"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.
That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
Almost every major US criminal constitutional rights case started with an actual criminal, or at least someone unsavory. Miranda was a rapist. Gideon of Gideon v. Wainwright was a burglar. Brady of Brady v. Maryland was a robber and possibly a murderer. These cases helped form the foundation of what due process actually means in the United States. But contemporary discussion surely included a lot of commentary like "Why would anyone be opposed to prosecuting murders, rapists, and violent criminals?" And that commentary was just as irrelevant then as it is now.
It's not about whether the US deports criminals. It's about how we go about doing it.
Obama managed to deport more illegal immigrants than Trump. The difference is the local cities and states were working with ICE, rather than weaponising it to try and get a Democrat president.
You forget that Obama wasn’t an idiot and did everything above board. Sanctuary cities existed back then, federal agents still enforced immigration rules just without Gestapo-like sh*t stirring. Trump wanted to provoke Minneapolis with aggressive highly visible tactics, and he got what he wanted.
That is ridiculous, Republicans are sending in poorly trained masked federal agents "en masse" into liberal, being as rough and visible as possible. That is the very definition of sh*t stirring. This is just what MAGA wanted: to beat up and shoot some libs.
If it was really about illegal immigrants, ICE wouldn't be raiding immigration hearings, nor would they be kidnapping legal immigrants.
If it was about stopping violent criminals, they wouldn't raid restaurant kitchens and crop fields, where workers are trying to make an honest living for their family.
You can't reason someone out of something they clearly didn't reason themselves into. If they cared about the truth and evidence they wouldn't be holding that opinion right now.
Amusingly, a lot of rank and file on both sides ( and center ) of the aisle would not mind at all. However, somehow the political will in the upper echelons is just not there. Somehow.
If they really really wanted to deport 8 million illegal immigrants, there are surely more effective ways than grandstanding a bunch of masked thugs. Obama did it, surely Trump can figure it out also? I know, I know, you guys never would admit Obama was doing it because he was doing it so discretely, which is why you want Trump to make such a show of it, I guess.
Hey for audience, your numbers include asylum seekers who came here legally right?
Just want to point out that for conservatives the set “illegal immigrants” include, large numbers of legal ones because they generally thought the asylum process was too simple and shouldn’t count.
"The despondent faces and screaming, wailing and pleading from these men, women and children in cells will forever haunt me. But perhaps more haunting still was the sound of agents nearby laughing."
Yes, very not Nazi. And the press is not the reason people in Minneapolis are livid and putting their lives on the line, out in the freezing cold. Instead of getting angrier and angrier as "useful idiots" continue to do the same all across the country and in ever greater numbers, maybe take the chance to revisit your assumptions and pull yourself out of whatever dark propaganda pit you're in.
FWIW they were murdered in hot blood. A cold–blood murder is one where you plan the murder at home and execute it. A hot–blood murder is one where you kill someone because you are enraged in the moment, which is what happened here twice.
In the US, the 8th Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted again and again as requiring that punishment be proportionate to the conduct. Weems v. United States (1910), for example, struck down a 15-year hard-labor sentence for a man who engaged in criminal fraud.
Do you think Alex Pretti or Renee Good deserved 15 years of hard labor for disobeying ICE? How about just five years? Because what actually happened was they were executed on the spot.
There is no FAFO exception in the US Constitution.
Oh, just spontaneously died then? You know if you play the video backwards it shows ICE applying lifesaving bullet removal techniques on Mr. Pretti and Mrs. Good
You mean "you're right, saying the victim was cruelly and unusually punished isn't a good argument here."
You've just presented a new argument.
Many, many people are killed by LEO each year; how many are considered 6th amendment violations? (None. LEO is not out there "administering judgement", they are responding to deadly-force encounters, guns, etc)
We’re not sure what your point is. “Things of a similar nature have happened in the past” is not a particularly strong argument.
> In every state of the US (and most countries), people disobeying law enforcement will die. If you want to live, you comply, and you fight in court.
This is naked bootlicking. You only support it because you view it as “your team” or “your tribe” and do not feel threatened by it. Tables turn in time. Maybe you are not old or wise or well-read enough to recognize that.
ICE has been breaking a lot of laws in Minnesota and ignoring Constitutional rights. Neither of the shootings have been justified based on video evidence, and the administration has blatantly lied and engaged in covering for the agents involved so far.
Pretti was a cluster like I said. I don't think he should have been shot, but it's going to be really hard to find anyone guilty.
They're hands on with an armed person who is resisting them, and he is shot in the chaos. I personally believe the first shot was by the officer who drew, but was unintentional and I don't think he realized it was his own gun.
The time from him being disarmed to the first shot was well under a second, wasn't it? Not enough time to send a memo to everyone about the current status of the armed opposition.
I’m curious how you came to this conclusion. Maybe you generally believe that federal agents do not have a responsibility to deescalate / not put themselves in situations where lethal force could even become something within the realm of being discussed? They are, after all, the ones with the guns and therefore a responsibility to not escalate.
