As I noted yesterday, after the killings of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis last winter, ICE/DHS shifted strategy, trying to keep up the pace of arrests and predation, while also keeping it more under the radar. Then the recent push to up the number of daily arrests began to upset that apple cart with two brazen killings of two motorists in just one week. What was notable yesterday was that ICE didn’t use its standard excuse for killing a civilian — weaponized vehicles, an agent feeling his life was threatened. They simply said the agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero because of a vague belief he posed a danger to the community. This seemed odd since ICE has manufactured cover stories with abandon in the past. Why not now? And why go with an excuse that actually provides a much less robust defense in court? Sure it’s good not to lie. But again, they’ve done it so consistently for 18 months.
Now we’re hearing that DHS has ordered ICE to stop most traffic stops around the country, though this claim is being put out by the administration with no one actually saying it on the record. It’s just “sources.” This also looks like an effort to get Susan Collins out of a jam. She claimed credit today for the shift in policy.
Presumably they’re doing this because ICE traffic stops lead so frequently to officers unloading their revolvers into people not threatening anyone. The White House clearly doesn’t want the events of the last week to escalate to a replay of January and Feburary.
We can see a consistent goal here, despite the backs and forths. Maximize arrests and deportations but with as few as possible gruesome killings and/or murders that lead to public backlashes and declines in the president’s popularity. That is, before the midterm. The challenge for the administration is that ICE is made up of hot heads, not so much poorly trained as trained to escalate in almost all situations, and generally gunned up with white nationalist propaganda. It’s one thing to, say, focus on arrests and deportations and not killing people. It’s harder to make that distinction in practice. The line agents and NCOs may also have their own ideas. It also seems that you have two factions within the administration. One just wants to deport as many people as possible but with little fanfare. Another wants that and using ICE as a de facto paramilitary terrorizing blue cities and states. For now, faction one is mostly calling the shots. At least until the midterms.