ICE Was Built to Go Rogue. Trump Just Took the Leash off.
So right on cue—for the second week in a row—I’m back at my keyboard making a last-minute edit because federal immigration enforcement has killed another person in Minnesota.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti is dead after being shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, and the first thing the Trump administration did—again—was roll out a version of events that asks you to ignore your own eyes. The official line leans on “self-defense,” but video, eyewitness accounts, and even Gov. Tim Walz’s reaction after reviewing footage point in a very different direction. This is the part where I’m supposed to pretend the truth is unknowable, that we all just need to “wait for more information,” while the spin machine gets a head start. I’m going to write about this in fuller detail soon.
I saw that USA Today headline about Renée Good’s father being a Trump fan, and I had the same reaction a lot of you probably did: Wait… so now we’re doing character witness updates for the dead? And that little detail—who her father liked, who he voted for, what bumper stickers were on his car—shouldn’t matter at all. A woman is still dead. An ICE agent still pulled the trigger. But the headline made one thing painfully clear: the way Washington talks about ICE depends on whether the victims can be framed as “acceptable,” “relatable,” or conveniently adjacent to somebody’s political tribe. That’s not public safety. That’s PR triage.
And it got me thinking about the centrist framing I keep hearing: “What ICE is doing right now is really, really bad … but we shouldn’t ‘abolish’ ICE.” I’ve heard versions of it from the center, from cable news types, and—if we’re being honest—from some Democrats who keep treating ICE like it’s a basically normal agency that is merely having a rough patch. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, urged Trump to pull ICE agents out of U.S. cities after the Minneapolis killing, warning that raids were “terrorizing communities” and were dangerous. But even in that posture—condemn the tactics, plead for a pullback—you can still feel the carefulness, the reluctance to say the obvious part out loud: this agency has been a problem on purpose for a long time. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has used the language of “major reform” for ICE and DHS in recent comments, which is at least an acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong—but it also quietly smuggles in the idea that the core thing is fine if we just tweak the knobs.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/ice-was-built-to-go-rogue-trump-just
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