This belief, that federal agents should be held to a higher standard, and not agitate or escalate, seems to be the dividing line. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
The most damning moments in that encounter to me were when he switched the hand his phone was in before moving in front of the car while interacting with the wife, clearly giving himself the opportunity to unholster his gun, and then moving in front of the car, and then seeing in the video that his hand was already on his gun before the car started moving forward, and then calling her a “fucking bitch” after unloading a clip into her side window.
Not that any of that matters, because in the end they have effective immunity because the government refuses to perform a public investigation, and even invites more similar violence by effectively celebrating the occasion.
And you’re a part of the problem by enabling all of this with your sniveling justifications.
> The violence in Minnesota--that is, law enforcement killing people who are not obeying them--is nothing new. Happens in every state every day.
Sure, agreed.
> ICE deporting people isn't new, either.
Yeah, agreed.
> What's new is the folks trying to stop federal agents from doing their jobs...
Nah. Cops of all flavors have been lying (even under oath) about how they beat the shit out of (or assaulted with chemical weapons (or killed)) someone because "I was afraid for my life", "I was being obstructed during the discharge of my lawful duties", and similar for ages. That's nothing new.
What is probably new is the scale of the deployments of killer cops. What's definitely new is the extent of the media coverage of the obviously-illegal-but-roughly-noone-will-be-punished actions of many of those cops.
That these cops are injuring folks, stealing and breaking their property, kidnapping folks, and killing folks is one huge fucked-up thing. The other huge fucked-up thing is that approximately noone will ask "So, why aren't these cops immediately in jail awaiting trial? Why don't the courts think this is obviously illegal? What has gone wrong here?". Instead, this will generally be pinned on either the Trump Administration, or Trump personally... so once he's out of office, folks will go "Job's done!" and nothing will change to fix the underlying long-standing problem. [0]
[0] Do carefully note: I'm absolutely not saying that the Trump Administration (or perhaps Trump, himself) is blameless. They absolutely are responsible for the flood of poorly-trained ICE officers who pretty clearly have orders to engage in domestic terrorism. I'm pointing out that these domestic terrorists absolutely should be immediately sent to jail for what they've done. Trump and the Trump Administration have pretty much nothing to do with the fact that USian cops can kidnap, brutalize, steal, and murder with almost complete impunity... that's a long-standing problem.
Normalizing state-sanctioned extra-judicial murder along with a message of compliance? Maybe go find videos of where compliance got people killed because the fact is the slave catchers enjoy brutality and murder.
No, that's the thing. We accepted for a long time. Literally not one thing about any of this is new, except the politicians and reporters decided we need to focus on Minneapolis this month.
The same thing has been going on the same way for decades.
Because DHS thinks it's agents are special and need protection from doxing that politicians, judges, police, FBI agents don't have? Maybe ICE doesn't like receiving free pizzas and threatening phone calls? Maybe they were inspired by Hamas so they could go around being violent with little repercussions?
> In every state of the US (and most countries), people disobeying law enforcement will die. If you want to live, you comply, and you fight in court.
This is one of the worst takes I have ever seen, to the point that you must just be trolling.
Disobeying law enforcement is not a death sentence. It is often not even illegal. Just because LEO shouts "I am giving you a lawful order" does not in fact make it a lawful order. And this certainly is not happening in most other countries.
The desire to be part of the Trump Tribe has made people forget what actually made America great.
ICE aren’t law enforcement and can’t legally effect traffic stops. Their orders to Good were not lawful as they had no PC related to immigration violations.
They’re customs enforcement. That’s distinct legally and practically from law enforcement. They have no legal right to effect traffic stops, for example. They can search people only insofar as the border proximity exemption is in effect; I would assume Minneapolis is outside of this range.
If the claim is that you can fight it in court then I want to know how you'd do that. Because from where I sit there are mountains of procedural barriers to actually doing this. A lot of people assume that you can just get some remedy in court, but this is often not true.
When an ICE agent shot and killed a kid their Bivens claim was still denied.
...many people get off because of police procedure problems.
I see it constantly in my courtroom youtube feeds. Judge: "And what was the probable cause?"
Prosecutor: "(some bullshit that's not legit PC)"
Judge: ::incredulous look:: "Mr. Criminal, I'm going to dismiss this case based on lack of probable cause. I suggest you take this opportunity to fix your problems and stay out of my courtroom...blah blah blah"
The smaller the crime (like obstruction, not exactly murder or anything), the more likely it works. I think because police often use small crimes as retaliation.
There's no mountain-sized barrier, you just have your attorney bring up probable cause with the judge.
This only works for excluding evidence acquired illegally. Cases are not dismissed based on lack of probable cause. You also cannot exclude the person even if the method of their arrest was illegal. Watching some court room feeds online doesn't actually teach you meaningful things here.
And what you describe only helps you avoid a conviction. It does not actually remedy the violation of your rights. If a federal agent just beats the shit out of you for no reason and then you are not charged then the mechanism of suing them is Bivens, which has been gutted by the courts.
