: Meet your new national police force – CNN What Matters
: Meet your new national police force
By Zackary B. Wolf
The agency of mask-wearing officers who aren’t afraid to smash windows, detain lawmakers and pluck nonviolent undocumented immigrants off the street is about to become the best-funded federal police force.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already been acting with impunity during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Get used to ICE
Video of agents on horseback and in armored personnel vehicles in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles is striking both for its demonstration of militarized power and for the total inability of the city’s Mayor Karen Bass to do anything about it.
“They need to leave and they need to leave right now,” she told reporters on the scene Monday.
But Trump administration officials feel no need to listen to local authorities in a city like Los Angeles.
“Better get used to us now, because this going to be normal very soon,” El Centro Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News on Monday, responding to Bass.
That new normal may come as a shock to Americans unused to a federal national police force operating inside the country.
The megabill Trump signed last week will elevate ICE in the American consciousness and on American streets.
A flood of cash
ICE will have more funding in the coming years than any other federal law enforcement agency, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at pro-immigrant American Immigration Council.
The new law allocates $75 billion for ICE through 2029 to order as many as 10,000 new agents and to build detention facilities for more than 100,000 additional people.
“It makes ICE a higher-funded law enforcement agency than the entire FBI, ATF, DEA, US Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined,” Reichlin-Melnick explained, after averaging that $75 billion across the next four years, more than doubling ICE’s budget in each of those years.
A new part of American life
With all that money and the OK to hire new agents, ICE will become even more visible.
“Most people in the United States are going to experience immigration enforcement for the first time in their lives,” predicted David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
The spectacle will be the point
The future Bier foresees looks like this:
“US citizens being interrogated on the streets about their citizenships; ICE agents in apartment buildings knocking down doors; National Guard troops on the streets blocking traffic. At your workplace, your home, your neighborhood, your park, in a very visible way and intentionally so,” he said.
Making raids and actions as visible as possible may be designed to scare immigrants out of the country and deter anyone who might otherwise come.
Bier also anticipates a “mad dash to spend all of this money in the next three years,” before the next presidential election.
No longer primarily targeting violent criminals
Already, the pace and intensity of ICE’s actions have increased.
There was a major spike in the number of ICE arrests in June, to more than 34,000, according to data compiled by the Syracuse University immigration researcher Austin Kocher. At the same time, the number of detentions has risen to more than 50,000.
The profile of the detained population has also changed, according to Kocher. When Trump took office, most detainees had a criminal conviction. Now, a third of detainees may have only a civil immigration violation.
And most of the arrests are taking place inside the country rather than at the border, according to Kocher.
Corners will have to be cut
As ICE begins a hiring and construction frenzy, look for mistakes to be made, according to Garrett Graff, who has written about a similar effort to quickly tighten border security with new border agents after 9/11. At that time, agencies, including ICE, were reorganized under the now-massive Department of Homeland Security.
“What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented,” he wrote in his Doomsday Scenario newsletter. “Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.”
There were ultimately stories about corruption and agents recruited by drug cartels.
Now there could be “a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January,” Graff wrote.
ICE agents operate outside of the normal judicial system
Immigration enforcement is not criminal law enforcement, which means agents don’t have to adhere to the standards of FBI agents or local law enforcement.
“You get an agency which is primarily oriented at non-citizens, but also authorized to arrest citizens at the same time for certain violations of law,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
ICE agents have also operated intentionally in anonymity, an adjustment for anyone who expects law enforcement to identify themselves.
The masks frequently worn by agents make ICE seem like the type of secret police that operates in authoritarian regimes. But they are apparently meant to protect agents from doxxing.
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, and their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” said ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons during a press conference in Boston in June.
Trump officials also seem ready to arrest local officials if it comes to that. Border czar Tom Homan said anyone, including local and state elected officials, could be arrested by ICE.
“You can protest if you want; you have that First Amendment right,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in June. “But when you cross the line of putting your hands on an ICE officer, impeding our enforcement operations, knowingly harboring and concealing illegal alien, that’s a crime.”
ICE will also begin looking to detain and deport people who committed no crime. Entering the US illegally is a civil offense, which is certainly deportable. But the Trump administration has also moved to remove the legal status of literally millions of migrants, according to Bier.
It has moved to revoke temporary protective status for multiple groups of migrants from Central and South America, including Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The Trump administration is now primed to turbocharge efforts to denaturalize, or take citizenship away from, people who immigrated legally to the US.
Bier said the administration will continue looking for new groups to deport.
“The idea that they will ever be satisfied with the number of deportations I think is just preposterous,” he said.
LA Times: ICE leaves cars abandoned, lawn mowers running when it arrests workers: A new push to secure property
"...One local police department has announced it will attempt to return abandoned property, such as vehicles and work equipment, to relatives of those detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. .."
Santa Ana police announced it would attempt to return abandoned property, such as vehicles and work equipment, to relatives of those detained by federal agents.
