ICE is, essentially the perfect cover agency. Your average Fox News-addled American will see criticisms of ICE and immediately jump to its defense, because obviously that means you want immigrants to take over our country or you hate our borders or you hate the law etc. You can even look back through various HN threads on some of the various crimes ICE has committed in the past year and see this common byline.

The fact that Americans are getting caught in the dragnet, having their possessions and lives destroyed, getting sent to secret jails or being assaulted for merely being in the same zipcode as an ICE agent doesn't matter to them. It's all about inflicting harm on people they dislike, and if ICE is harming someone then obviously it's because it's they did something bad.

It's pretty dire circumstances. ICE was always close to a paramilitary organization, it just took Trump to actually fund it and push it over the edge.

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tdeck 6 days ago | parent [-]

This is not untrue, but it's also worth pointing out that democrats have been active participants in making ICE the dangerous, unaccountable, overreaching agency that it is. Nothing was meaningfully rolled back under Biden. And in Congress they didn't even block the massive funding increase for ICE earlier this year (instead Chuck Schumer urged his caucus to vote to end debate).

This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.

Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted, corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into fascism.

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SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago | parent [-]

The opposition is right this second taking a stand on funding the entire government! I don't understand how this narrative keeps spreading when it's so transparently untrue.

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tdeck 5 days ago | parent [-]

Is this moment tbe only time you've been paying attention all year? The Senate opposition leader's actions now literally directly contradict his actions from several months ago. If they had taken this stand then, a lot less damage would have been done.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve been paying attention throughout and I don’t see any contradiction at all. In March, Schumer explained and I agreed that a shutdown would have provided political cover for Elon Musk to keep blowing up entire departments under DOGE. Now Musk is gone, DOGE is severely weakened, and the caucus has had more time to workshop their goals. One important dynamic I think people often miss is that party discipline is weak in the US. Schumer can’t make the caucus go along with a shutdown fight; he has to convince them it’s a good idea, and be confident they’ll stay convinced for long enough to get what he wants, because otherwise the 7 most moderate members will happily defect and start writing their campaign ads about how they’re independent minded who won’t be pushed around by anyone. He’s already got 3 defectors in the current fight.