The videos you see online where ICE is responding with violence to a large group? Those are the rare cases where they didn’t back off, maybe got caught too far into an abduction to run as observers show up.

Early in the invasion of Minneapolis, ICE realized observers were showing up too fast for their previous methods. They now try to operate in one of two modes: grab somebody and flee in as little as 5 minutes, before there are camers, or if observers start showing up quickly disperse and come back later.

It’s exhausting for everyone — but it is most definitely sand in the gears of their operations. Nothing here is as easy as they thought it was going to be.

2/2

Paul’s Patented 3 out of 2 Post™:

This grab-and-run strategy explains a lot of the incidents you hear about. ICE’s targeting strategy here is mostly chaotic and opportunistic. They can’t actually try to identify an undocumented immigrant, or even an •immigrant• at all, based on any kind of real evidence. They are mostly just running around trying to catch a brown-enough-skinned person in a vulnerable moment. Bully cowards.

This is one reason why you hear about them grabbing random people out of cars, grabbing US citizens, leaving a car sitting in the middle of the street, leaving kids abandoned in the car, chasing down a random person and then suddenly dispersing. They •know• it’s all disorganized, but they’re desperate to get in and out fast — and they have to hit those quotas somehow.

3/2

@inthehands I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there is an actual bounty on brown people.

I wouldn’t put it past Trump or Miller to institute bonuses for each person snatched off the streets.

There is a reason that ICE’s budget is so large

@hasani This is already happening: word is that some of the people conducting abductions are straight-up bounty hunters, not even ICE / DHS at all. That’s one of the reasons they’re desperate to keep agents from being identifiable on-scene: some of them aren’t actually agents and don’t have ID.

I don’t know how many.

I’m not sure they’re paid on a per-person basis, but I would expect so.

I find it hard to imagine that they’re being paid for “correct” arrests, i.e. people who were actually undocumented, instead of of just being paid for getting any brown body in cuffs and to the federal building.

@inthehands @hasani

Non-lawyer here, but it seems to me that if you are being kidnapped by a non badge wearer, you can legally use deadly force to defend yourself. Am I right?

@LevZadov @hasani

What is actually legal is so far from our lived reality here in Minneapolis right now it’s barely even relevant. The question is what the system will tolerate, what the public will tolerate, and what the aggressors believe they can get away with.