What happens when there’s a legit standoff between ICE and police?
For now the Minneapolis pollce have been told to stand down and not to engage ICE directly. This is probably for the best, although it's disappointing to people who have been told to rely on local police for protection. It gets worse when you think about the possible standoff between ICE and the Minnesota National Guard, or between MNG and the regular Army.
Fraud seems to be the second line of attack
I think they're figuring out that they can't control the narrative of their ICE brutalism. The visuals don't bear out their desired story. It's hard for them to write off cheerful moms and obviously compassionate observers as "domestic terrorists." So all they can do is do keep repeating the lies an hope that enough people believe them. And that's why it remains absolutely essential to observe and record federal officers and thereby preserve an objective record. The federal agencies aren't holding their officers accountable. The courts aren't. (The appeals court stayed the order preventing ICE from harassing protesters.) Congress is entirely feckless. Thus it falls to the people to protect their own rights directly.
And the Trump regime's response is to try to shift the narrative back to a claim for which there are no contravening visuals. Poring over court dockets to discover that it was really a non-Somali U.S. citizen who perpetrated the entitlements fraud and was prosecuted by the Biden administration for it isn't nearly as exciting or compelling as picking apart videos of ICE violence. So the narrative that "Minnesota is opposing the Feds over immigration" isn't landing as it once would have, so they have to fall back to "Minnesota is defrauding the federal government," which is this point becoming a more tenable propagandum.
Visual records of enforcement activity are a game-changer. One thing everyone needs to realize about American law enforcement is that
police always lie. Hence the focus of a criminal defense has been to assemble evidence that challenges the arresting or investigating officers' narrative for what happened. Prior to widespread surveillance and mandatory body cameras, this has been quite difficult. Hence judges and juries have been accustomed to just believing whatever a police officer said. Nowadays it's much easier to challenge police accounts with objective evidence. And this is a good thing for a civil society.
But if your goal is to exercise police brutality, then it's absolutely essential to paint observers as obstructionists and "terrorists," and to use whatever pseudo-legal means are at your disposal to operate without being observed.
Bessent: I'm sorry he is dead, but he did bring a semiautomatic weapon to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest.
Something something Rittenhouse. Something something Jan. 6.