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.

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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.

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