Implementation is a huge part of policy!
Another ICE/CBP shooting. Sigh.
This one is utterly indefensible. Everyone who is defending this is either insane or arguing in bad faith. I have yet to see an exception.
ICE/CBP has clearly grown too quickly, adopted tactics that are totally reckless, obviously directly caused this death, and needs a huge overhaul.
It’s not an indictment of the mission to admit what is plainly true. None of this itself damns either current federal immigration law or the administration’s current deportation goals.
But implementation is policy. You can’t separate the two. Executive governance requires smart decision-making. The legislature can give you resources and authority, but they can’t make policy come to life. If the implementation is failing, the policy is failing.
The implementation is failing. Whatever else you might argue about it, the current policy is unsustainable politically, which means the central goal of the policy is in danger of collapse. The inability of the administration—and, to an even greater degree, any of its supporters—to see this and act on it is wild.
One short-term way to improve implementation of a contentious deportation policy like this is to scrupulously hold officers to the highest standards of conduct. That’s clearly not happening. In many cases, the opposite is happening.
So a quick path forward to begin turning this around: make sure the agents involved in this are investigated, and then charged and prosecuted (if still appropriate). Do that concurrent with a short 48-hour pause on activities to conduct a policy review. Update the policy and publicly announce it. This is executive governance 101-level stuff.
One big-picture policy question is why is ICE/CBP committing so many resources to MSP? There are something like 30,000 illegal immigrants in MSP, which is something like 0.25% of the national total of ~12 million. Something like 10% of all ICE agents are in MSP right now, and they’ve made about 2-3k arrests in a month. Moving these resources to Texas or Arizona seems an order of magnitude more efficient, given the number of illegal immigrants in those locations. Especially if what ICE defenders say is true and the populations there would be much more welcoming and grateful for ICE, and way less confrontational.
I can think of a lot of reasons why the administration is wasting its energy on MSP, and none of them are good immigration policy.
I agree with Matt Yglesias that, longterm, the ICE function may need to be folded into a more general federal law enforcement agency, with a wider mission, as part of a general reorganization of the incredible disparate federal law enforcement world. ICE culture may just create too many negative downsides as a standalone agency, and might perform better as a function of a general federal policing agency, so officers rotate into the job, rather than being hired, trained, and embedded in a culture that is purely immigration enforcement.