Again we have an ICE killing in which the Department of Homeland Security gets a story out first which, on its face, appears to describe an armed civilian in the process of committing a massacre of federal law enforcement officers. A tragedy is prevented only by fast-thinking federal officers, this account claims, who shoot and kill the assailant before he can do any harm.
As now happens 100% of the time, these early DHS narratives are willfully absurd and don’t survive contact with abundant video evidence emerging from the scene. My best current understanding is that the dead man, Alex Pretti, 37, was legally carrying a licensed firearm and was at the scene in some sort of observer status or perhaps there to place himself between ICE agents and those they were trying to assault or arrest. Video evidence seems to clearly show that Pretti never brandished his firearm and actually used clear non-confrontation signals in his engagement with ICE agents. What’s more, video evidence appears to show that ICE agents had already confiscated Pretti’s firearm in a scuffle before shooting him multiple times.
In response to this latest ICE killing, a TPM Reader contacted me this afternoon and said that he thought Stephen Miller’s true goal was to have the U.S. military enforcing martial law in U.S. cities. Why else would they continue to escalate ICE’s tactics in the face of growing public outcry and the majority of Americans opposing ICE’s behavior?
I mostly agree with this TPM Reader’s perspective. But I’d like to suggest another prism through which to understand this moment. “Escalation dominance” is a concept in military theory and strategy. Imagine you have two countries in a tit-for-tat confrontation. The country with escalation dominance has superior capabilities on every rung up the so-called escalation ladder. So at every stage, that country has the upper hand. It has more and better guns. So every escalation puts the weaker country in greater danger and with less hope of ever getting the upper hand. The weaker power faces the bad choice of either backing down or incurring ever greater injury and ultimately destruction.
I think the White House or at least Stephen Miller’s faction in the White House, including Border Czar Tom Homan, thinks it has escalation dominance. I think they’re wrong. But let’s set that belief to the side for a moment. I’m not sure the Miller/Homan group has a particular end goal. The goal is submission, and the strategy to achieve that goal is escalation. Miller, Homan and the leaders of ICE and CBP believe that they’ll come out on top at every step up the ICE/CPB escalation ladder. They’re communicating this to the protestors and activists and the communities in which they’re operating: the more you resist us, the worse it will be for you and eventually you’ll have to back down. If you listen to comments from Miller, Homan and others, they frequently speak in exactly these terms.
We’ve had several ICE “surges” into major American cities, starting on the West Coast, then into Chicago and now in Minneapolis. It certainly seems like there has been a marked escalation in the marching orders given to ICE and CBP agents even over the last four weeks. Why would the White House continue to escalate in the face of rising public opposition? One answer is that they’re fanatics and true believers. But a complementary explanation is this belief in escalation dominance. It may not be popular but they believe public resisters will eventually have to knuckle under. So they’re happy to keep escalating. Because they have more and bigger guns and eventually those who oppose them will have to give in. I don’t think that’s the case. But I’m pretty sure they do.
