see the forest for the trees. Inspecting each leaf is far safter for their worldview. This is currently happening with the blatant daylight executions in the street that ICE has carried out over the past weeks.

The brilliance of this Leaf Inspecting strategy is that is 100% justifiable -both logically and ethically- to want to make sure that your interpretation of ‘the forest’ is not misinformed by false information about each individual ‘tree’. And here’s where the trick comes in. Because no individual incident can be fully known in every detail, there is an infinite number of leaves to inspect on each tree. (Just how far was her wheel turned? Did he say something threatening before the footage we have? Did the officer have sufficient training? What’s the legality of having a concealed weapon ‘in the area’ of an ICE protest? Does breaking a turn signal on a law enforcement vehicle cross the line that turns someone from a protestor to a terrorist?) So many, in fact, that one can at any point conclude that ‘we can never know’ the true status of the event. With this strategy, one can ‘process’ a virtually unlimited number of events, (trees) tallying them all to a null with regard to how one ought to interpret the ‘forest’.

There is no valid argument against this Leaf Inspector strategy that I know of except for the fact that we live in a world and that time exists. A world where real harm is being done. (Or could be) At some point, the inspection of leaves and refusal to look at the obvious forest become immoral. But I don’t know where to draw that line, especially because different people have natural inclinations towards small scale thinking and some towards big. And the world needs both inclinations. Certainly the opposite of the Leaf Inspector is no better. Oops! All Forest people will fall for any fake news because they have no interest in examining the individual claims that compose the forest of a conspiracy theory or evil ideology. But I’m not concerned with those people here, as I think there is literally nothing one can do about this cohort.

Do you know how scientists count trees? Well, there’s a variety of ways, but one that helps me process the balance between the Leaf Inspector and the Oops! All Forest archetypes is this:

__

“Scientists establish specific plots in a forest to measure every tree’s diameter, its species and height. Data from these smaller samples are then extrapolated to calculate the total tree count for the entire area.”

__

As with most scientific measurement, multiple methodologies are brought to bear in order to validate each other. What this means to me in our current sucking void of epistemic instability is that a balance between these two archetypes (Leaf Inspector & Oops! All Forest) is not to stay at a medium altitude at all times. It is to BE a Leaf Inspector often enough that you can validate your sources within reason. You can be aware that sources can never be perfect, that bias is everywhere, that sources can shift bias over time, that your own bias will favor some sources over others, etc. AND you must get enough altitude often enough to see the trends, patterns, warning signs, etc.

So my frustration with the status quo Leaf Inspectors is that there seems to be an implacable faith in the strength and solidity of the status quo. They don’t think a trip to the mountaintop to view the whole forest is worth the effort, because it’s fine. They are sure it’s fine. And any anomalous trees that might indicate otherwise must just be edge cases. Besides, they can inspect enough leaves on any troublesome tree to call into doubt the idea that it’s a problem to begin with.

Let’s examine what might cause a person who is in an obviously-dying forest to interpret it as fine.

First, they might be right. The Very-Alarmed among us could actually be Chicken Littles. Our vetting process for information sources could be wrong. Our personality dispositions could push us toward overreaction.

Second. The Leaf Inspectors could have an emotional need for the forest to be fine. They may not have been happy about the state of ‘their team’ when they voted, but the fear they have of the other team could outweigh whatever makes them unhappy about theirs. To fully understand how this could be, I’m going to remind myself and my lefty readers of the following.

1. In many conservative Republican’s minds, (most of the evangelicals) there has been an ongoing genocide in the US for decades. To them, an unborn baby is equal in every important way to a born baby. Why do they see the development from two cells into a fully formed human as a binary state? I think this gets to a ground-level fundamental psychological insight about the conservative mind. (in general) I believe they strive to make as many things conform to a binary as possible. If a person has a soul, it’s gotta be ‘inserted’ or ‘turned on’ or whatever at some point. The idea that a soul, or personhood could be a spectrum rather than a binary is unthinkable, apparently. It was for me. After all, there’s a slippery slope if a society determines that a 2 month old fetus is “not human”. They may next determine that people of low intelligence or mental illness, or disabled, or too old, etc. can be considered “not human”. This hardline stance is part a prophylactic measure (pun intended) to restrain a utilitarian justification for eugenics and forced euthanasia that they imagine the evil leftists are just waiting to pounce on.