> Cases are not dismissed based on lack of probable cause.
I must insist that they are.
"Police must have probable cause to arrest you, and when officers lack sufficient facts and circumstances to justify arrest, courts dismiss resulting charges. Arrests based on hunches, profiling, or insufficient information violate Fourth Amendment protections."
One of the first Google results for my search. Several others say the same.
4th amendment violates are cured by the exclusionary rule, which only applies to evidence. "Oopsey-doopsey your arrest was illegal" does not actually turn into a complete dismissal automatically.
And with Bivens basically dead you cannot sue the agent for violating your rights.
There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.
Another great way to do this would be to preemptively arrest your political enemies with a pretext of assumed fraud and use that as a fishing expedition. Then you could spread your retribution by trying to violently suppress anyone who got in your way and use that as a pretext to send in the army to raid some billionaires' compounds.
I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
If you genuinely believe that the Good incident was self-defense and doesn't even warrant a trial, you aren't capable the critical thinking necessary to participate in a lawful society. You are parrot of authority without autonomy.
> He's already been stuck and dragged by a vehicle in a previous incident, so he's well aware it's a weapon, and he has good reason to fear it.
That's one take. Another is that he needs serious remedial training as he's put himself in a stupidly risky spot in direct violation of ICE policies at least twice now.
"ICE officers are trained to never approach a vehicle from the front and instead to approach in a “tactical L” 90-degree angle to prevent injury or cross-fire, a senior Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News."
The clear footage we have is of the car hitting the agent. The car starts moving, when previously stopped, in violation of a lawful command, and travels directly into an agent. He can't see the tires from his viewpoint, so that doesn't influence his actions. He was hit by a car and returned fire.
You want him to be found guilty of a policy violation? Do you think there's real consequences for that?
He's not guilty of a crime. Look at some legal analysis or something, it's not hard to find.
> U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
> The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
My translation: "Jenny Carolina Lopez: I'm taking my daughter V.M.L. (unredacted) with me to Honduras."
The judge received a petition from non-family that said a US citizen was being deported. He inquired, and found out that it was the mother's choice, not ICE's.
"On April 25, 2025, Judge Doughty issued a memorandum order addressing the emergency petition. 2025 WL 1202548. The order acknowledged the serious due process concerns raised by the petition and scheduled a hearing for May 16, 2025, to determine whether the government had unlawfully deported a U.S. citizen without providing a meaningful opportunity to challenge her removal. Despite the scheduled hearing, on May 8, 2025, the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal, and the case was closed without a ruling on the merits."
"Some time that night, an officer who was supervising Julia and her daughters at the
hotel instructed Julia to write down on a piece of paper that her U.S. citizen daughter Jade will
travel to Honduras with her. When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be
immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade
would be deported to Honduras with her. Under duress, Julia did as instructed and wrote down in
Spanish: “I will bring my daughter [Jade] with me to Honduras.”"
> He inquired, and found out that it was the mother's choice, not ICE's.
That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
> does the difficulty in surfacing a case
I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.
> A Trump-appointed Federal judge clearly did not find that excuse compelling.
A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported. I would expect any judge to care about that, regardless of who appointed them. Because we don't actually deport US citizens, it turns out.
> The same org claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin who was attempting to massacre ICE, remember. They lie; that's a matter of public record.
They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced. They allege that they didn't give them enough options to contact family etc. She had an option to leave the child in the US.
> "the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
This shows that the child going to Honduras was a choice by the mother. Under duress? Sure, she's getting deported. Tough choice. But she made it, not the government.
> That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
No it's not. What, you think the judge never saw the piece of paper? You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?
> I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.
Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria. This US citizen wasn't deported by the government. Their mother was, and she chose to take the child with her.
> A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported.
He's quoted as having a "strong suspicion" that a US citizen was deported.
> The same org that is claiming what?
DHS claims it was a voluntary deportation. But DHS also claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin. They're simply not credible.
> They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced.
I directly quoted it. Here it is again:
"When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
> You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?
Again, "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
> Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria.
Given the above, and your other comments on incidents even Trump, Miller, and Noem are walking back their statements on, I'm not certain you're really reading anything.
> "When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
The officer "threatened Julia" that the US citizen would stay in the US and not go with her during her deportation.
"Threatened" is a word written by her attorney. I would have said "explained."
Yes, those were her two options. Leave the US citizen in the US, or don't leave it. She made a choice. We didn't deport the kid.
I'm glad you showed how you're here to defend the fascism, which includes the fascism of claiming borders. This is why I said do your own research....no need to give more energy to questions asked in bad faith.
I did my own research, while you still won't provide a name that's supposedly so easy to find. Not one case where we actually deported a citizen, with 1.2 million forced removals.
Keep researching. You simply gave up because you're stuck in believing the narrative you're carrying. You get no points for bad faith arguments and upholding any system based on oppression.
> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.