Trump sent his masked #ICE goons protected by "90 National Guard troops", "over a dozen military vehicles" including "17 Humvees, four tactical vehicles, two ambulances", & agents on horseback to LA's mostly empty MacArthur Park July 7th, a Monday, in the middle of the work day. "officers on horseback and soldiers in tactical gear walking past a playground as children at a summer day camp were rushed indoors so they would not be traumatized" is a crazy sentence to read. apnews.com/article/what-happen…
Billionaire Dies After Swallowing a Bee During Polo Match By Luis Prada June 17, 2025, 2:40pm What people are saying Commenters mourn the loss of "Comrade Bee," who died after being swallowed by a billionaire during a polo match. Many praise the bee's sacrifice, likening it to a heroic act against the wealthy elite. Others lament the loss of a valuable pollinator and express admiration for the bee's apparent targeting of the billionaire.
#Israeli plan for forced transfer of #Gaza’s population a blueprint for #crimes against humanity
#Israel’s defence minister laid out plans to force all #Palestinians in Gaza into a camp on ruins of #Rafah; scheme legal experts, academics described as blueprint for #CrimesAgainstHumanity
Palestinians would go through security screening before entering. Once inside they are not allowed to leave. #Prisons
Happy Hour News 🎵 "Only a nobody walks in L.A." 🎶 Whatever he’s having, I’ll have a double. (Does anyone think Possum Hollar believes this? I mean other than the 4th Reich will rule with an iron fist until the end of time.)
Happy Hour News 🎵 “Only a nobody walks in L.A.” 🎶 Whatever he’s having, I’ll have a double. (Does anyone think Possum Hollar believes this? I mean other than the 4th Reich will rule wit…
My maga b-i-l who grew up in Brooklyn, lives within commuting distance of NYC, and watches so much Fox that their "Breaking News Alert" graphic is permanently burned into the lower left corner of the tv screen, gets almost panic-stricken when my visiting husband and son head into Manhattan in broad daylight: "It's not safe! Don't get the subway! Don't walk anywhere!" So yes, can confirm.
This post by @aphyr I think really captures the staggering evil of a non-trivial swath of the LLM world right now. Perhaps they don't see themselves as evil, but what they are doing is deliberately undermining all social and cultural norms for ... what? A few extra sales? Burn the world to the ground for ... a few bucks?
I realize that we have many other Big Evils in the world, but when I say that the only winners with gen AI, along with blockchain, bitcoin, and all other recent VC-bloviated ilk is criminals and sociopaths, this is what I mean. What that says about VCs is up to you to determine.
Kyle is more introspective than I am here. What i see is the wholesale willing destruction of trust and society for... well, certainly nothing beneficial.
This is what I think of every time someone tells me "gen AI is the future". Perhaps it is, but that future is bleak and desolate. It is soulless and cruel and confidently stupid. It aspires to bland mediocrity.
Keep it. There is no "upside" that could ever justify this total obliteration of good in the world. Your talking parrot drips venom from it's beak with every word it speaks.
Just as Canter & Siegel contributed mightily* to the collapse of UseNet with the first real case of mass spam, and exploited a system of trust, that's what this is doing. Spray painting their vulgar spittle across the public square with hopes of garnering a few extra dimes.
* I was at Sprint at the time and remember the hammer that got dropped being "nuclear" by the standards of the time. Now it's quaint. In retrospect, we should have done so much more, but I don't think anyone imagined it would ever get THIS bad. And for as bad as you think it is, it's 1,000,000x worse than that.
Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
Why do judges not punish lawyers who blatantly lie? Because the legal profession protects its own and doesn't give a damn how much credibility it forfeits in the process? wired.com/story/elon-musk-comp…
Most states (and the Feds) impose an obligation of candor on attorneys. It is clear to you and to me that the musk-lawyers are not only failing to meet that obligation, but are actively trying to do the opposite by misdirecting and deceiving the court. A judge ought to impose contempt or sanctions. A state bar ought to consider longer term sanctions, such as disbarment.
The great majority of lawyers that I have met are ethical and abide by their professional obligations.
Some do not.
And the crew of maga lawyer seem to contain have an extraordinary percentage of those who not only do not abide those obligations but act in open flaunting of those obligations.
The disease of Roy Cohn, so strong in FFOTUS, is coupled, in the land of maga, with bondi-lying, john-eastman-scholasticism, and thomas/alito fantasies of "natural law" and religion as superior parts of our legal system.
O Kremlin declarou-se chocado com a morte do ex-ministro russo do Transporte, Roman Starovoit, de 53 anos, cujo corpo foi encontrado morto nos arredores de
Two Horses in a Meadow near a Gate, Paulus Potter, 1649 Two horses stand on a little rise before a sweeping meadow landscape with cattle. The town of Delft is visible in the distance. The animals’ fluttering tails and manes, and the low-lying clouds, signal that the weather is raw and windy. Potter enhances the liveliness of the depiction by placing the grey horse before a dark boscage and the chestnut horse before a light, cloud-filled sky.
