This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?
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The Atlantic had a hilarious article last week about how ICE agents are “miserable.” The gist of it is that there are two kinds of ICE agents: The ones that actually want to do the job for real and the ones that salute Nazi flags. They’re overwhelmingly unhappy.
Boo fucking hoo.
OK, let’s take a look at the life of an ICE agent:
The reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. 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.”
Well, you can always quit. No one is forcing you to be a monster and make America less safe. No one is forcing you to commit literal crimes and violate your oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.
That’s a choice you’re making and if you continue to make it, well, that’s on you. Don’t be all shocked and horrified when you find yourself in front of a tribunal to answer for what you’ve done.
But like I said, there are two kinds of ICE agents. Some of them are there, or they were, for the right reasons.
Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe. At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
I know we don’t like to admit it, but there are, in fact, some people who come here illegally who should be removed. Not every undocumented migrant is a decent person trying to live the American dream or someone fleeing poverty or violence. People are people, and that means some of them are going to be awful. That’s just the way people are. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have Republicans.
Now, does that mean we shouldn’t fix the extremely broken immigration system Republicans have nuked over and over again for decades to keep people from finding a pathway to citizenship? Of course not. But we also shouldn’t pretend we don’t need to toss out legitimate criminals.
So do I feel a little bad for the ICE agents that want to pursue drug dealers and human traffickers, etc.? Sure. But it can be measured in subatomic units. They know who Trump is. More importantly, they know who Stephen Miller is and they know who the Republican Party is. They know that the GOP is a white nationalist cesspool whose only interest is terrorizing Latino communities.
And that’s the problem with Miller’s “Burn It All Down” demands. By insisting on numbers instead of doing a proper job, he’s forcing ICE to use a shotgun instead of a scalpel. Great for instilling fear, less great for finding the people you really want gone.
But ICE agents know that. They learned that during Trump’s first time in office, when they terrorized Latino communities and deported far fewer people than both Obama and Biden. They knew it was going to be even worse this time. My lack of empathy for their suffering is profound.
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Then there are these guys:
“Morale is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”
A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting.
Translation: The scumbags in ICE are mad because Stephen Miller is making them do Nazi shit the wrong way. He doesn’t want some brown people thrown out of the country. He wants them ALL. Right NOW or he’ll throw a temper tantrum!!!
Some ICE agents have left the agency to work in other areas of federal law enforcement. A story the legacy press is curiously not talking about. And you’d think they’d be making more of a story over ICE agents having qualms about being turned into a secret police force being used to silence dissent and attack legal residents.
But either not enough of them are speaking up or the press is assuming it won’t matter as the regime fast-tracks hiring 10,000 white nationalists to bolster the ranks of ICE. Because as I’ve mentioned before, the regime is not going to be looking for sober professionals who care about the rule of law. They’re going to want more of these guys:
Some ICE officers have been thrilled by Trump’s changes and what they describe as newfound free rein. They chafed at rules set under the Biden administration, which prioritized the deportation of serious offenders but generally took a hands-off approach to those who hadn’t committed crimes. Officers said they used to worry about getting in trouble for making a mistake and wrongly arresting someone; now the risk is not being aggressive enough.
Yeah, how DARE those non-criminals be allowed to exist in the United States while we focus on law-breakers!!! Now we can arrest *checks notes* 75-year-old grandmas with unpaid parking tickets while letting drug dealers roam free because we don’t have the resources to find both! That’s making America much safer!!! But it really scares brown people so it’s worth it! ‘Murika!!!
These will be the guards at the concentration camps and they will be thrilled at the opportunity to rape and murder the people they hate.
Hope it’s worth the thrill, guys. Enjoy the life sentence or hangman’s noose in your future. You’re all getting Nuremberged. I have my bucket of popcorn ready to enjoy watching you swing.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that Stephen Miller is driving ICE to the brink of collapse and that’s awesome. By the time he fills its ranks with 10,000 Nazis, the previous 20,000 are going to be burnt out and useless. Hard to terrorize a country into submission when your Gestapo is exhausted and overworked. Keep up the good work, Miller! The best weapon we have in our fight against fascism is the stupidity and arrogance of the fascists themselves.
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