The Trumptanic hits the ICE berg

It was supposed to be Trump's big winning issue.  In mid-2024, 62% of Americans, including 53% of Hispanics, favored mass deportation of illegal aliens.  Americans generally support the rule of law, and having ten-million-plus people living illegally in the country more or less permanently while everybody else just sort of puts up with it was never going to be accepted.  And the cultural implications of mass immigration were probably a big part of why Trump won the election that year.  However out-of-touch Trump was on many other issues, he was solidly in the mainstream on this one.

Today his support lies in tatters and the issue is even turning large numbers of Republicans against him.

It started with the chaotic and incompetent way deportations were carried out under Trump.  Large numbers of people were being arrested, locked away in camps, and even deported without due process, never given a formal opportunity to prove their residence status.  Legal residents and US citizens were caught up in the dragnet. Agriculture and other industries were disrupted as Hispanic workers in many places stopped coming to work for fear of arrest.  Still, these abuses occupied a limited space in the mass public mind, overshadowed by the economic harm caused by Trump's tariffs and the damage to vital alliances wrought by his arrogant and blundering foreign policy.

Then Minneapolis happened, and the true nature of what was going on was laid bare.  The huge expansion of ICE, it became clear, was no longer just about deporting illegals, however ineptly -- it was about building up a force of Brownshirts to harass and intimidate political opponents.  ICE had been sent to Minneapolis to terrorize and punish a part of the country where opposition to Trump was widespread.  Agents were abducting people without any grounds for suspecting that they were in the country illegally.  It's reported that they mainly targeted non-white people, but pretty much anyone who aroused their dislike in any way could fall victim.  The poorly-trained agents routinely used unjustifiable violence, culminating in the murder of Renee Good on January 7.  ICE behaved like a foreign occupying army and was increasingly treated like one, as the citizenry mounted a massive campaign of organized resistance unprecedented in the US since, probably, the War of Independence era.

Trump and his administration flagrantly lied about the details of the Good murder, as video evidence quickly showed.  Despicably, they launched an "investigation" of the victim's wife rather than of the agent who killed her.  A leaked memo revealed that ICE planned to carry out home invasions without judicial warrants, in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.  At that point, at the very latest, any pretense that the rule of law was being upheld collapsed.

But it was the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24 that seems to have been the real turning point.  As with the Good case, Trump and his toadies lied about the details of the shooting and smeared the victim.  But their truly colossal mistake was to claim that Pretti represented a mortal threat to ICE agents because he had a gun on him (though he did not draw it, much less threaten the agents with it), and to imply that coming to a protest with a gun was evidence of malignant intent and possibly even illegal.

I read a fair number of right-wing activist blogs, and if there's one thing that arouses those people's passion, it's gun rights.  The NRA and other pro-gun organizations are among the most active and powerful political groups in the country.  And they're surprisingly consistent in their position.  In September, for example, Trump floated the possibility of restricting the gun ownership rights of trans people -- and gun-rights groups forcefully rebuked and opposed him.  The fact that trans ideology is overwhelmingly rejected by right-wingers made no difference at all.  The sanctity of gun rights trumps everything.

The moment it became apparent that the Trumpist defense of the Pretti shooting was taking the form of challenging his right to be armed, the gun groups turned on Trump, rejecting the official narrative and demanding an investigation, effectively siding with Pretti despite his clear left-wing activism.  Some Congressional Republicans, such as Massie, joined in their condemnation.

It feels like a dam bursting on the right.  Some are now rebelling against the barrage of Trumpazoid lies defending ICE's atrocities (more here).  A Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota has dropped out of the race because he can't support what ICE is doing.  Some Senate Republicans are demanding that Noem resign or be fired -- enough, perhaps, for an impeachment to succeed -- while National Review headlined its editorial "Fire Kristi Noem into the Sun".  These observations from a right-wing blog show the growing discomfort about ICE's behavior, while another warns that a domestic army of thugs unconstrained by law endangers everyone, not only the left.

It's already being reported that morale among ICE agents is imploding, partly due to "hatred from the public".  The loss of so much right-wing support will surely dishearten them even more.

Meanwhile, majority opinion has turned against ICE's tactics, while only half now support Trump on border enforcement -- and there hasn't been time yet for polling to incorporate the shift in Republican attitudes since the Pretti murder forced the gun issue to the forefront.

One shouldn't mistake this for a fundamental shift in Americans' views on illegal aliens.  What most of us wanted, and I believe still want, was a humane removal of those who are not supposed to be here, in accordance with law and due process, and allowing time for the economy to adjust.  That will not change, and coddling illegal migration will continue to be a problem for Democrats even after Trump is gone.  But Trump's ham-fisted brutality, his use of illegals as a pretext to create an internal army of lawless thugs to terrorize opponents, and his disdain for the one part of the Constitution most sacred to the right wing, have completely blown the issue on which he started out with the broadest national support.