   So you have to understand the combination of this binary impulse (along with the moral interpretation of pro-choice people as being literal baby-killers) creates an intense emotional state. Imagine if half the population openly supported killing babies because they felt like it. How would you feel about that population? What would you think of their moral and ethical framework? I would think they are monsters. That is what I DID think before I learned how historically, philosophically, culturally, scientifically and religiously anomalous a belief of full-personhood-from-conception is. I thought people who voted for democrats were moral monsters. Every time I heard of an uncle or friend who voted democratic I got a sick feeling in my stomach and my opinion of them tanked. I had to emotionally sever myself from them to diminish the cognitive dissonance. I’m banging on about this because I think so many liberals and leftist really don’t understand how powerful this emotional state is and how it drives the nation’s cultural and political divide.

   

2. Another massive reason many conservatives ‘have to’ vote for their team -no matter what- is that they very sincerely believe that academia, media and the entertainment industries are all filled with people who are literally insane and/or evil perverts. Not figuratively. Not hyperbolically. Literally. Insane. Or evil perverts. They can not or will not understand the beautifully complex and nuanced science of sex and gender. Note, again, how the insistence on binaries plays a role here. Their inherited paradigm is simply unquestionable. There are too many deeply intertwined roots with other foundational pillars of their worldview to even let them consider other perspectives on this. That leaves them with two interpretive frameworks for people like me who argue that their inherited cultural understanding of sex and gender is wrong and harmful. To them we are literally insane. Or at best, we’ve forced ourselves to believe obviously-wrong things because of our ideology. The other option is that we are literally evil perverts. We want to bewitch and mutilate children.

3. And finally, I think it is uncontroversial to say that the US has spent an massive amount of resources on indoctrinating the population about capitalism/anti-communism. For most Americans -including most liberals- the neoliberal world order is as unquestionable as water is to a fish. (See The End of History and the Last Man for the ultimate example of this) Any rhetoric or policy that is not in lockstep with this world order is instantly fed into the binary filter of good capitalism versus bad communism. Again with the binary. I’m going to come back to this. Even the most modest collectivist-seeming proposal is equal to building the Berlin Wall or starting the Bolshevik revolution, which will lead to death camps for Christians and complete economic collapse.

For all of these three fears, I’m speaking from experience. I felt them. Deeply. Most people in my social circles felt and expressed them. I argued for them vociferously for years. I’m articulating these fears to help us all understand how charges of hypocrisy towards people with these fears is useless rhetoric. Given the imagined reality they inhabit; virtually any amount of damage to our institutions, rule of law, and justice is a price that is justified. It may be bad, but it’s better than being enslaved by baby-killing insane evil perverts.

Now let me turn that binary impulse back on my own views so that I can demonstrate how I think the Not-Alarmed are perceiving us Very-Alarmed. Because their impulse is so consistently demonstrated to be the inappropriate application of binary thinking, when they hear us say stuff like “He’s Hitler” and “ICE is the Gestapo” they think that we are delusionally claiming 1-1 correlation on every level. With this in mind, they can only understand us to be very stupid, ignorant, insane or deluded by ideology. Since they can clearly see that there aren’t literal piles of books being burned by our military forces, and that we are still allowed to vote, and that almost no white people are having their doors knocked down and being dragged away to a facility where there’s a less-than-zero chance they won’t have representation, trial or other amenities of due process and the rule of law… They must be right! There’s no need for alarm. The Status quo is maintained. The crazy libs are hyperventilating because they have Trump Derangement Syndrome, etc.

Since many of us Very-Alarmed are more prone to spectrum thinking, we are addressing movement and trajectory. Not a binary toggle between perfect freedom and totalitarian fascism. When we say “He’s Hitler” we mean that he is showing most of Hitler’s tendencies, personality traits, and obvious evil. I mean, Hitler was not “Hitler” for most of his political career. He was Hitler without the backing of the state. Things changed slowly, then rapidly. The same is true for ICE. So let me address the competing interpretations of ICE.

