Trump’s Schrödinger’s ICE Reversal and ‘Fearing for Public Safety’

Trump either has or has not reversed the new ICE policy about traffic stops. It’s Schrödinger’s reversal. Nobody can quite open the box and tell you whether the cat, or in this case the traffic stop, is alive or dead until you actually watch what agents do on the street next week.

But he is being very loud about it on his bargain basement version of Twitter. Loud enough that three different news outlets can’t agree on whether he issued a demand or an actual order, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how this administration operates.

But before we get to that, there’s another reversal worth talking about first, because it’s the one that actually explains why any of this happened.

Previously, the weaponized vehicle excuse was used after the shootings. That was the line DHS reached for both in Houston and in Biddeford. The driver’s car became a weapon, so the agent had no choice but to open fire.

Except in Houston, the men riding in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s van told their attorney that no officer was ever in the vehicle’s path and that the shots came from the sides.

Now, in Maine, DHS is saying Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero tried to flee the scene, and the firing agent shot him because he “feared for public safety.”

I guess he didn’t fear the public’s safety when he sent lead flying into a residential Biddeford neighborhood at seven in the morning, in front of a wife and a three-year-old daughter who reportedly watched the aftermath in her pajamas.

Most major metropolitan police forces now have standing orders to disengage from a police pursuit if it puts the public in excessive danger. That’s fearing for the public safety, not executing a brown man who didn’t break the law, when the government now admits he wasn’t even the target of the operation.

In my opinion, ICE are not cops. They are goon squads, shock troops, death squads, and stormtroopers. I’m not talking about the George Lucas kind, either. I mean the ones in the Hugo Boss uniforms, the ones who show up unmarked and unbadged and leave without rendering aid. The ones nobody can put a name to because none of them wear a body camera.

A Biddeford resident said Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was 25 years old and had been authorized to work in this country. He had a wife and a daughter. Now he has a bullet hole in his windshield and a government agency that won’t answer questions about the agent who put it there.

Now, getting back to the tangerine-tinged sex pest of a president, Trump either reversed ICE’s decision to cease traffic stops for now or was mad tweeting about it, depending on which news source you use.

The Guardian says the White House flat-out overturned the one-day-old DHS memo. Reuters and PBS are more careful, reporting only that Trump came out against the pause without confirming whether any actual order changed.

Trump himself doesn’t leave much room for nuance. “We must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he wrote, capital letters doing the work his argument couldn’t.

He added that the pause “won’t happen on my watch,” which is a strange thing to brag about less than a week after two of his own agents shot men dead who’d broken no laws from behind the wheel of a car. I mean, that could qualify as an executive order with this administration; who knows?

But as I posted yesterday, there were a lot of exceptions to the traffic stop, meaning the blanket ban Trump claims to be fighting off might have never actually even existed. He rescinded a policy that had already conceded his entire point. But the bottom line is innocent people who broke no laws are dying in the streets at the hands of masked jackbooted thugs because of Trump’s supposed immigration crackdown. Their blood is on his poorly toupeed head.

Personally, I think this immigration crackdown has two real purposes, and they’re not public safety. One, to try to intimidate minority voters from going to the polls, and two, to keep us distracted from the Epstein files.

The National Police Accountability Project called the Maine shooting “another extrajudicial public execution” and asked Congress to freeze ICE’s funding. Colombia’s own outgoing president said his country’s citizen was treated by American agents as an inferior being without rights.

None of that registered with Trump, who blamed the backlash on “Radical Left Dumocrats” and told agents to keep the crime stats coming, as if a body count from a botched traffic stop is a stat worth bragging about. How many people is Trump willing to kill to keep those files under wraps?

(Sources)