Comment by CMay

Comment by CMay 2 days ago

6 replies

> 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.

spacechild1 2 days ago

> I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do

The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.

> but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training.

Well, because they are not meant to be patrolling US cities in the first place. Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.

> 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.

That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.

> 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.

If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people? How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?

> which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump.

Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!

Your seemingly levelheaded words are just thinly veiled complicity with the MAGA movement. In your last paragraph you really let the mask slip.

  • CMay 2 days ago

    > The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.

    I don't know if their training is sufficient or not for the job they're actually tasked with, but it seems to not be resulting in dead people in every other city.

    > Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.

    Well, if the local police don't assist, you're going to end up with more ICE than other cities since some of them have to try to do the job of the police too. Sanctuary cities may also have a higher proportion of the people ICE is going after, so it would logically follow that more ICE resources may be needed there which could inflate the numbers twice.

    > That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.

    Well, I did look into the George Floyd case. It was not a fair trial. If you care about fair trials, and you do like the word embarrassment, that trial was an embarrassment to all US courts. These Minneapolis protester deaths are the closest things we've seen since then as far as I know in terms of them being promoted in the public for manufacturing outrage for political gain. It's like activist organizations know Minneapolis is a particularly good place to farm this so they push harder there. It was so easy for them to incite riots and city burning, that's the kind of imagery you like to get pushed national if you're a resistance movement.

    > If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people?

    I probably know of them, but not by name then if they're that influential. You're still missing the point that they aren't relevant here. Whoever they are and whatever DHS does, there are laws that exist that apply. There are officers and protesters in a video. An event took place. You don't need to know the current temperature on Mars in order to estimate whether a claim about the event is supported solely by the video evidence. You know this, because you're pushing back against people making claims about what's in the videos too. You're getting lost in the weeds here.

    It's like saying, "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you know the video is proof it was murder!" or "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you can tell the officers had him fully and confidently restrained!". It is not logically supportable.

    > How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?

    The George Floyd case was so bad, that what I'm saying is no matter what you think of DHS, they can surely do a better job than that. It's one of the worst cases of the execution of justice I can recall in my lifetime. Courts do sometimes get things wrong, but that was another level.

    At the same time, I can understand the concern that if these protesters are fervently and emotionally anti-Trump then get killed by DHS, serious activists may feel uncomfortable that DHS is part of the executive branch which Trump has legal authority over. There have also been lies spread about complete legal immunity of Trump and him being a king which aren't reality, but if it contributes to distrust in the executive branch handling the case that's probably a legitimate issue of public trust. That element existed somewhat in the George Floyd case, because the local police department was part of the executive branch and people didn't trust the police, so the judicial branch took it. That is fine, except for how the courts handled it.

    Either way, DOJ is involved with the case now.

    > Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!

    Being European doesn't mean you can't have an opinion and it's not unique to you alone that you don't understand Trump, because most people don't understand Trump. I highly doubt you see what the administration is doing, because it's very rare.

    There's the law, there's what they say, there's the action, there's the goal, there's what was achieved and then there's what achieving that actually produces as an effect. Most of what is occurring aligns with vanilla strategic national interests of the US that goes back many administrations. Maybe the surface level optics and culture are different, but make no mistake that this is just the US being the US.

    In short, if you think it's not about China, its probably about China. If you think it's about Greenland, it's about China. If you think it's about ending NATO, it's about China. If you think it's about immigration, it's about China.

    If you don't know what China has been doing and why they've been doing it. If you don't know the things Xi Jinping has been saying. If you don't know what China has been doing in the South China Sea, or in propping up dictatorships, etc. I highly recommend, whatever your political feelings are, you dig deep and spend a couple thousand hours just consuming information about China and the history of communism.

    Almost everything we're doing in the US and around the world right now can be explained from that concern as an organizing principle. Trump is just an instrument of that.

    • spacechild1 a day ago

      You're one of the rare people who understands Trump? (Yet you don't know who Stephen Miller his?) Give me a break! Your whitewashing of the Trump administration is mindboggling.

      Stop pretending ICE and the whole administration is acting lawfully. Their disregard and contempt for the law is all too obvious. ICE is patrolling cities, breaking into homes without warrants, kidnapping people without due process and throwing them into internment camps with horrible inhumane conditions. People are rightfully angry for being terrorized.

      I did not mention Stephen Miller because he is relevant for the shooting, but for the assessment of the DHS as a whole. If you have actual confidence in the DHS to lead an independent investigation of its own agents, considering the people in charge, you must be very naive.

      Your country has taken a sudden and deep authoritarian turn and is right on its way into fascism. We've seen this in our own countries 90-100 years ago, it looks and sounds all too familiar. The past few months have already shown that the democratic system is in fact very fragile and can fall apart faster than people would have thought. Better wake up until it's too late!

      • CMay a day ago

        Set a reminder for yourself in 20 years to think back on these times. Not all of your thoughts about these times will be correct, because almost nobody is 100% correct about all of the things all of the time. Recall how sure the media was about this and that, but it never panned out. It will be illuminating.