Which isn’t to say that there aren’t monsters who have found their way into and adjacent to power, but they are always limited by the beliefs held by the people on the ground doing the dirty work. The revelation in the quote below is that for all the cruelty and uncertainty being imposed by ICE, USBP, and the agents deputized from local law enforcement, it isn’t meeting the ambitions of those who want more than terror and lib-owning headlines. They know their days are limited and that to make the America, at the margin, as Whiter as is possible, and to do so they need the broadest possible net cast based on little more than racial/ethnic density:
What’s limiting them is that for as much selection as there is on politics, information sources, and social networks into the individual agents on the ground, their aren’t enough who actually want to maximize thecruelty and racial homogeneity. Most, I strongly suspect, just want to do their jobs. Many, I hope, no doubt do buy the false narratives of immigrant criminality, but those who mirror the darkest ambitions are probably (hopefully) too few in number to produce the outcomes desired by the architects of the current national travesty that shames us all.
So keep doing to the little things that keep the false narrives from becoming folk wisdom. The conversations across weak social ties that run counter to the fear-mongering and deception. Every agent and field officer who, consciously or unconsciously, finds themselves doubting the wholesale slandering of immigrants and racial groups is more sand in the gears slowing a machine that is on borrowed political time. Every day lost is a day won. Every TACO a month. Every court case a quarter. Just keep slowing it down.
Economist Writing Every Day 