Comment by sethammons

Comment by sethammons 4 days ago

source:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2026/jan/28/footag...

What I can tell is ICE starts to open a door, and a clerk immediately stops them and ICE shut the door a second later. The clerk opens the door to further tell them they are not allowed to enter. The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building. ICE then leaves.

I'm not ok with what ICE has been doing. But, it feels like a bit of a stretch to call this threatening staff, to me. Saying what will happen if the other party escalates feels like a different axis than threatening. Def taken as another data point in a sea of overreach however.

nutjob2 4 days ago

> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.

I'm not sure what the agent has to do to qualify as a threat to you, but at the very least this is thuggish behavior. The embassy is Ecuadorean sovereign territory where the staff have immunity from US laws, threatening to yank someone out of there is like extracting someone from Ecuador by force. It's highly offensive.

If you tried that at a US embassy you'd probably be shot, but it's generally impossible because they are all heavily secured and fortified.

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cdrnsf 4 days ago

I don't think that it's reasonable to see this behavior as anything but threatening given the location and the ample context provided by ICE's behavior up to this point.

> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.

Does that not amount to a threat?

It sounds as though most of these agents are poorly trained at best. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-unloads

> “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me.

> The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”

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whatsupdog 4 days ago

> Does that not amount to a threat?
"If you touch me, I'll break your jaw" has been ruled by courts to not be a threat.

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- cdrnsf 4 days ago
  
  If it were said by a masked agent who is part of a group of rampaging thugs murdering bystanders in the street, I would see it as a threat.
  
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