To the extent that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ever enjoyed mainstream public support, those attitudes are starting to evaporate. The latest Economist/YouGov poll, for example, found that a 47% plurality of the public believes ICE is making Americans less safe, while a 46% plurality thinks ICE should be abolished altogether.
This dovetailed with a recent Quinnipiac poll that found 57% of Americans disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws.
Donald Trump is apparently aware of these attitudes, and he has some ideas about how to turn them around. Do the ideas involve improved training and restrained tactics? No, as far as the president is concerned, ICE simply has a public relations problem.
The president published a post to his social media platform on Tuesday:
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system. They are saving many innocent lives! … Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW. The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators!
The obvious problem with messages like this is that Trump is peddling assertions that are entirely fictional. The people protesting ICE tactics in Minnesota, for example, are not “highly paid troublemakers.” For that matter, the proposition that ICE agents are only capturing “violent criminals” is belied by the statistics that show most of its targets do not have criminal records.
But the less obvious problem is the one that the president doesn’t appear to understand on a conceptual level. To hear Trump tell it, when the Department of Homeland Security and ICE “start talking” about their work, the American public will learn what agents have been up to and be duly impressed.
In reality, the American public already knows what ICE agents have been up to. That’s the problem.
To conclude that the agency is struggling with a public relations crisis is to overlook the inconvenient fact that DHS and ICE are guided by the wrong policies, not the wrong talking points.
At issue are masked, heavily armed federal agents acting with impunity, terrorizing communities, harassing and detaining citizens and noncitizens alike, while racially profiling its victims. DHS leaders such as Kristi Noem and Tricia McLaughlin have invested all kinds of time and effort doing exactly what the president has recommended, taking their case to the American people, but this hasn’t worked: The American mainstream is rightly repulsed by what it’s seen and learned about ICE tactics. In a New York Times opinion piece, writer Radley Balko concluded, “We can still stop these abuses of power, but we need to be clear about what we’re facing. This is no longer a conversation about law enforcement or immigration policy. This is about authoritarianism.” The sooner the president comes to terms with the failures of his administration’s policies and stops pitching a new PR strategy, the safer the public will be.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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