Trump’s Own Advisers Suddenly Unnerved as ICE Raids Take Horrific Turn

In a startling development, some of President Trump’s advisers have suddenly realized that unleashing heavily armed government militias on American cities to terrorize American citizens with abandon just might be a tad unpopular with Americans.

Yep, it’s true. Axios reports that Trump’s team recently viewed private polling that shows “support for his immigration policies falling,” raising concerns about Trump’s “confrontational enforcement tactics.” Some advisers are talking about “recalibrating” that approach.

Which means it’s apparently necessary to state the following point: No recalibrated or sanitized version of the assault that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now, most prominently Minneapolis, is available to them or anyone else. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror: The policy is the terror, and the terror is the policy.

Note how Axios describes these internal deliberations. Trump apparently has misgivings about the “optics” of ICE tactics. One adviser says this:

“I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”

“There’s the right way to do this,” that adviser added. “And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”

But is there any “right way” to carry out these policies within this adviser’s intended meaning of the phrase? The idea seems to be that one could achieve the full scale of mass deportations that Trump and Miller want, albeit in a way that would achieve wide public support. And there are huge problems with this notion.

For one thing, the core idea of removing this many undocumented immigrants—and the classes of them now getting deported—is itself deeply unpopular, even as an abstract goal. The Marquette Law School poll precisely gauges this by asking if respondents favor the deportation of people who have jobs, no criminal record, and who have lived here for some time. In November, it found that 56 percent of Americans oppose this. Trump’s nosediving overall approval on immigration—an Associated Press poll has him down to 38–61—almost certainly reflects this.

The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations seems to rest on the idea that they can be carried out without mass societal disruptions—not to mention without the shocking imagery of roving paramilitary thugs tear-gassing, beating, and killing people. Accomplish this, and mass removals would no longer be unpopular even in the abstract.

But this doesn’t work, either. Miller’s articulated goal is to remove 3,000 people a day, or one million per year. Recall that last spring, Trump admitted that mass deportations are depriving farmers of good workers and sought to exempt them from removal. Miller privately opposed this plan, and it quietly died.

In other words, Miller’s agenda is that removing the “right” number of people—3,000 per day—must be done regardless of the societal disruptions it unleashes. The fact that mass deportations are causing such turmoil is inescapably embedded in the deeper priorities here—in the privileging of high removal numbers over all else; in the privileging of Miller’s ethnic reengineering project over the economy and even over public safety.

In short: If you drop the goal of high numbers, you’re dropping mass deportations. And that won’t happen. As it is, Miller is well short of that quota, and he’s scaling up ICE recruitment to hit his targets. So the societal disruptions will only get worse—of necessity.

Meanwhile, a ProPublica investigation finds more than 40 examples of immigration agents using banned choke holds and other horrifyingly violent tactics. And more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Inescapably, all this is the direct outgrowth of flogging agents to meet high arrest quotas, which drives them deep into communities to root out longtime residents. Here again, the disruptions are baked into the broader ideological project itself; those disruptions will also get worse as ICE metastasizes.

Finally, the Trump-Miller agenda cannot be cleanly hived off from the rampant paramilitary thuggery we’re seeing. The terror is an essential piece of Miller’s project. Most obviously, it’s meant to encourage mass self-deportations. But it’s intended to send a message to countless Americans too.

You can see this in Miller’s constant use of phrases like “outside agitators” and “insurrectionists” to describe the everyday Americans turning out to protest against ICE raids in Minnesota. The fuzziness of this language is deliberate: The whole point is to send a warning, not just to people who are doing something illegal but also to ordinary people who are showing solidarity with the immigrant victims of Trump-Miller stormtrooper raids.

“ICE is a terror agency masquerading as an immigration enforcement agency,” Will Stancil, a Minneapolis resident who’s been observing protests up close, told Liberal Currents editor Samantha Hancox-Li. Those who think that’s hyperbole should ask themselves this: Is there any denying that federal immigration enforcement has in a very real sense been repurposed toward some sort of larger ideological goal that harbors violence and sadism at its core?

The other day, the Department of Homeland Security’s official social media feed featured this:

Who are those 100 million people, exactly? Given the estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants in this country, one can only assume that group includes the millions and millions of people who are related to them, support their presence here, or perhaps even protest on their behalf. This isn’t a statement of government policy, but it is a statement that the government’s enforcement apparatus regards many of us as vaguely suspect and subject to expulsion if the ideal political conditions arise.

As Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times writes, the unleashing of agents to “brutalize ordinary citizens” is inseparable from the treatment of “half the country as conquered territory.” Ask yourself this too: After the horrific shooting of Renee Good, why have so few, if any, administration officials bothered to publicly reassure the country that they are taking meaningful steps to ensure that such killings don’t happen again? They could have done this while simultaneously (if wrongly) defending the officer. Why didn’t they?

All this violence, disruption, and terror is intrinsic to Trump-Miller’s ideological aims. It’s a feature, not a bug. It will continue until all of us, the agitators and the insurrectionists, put an end to the entire project, once and for all.