ICE is engaging in their current tactics and strategies because they have no choice thanks to Sleepy Joe Biden who let in 12 million criminal illegal aliens. Crime and fraud are rampant because of them, (please don’t look at the stats, but DO look at individual accusations) and the only way to fix the problem is to push the boundaries (and yeah, sometimes ignore) due process and the rule of law. This is ultimately the fault of insane liberals who let this all fall apart. And now they are irrationally obstructing justice and illegally interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations. The people ICE killed “fucked around and found out”. Every law enforcement operation has risk associated with it. The fact that some people got injured or killed is unfortunate, but mostly their own fault. If people weren’t calling ICE the Gestapo then these protestors might not be whipped up into a delusional frenzy that ultimately got them killed. It is illegal and immoral to impede law enforcement, therefore everyone who is doing so is immorally putting themselves and others at risk. (ICE are the real victims here.) In theory, there are times in history where impeding an unjust law enforcement operation is warranted and moral, but we are no where near that point.

Ok, so that’s my best faith representation. I’m not going to bother with the interpretation that centers on Great Replacement and other racist tropes. But I will mention the gray area between my best-faith and the racist version, because it’s the one I imbibed and regurgitated as a young adult.

“It’s not about their race. It’s about the cultures they come from where graft and corruption is accepted and normalized. The more of them we let in, the more that cultural influence will work its way into our government.”

Man. I’m so glad we voted in all these Republicans who kept graft and corruption out of our government.

For any conservatives who have made it this far; leaning on the conceptual groundwork I’ve laid, here’s what I hope is a helpful guide for why the Very-Alarmed crowd is willing to endanger themselves, donate time and money, and yell loudly about what ICE is doing.

First, I see a pattern in history that is being repeated here. This pattern is a spectrum, not a binary. I see that historically democratic backsliding happens slowly, then very rapidly. I understand that people all have different triggering thresholds for signals that indicate backsliding. I don’t expect everyone to feel the same threat at the same time. What concerns me is the apparent entrenchment into Leaf Inspecting that indicates a determination to refuse to see any potential signals. As long as you can infinitely adjudicate every instance of alleged injustice, then there’s never a reason to step back and try to perceive a coherent picture of how these instances form a whole.

The reason this is so effective is that it means no meaningful dialogue can happen between yourself a person whose primary concern is not the individual situations, but the context that brought them about in the first place.

This is really the crux of what I have to say, so I think I’ll try to illustrate it with a parable.

If you’re at a playground and see a scrawny kid run up to a bigger kid and kick him in the shin, then the big kid pounds him into the dust, you may come away thinking that the aggressive little snot got what was coming to him. But if you widened your lens enough to see that the big kid had been spending the past hour mercilessly pummeling other smaller kids, that context completely reframes the scrawny kid’s actions and motives. This is what it’s like as a Very-Alarmed person speaking to a Not-Alarmed person. No matter how much I argue about the context they are determined to stay focused on the individual incident removed from all context. They will say that hitting is wrong. That needless aggression usually has unfortunate consequences. That the big kid was obviously minding his own business, according to what they saw in that specific moment. So when I try to redirect to the larger context they will say I’m dodging the issue, or that I must actually like needless aggression and kids hitting each other.

In general, kicking a police car’s tail light out or putting yourself between a suspect and a cop is bad thing. But the ENTIRE POINT we’re trying to make is we are not in a “in general” moment. What we are witnessing in these individual situations that are making the news are imperfect humans who have bravely inserted themselves into an unjust, inhuman, democracy-destroying operation, willing to risk their lives for their neighbors. If all you can see is an “entitled bitchy lesbian mouthing off to a cop then trying to escape” or a “frothing-at-the-mouth crazy guy screaming at legitimate authorities” then you simply have not taken ANY of the context into account. And without that context being included, there is absolutely no point in debating the finer points of these kinds of instances. Ultimately the emotional/cognitive maneuver everyone supporting ICE is doing is flattening the issue down to a binary of legal/illegal and substituting that for any moral or ethical concerns. As long as ICE procedures get the "legal" stamp of approval than what they are doing is good and righteous.

Other people ask deeper questions like: "Are laws always right?", "Is this procedure a precedent we want to set?", "Does the extremity of these procedures match the offence committed? (primarily civil violations, like speeding or jaywalking)", "Are there ways to accomplish legal immigration enforcement that doesn't' require masked military deployment with machine guns and explosives?" "IS getting rid of this population actually good for our society?" Smart people on the right are asking "If we cheer this on right now, but the power dynamic flips at some point in the future, could these same weapons be used against us?" Hopefully we are ALL asking "What is MY bright line that triggers my sense of injustice and concern that if left unchecked, these policies and actions cross the line into totalitarianism?" (Papers Please) It's hard for me to trust the judgment of people who think that we're still comfortably in some kind of status quo, or that the status quo was fine to begin with. The fact that they are apparently incapable of abstracting the policies on display by ICE and making the connection to other countries' slide into authoritarianism is... rough.

