How not to talk about ICE’s killing spree

Donald Trump’s ICE killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an American citizen who worked as an ICU nurse, in Minneapolis Saturday morning. The latest ICE killing came less than a week after it grabbed a five-year-old Minnesota boy named Liam Ramos from the driveway of his house and sent him to detention center across the country, which was less than two weeks after ICE killed Renee Good.

Masked secret police roaming American streets, terrorizing residents, seizing children, murdering adults, operating above the law and with impunity on behalf of a man who has spent a decade threatening and inspiring violence against those who oppose him is evil. We should not grant it a single inch, substantively or rhetorically.

ICE’s political toxicity is so clear that even centrist pundits like Chris Cillizza, who spent last year wrongly warning people not to fall into the “trap” of criticizing ICE and Donald Trump’s authoritarian assault on American cities because doing so would raise the salience of an issue that benefits Trump, now belatedly recognize it. Unsurprisingly, though, the folks who were wrong about opposing authoritarianism last year are now wrong about how to talk about it.

“Democrats can win on this issue,” Cillizza writes, “But not by calling for ICE to be abolished or by embarking on a quixotic mission to impeach [Kristi] Noem. How do they win? With a message something like this:

Illegal immigration is a problem in this country. We need to get people here illegally out — especially those who have committed crimes. But the way that ICE is currently comprised — and the way that Secretary Noem has defined its mission and sought to recruit people to the agency — is making our cities less rather than more safe. I believe we need ICE — but I also believe it needs to be reformed. And that starts with Donald Trump removing Noem and recalibrating the agency’s mission.

That is an absolutely terrible message.

ICE is killing Americans in the street, and Chris Cillizza’s suggested message leads with two sentences validating ICE, doesn’t contain a single specific criticism of anything the agency – which, again, is killing Americans in the street – has ever done, reiterates a belief in ICE’s necessity, and concludes with a vague call for a “recalibration” of the agency’s mission. Like an unaccountable secret police force roaming our streets and executing Americans who dare oppose Donald Trump is something that can be solved by bringing in some management consultants to tweak the mission statement.

Cillizza’s message is designed to test well in the fake environment of an opinion poll. And it might do that; there is (by design) something for everyone in it, and it carefully avoids stepping on anyone’s toes. But in the real world, if someone responds like that to a five-year-old getting snatched off the streets by masked secret police who just shot a woman in the face, they’d come across like a complete phony; a caricature of a politician trying desperately not to take a stand on anything. If you spend more time endorsing the thing you say you want to reform than you spend describing the things it has done that demand reform, nobody is going to believe you actually give a shit about the bad things it is doing.

What centrists like Cillizza propose – a response to ICE’s murder spree completely lacking in human emotion – recalls one of the most famously disastrous moments in modern American political history, when CNN’s Bernard Shaw opened a 1988 presidential debate by asking Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, a death-penalty opponent, an obscenely personal hypothetical about his wife:

SHAW: Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

DUKAKIS: No, I don’t, Bernard. And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.

Dukakis’s answer was principled, and he was right about the death penalty from a substantive standpoint. But he had just been asked on national television about his wife being raped and murdered and he responded like he had been asked if he wanted sugar in his coffee. The lack of emotion, of outrage, of humanity in his response was widely seen as more damaging than the (unjustly) unpopular policy position it contained.

With that in mind, take another look at how Chris Cillizza thinks Democrats should talk about masked federal agents executing peaceful protesters and using five-year-old children as bait before whisking them away to detention centers across the country:

Illegal immigration is a problem in this country. We need to get people here illegally out — especially those who have committed crimes. But the way that ICE is currently comprised — and the way that Secretary Noem has defined its mission and sought to recruit people to the agency — is making our cities less rather than more safe. I believe we need ICE — but I also believe it needs to be reformed. And that starts with Donald Trump removing Noem and recalibrating the agency’s mission.

Would you think a candidate who talks about ICE that way is even a little bit bothered, much less outraged, by ICE murdering Renee Good, kidnapping children off the streets, and harassing and assaulting people for engaging in constitutionally-protected free speech? Would you think a candidate who talks like that is ever going to fight for you, or against a fascist regime? Of course not. They would look weak, because they would be weak. Bill Clinton famously said voters will choose someone who is “strong and wrong” over someone who is “weak and right.” Responding to a government agency murdering its citizens with impunity by calling for tweaks to the mission statement is weak and wrong. Not a great combination!

Cillizza’s message also fails by doing exactly what he spent all last year lecturing Trump opponents not to do: It helps Trump define the terms of debate. Here’s Cillizza last year: “Politics, as I have said many times before, is about picking your battles. It’s about fighting on ground that is favorable for you—and unfavorable for your opponent. Democrats need to think this way if they want to beat Trump and the broader Republican party.” As I explained last year, Cillizza was very wrong about his application of this principle, but the principle itself isn’t conceptually invalid.

Now look again at Cillizza’s proposed ICE message: It’s all about the supposed need for ICE to deal with illegal immigration, and contains not so much as a hint about anything ICE has ever done that’s bad.

There are two basic conversations you could have about ICE: a “We need to do something about illegal immigration” conversation or a “masked government agents shouldn’t murder Americans” conversation.

Which ground seems more favorable for Democrats? Not the one Chris Cillizza argues they fight on, that’s for sure! He’s proposing Democrats have the ICE conversation on pro-ICE ground – the very political malpractice he spent last year presuming to lecture progressives about. He’s violating his own central rule of political strategy, because his view of politics is utterly incoherent, untethered from both principle and politics. It consists of nothing more than “whatever Trump does shouldn’t be criticized that harshly, and whatever his harshest critics say must be dumb.”

The answer to the Trump regime’s lawlessness, to state-sponsored terror, to our government murdering our fellow citizens in the streets, is not for ICE to spend a week with management consultants to “recalibrate” its mission statement. That is not the moral answer, it is not the substantive policy answer, and it is not even the political answer.