The second point I would hope to impart to any Not-Alarmed who trying to understand the Very-Alarmed position is that I believe reasonable people can disagree about the threat that the number of undocumented people are to our nation. We can disagree on what a healthy number is, and we can disagree on what kinds of immigration policy we should have going forward. What is NOT reasonable to me, is to say that the threat is so severe that we should ignore due process and the rule of law. That law enforcement should be free to kill people who are concerned enough about these injustices to protest and impede the unjust actions. It is unreasonable to insist that the current tactics and policies are the ONLY way to “fix the problem”. To insist that we have to remove as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, disregarding the trauma it’s causing innumerable families and communities, disregarding the damage done to the trust of the populous towards law enforcement, disregarding the weaponization of these tactics towards blue cities, disregarding the inherent injustice of ignoring due process.

I personally don’t know if having this number of undocumented people is a serious problem for the country or not. I know there are a lot of lies about benefits they receive, crimes they commit, and votes they cast. If your concern about these people is based on those lies, then try to imagine how those of us who see them as lies might be concerned for our fellow humans who are being slandered this way. Imagine the gross injustice it would be to terrorize this community because of lies.

I don’t know anyone in my Very-Alarmed cohort who want to keep immigrant criminals in our country. But we also see a spectrum (see that binary/spectrum divide again) of “criminality”. There’s a big difference between a murderer and jay walker. I’m sure there are a lot of people in my Very-Alarmed cohort who are uncomfortable with the number of undocumented immigrants in our country and would like to see that number reduced, or even eliminated. That’s simply a separate issue to having our government deny basic human rights, dignity and due process to our fellow humans.

Third, we see undocumented immigrants as people first, and immigrants somewhere else down the list of attributes. We understand that some are criminals who came here to do crime. We also know that this is not the case for the vast majority. (Look up the statistics of immigrant crime) So when we see case after case after case of them being brutalized, being denied due process and human rights, our Justice alarms go off. I would ask those of you who don’t have that alarm going off to ask yourself why. Is it because you’ve put them in a binary category called “illegal”? Less deserving of due process than you because “they made a bad choice” or aren’t protected by our laws? And how do you know these deprivations of rights is only happening to those in that category when they are not given the due process that actually makes that determination?

Again, I point to the spectrum vs binary. With a spectrum I can see the humanity of an undocumented immigrant. I can understand that they all have different stories about how and why they came here. I can see there’s a mix of escaping danger and destitution in nations that were historically victimized by the US. There’s a rich tapestry of motives, personalities, families, and human experiences. I don’t feel an impulse to artificially divide people into “us” and “them”.

If I’m not mistaken, originally, ICE was like many law enforcement agencies. Mostly detective and legal paper work. They would, in theory, prioritize undocumented immigrants who were doing serious illegal activities, build a case against them, get a warrant, do an arrest, and try them. Was this the norm? I don’t know. But it’s a norm I think the vast majority of Americans would agree is reasonable.

If the buildup of the department was simply scaling up that norm: hiring more detectives and legal paper workers, expanding courts to handle a bigger throughput, etc. all while maintaining due process, human rights, and rule of law… We’d have a very different equation, wouldn’t we? There would still be a lot of leftists who would be upset. But would there be tens of thousands marching in the street chanting FUCK ICE? Absolutely not.

But the institution-building required for a sane expansion of immigration enforcement is obviously not something this administration cares about. Instead it’s all action-toward-quotas without the infrastructure required to do it lawfully or humanly. So now their “team” has to find a way to post-hoc justify prison camps, masked men with machine guns deployed in cities Trump personally doesn’t like, repeated disregard for due process, inconsistent rule of law for those arrested, a massive inflation of the surveillance state, people detained and sent to prisons in other countries (often on different continents than they came from) and blatant daylight executions in the street for those who dare let their conscience rouse them to oppose the gross injustices being done.

I did not want this to be so long. As always, I try to explain too many things in too much detail. I believe this is because writing these things is a way for me to process my thoughts and to imaginatively engage with the cloud of adversarial interlocutors I come across daily. Let’s see if can distill one simple takeaway…

ICE protestors believe that they are bravely standing up to bullies because the context of this situation is so far from normal that extraordinary measures have to be taken to protect human dignity and the rule of law.