Satellite observation of the imbalance between incoming and outgoing radiation in the atmosphere, which causes global warming, shows growth beyond what climate models have predicted.
It's day 4 of my 10 day video challenge! No one answered yesterday's question, so the prize has rolled over. Be the fist to answer today's question and win 50% off an item of your choice from Unstoppable Spirit Creations !
And please come out to see us at the markets this Saturday. I'll be at the Devon downtown market and Burgandy will be at the Tails on the Trails market in St. Albert.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
“In a sane world, the Israeli government’s slaughter of nearly 80 helpless Palestinians in a single day using American weapons would be major news and members of Congress would treat Benjamin Netanyahu like Hannibal Lecter. Instead, Israel’s daily killing machine is largely ignored while Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal, walks freely on Capitol Hill.”
A friend of mine has a parent with Alzheimer’s, and they’ve had to walk them through problems and hiccups related to their tablet, which naturally has problems and hiccups because that’s how it is with complex #technology.
And it got me thinking:
Whatever happened to videophones? Like, just phones, but with video, that does nothing else? For audio communications, we had wired phones, cordless phones, and super-basic cell phones that did ONE JOB (making voice calls) and did it extremely reliably, with no failure modes more complicated than “it’s physically broken, buy another one”. Why don’t we have the equivalent of that simple appliance, but for VIDEO CALLING?
My dad has a smartphone solely to make video calls with family, and because of that he has to deal with all the complexity associated with a general-purpose computing device, which he does not need.
The barrier of entry into video calling is too high. We need a single-use appliance.
This year we’ve seen Mariposa lilies. They don’t always bloom but they grow from bulbs that can live for over 30 years. Hard to grow in a garden, I’m told.
The bulbs were once a staple in the diet of many indigenous people in this part of North America. #bloomscrolling
This feels like it is getting out of hand. At what point does it stop being silly? Not only do I have fungi and plants, but now also a duck? Is this a normal pupation? Do I need a referral to see a professional caterpillar?
I don't mind being an ecosystem, but they're in my dreams now too. Are gestalt beings entitled to any sort of inter-node boundaries?
I just keep finding new specimens everywhere. I suppose biodiversity is a good thing. At least some of them grow eyes and seem to be able to track novel things happening. I'm not really sure what I'm pupating into? But I feel a duty to see it through. For science!
And also to figure out how to not harm my friends with pollen allergies. That's important to me.
Also, I hit my character limit with the alt text so here's the first part of it:
A mirror selfie of this enby wearing a cropped tank. You can see one part of their torso tattoo and some of the features of their arm tattoo. They're wearing their non-binary pendant as well as a necklace with a hoop supporting various short dangling chains that end in a sharp point. Their curly hair has deteriorated to waves as new plants and fungi have grown in.
The glow-in-the-dark blue duck is on their right side now, supervised by a non-googly-eyed toadstool. There are two additional toadstools with googly eyes looking at the viewer on either side of the brunette haired head. You see a pink clover on one side and a spring beauty on the other. In the center there is a daisy facing forward-ish, and a pink and blue leafed plant with googly eyes also staring into the soul of the viewer. A new addition is a pink-capped toadstool emerging sideways from underneath the hair around temple height.
Behind their shoulder, on the right of the frame, you see fronds of a blue and pink plant of some sort growing into view. Lower on the collar of the top is a plant with small green leaves and a bulbous fruit of an orange-red coloration. It looks like it might burst with fire if shit with an arrow. A red and yellow leafed plant is emerging from the upper part of the breast from behind their top. It has gained a googly eye on one of the leaves that is now trained on the viewer. Immediately above this is a new plant emerging. Its leaves turn white as the tip of the stem ends in a daffodil-like pattern.
Attached: 1 image
I was foolish to feel it was getting out of hand last time: https://lgbtqia.space/@h3mmy/114775241546992596
:blobcat_thisisfine:
#NonBinary #Mushroom #Selfie #SillySaturday #GooglyEyes #GoodBadScience #ContemplatingPupation
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MegatronicThronBanks
in reply to Davey • • •Ben Zanin
in reply to MegatronicThronBanks • • •@megatronicthronbanks I don't know, I'm seeing corroboration from a couple of sources. Haven't tracked back to primaries though, to be fair.
seattletimes.com/nation-world/…
people.com/prince-william-frie…
vice.com/en/article/billionair…
Billionaire Dies After Swallowing a Bee During Polo Match
Luis Prada (VICE):sparkles_bisexual: :BlobCat_Kirby: :BlobCat_KindaSus: x_cyanide_x :A_BlobCat_CozyWave: :A_BlobCat_Googly_Party: :sparkles_bisexual:
in reply to MegatronicThronBanks • • •It’s actually true
vice.com/en/article/billionair…
metro.co.uk/2025/06/13/billion…
Sunjay Kapur, billionaire who played polo with Prince William, dies 'after swallowing bee during match'
Prince William (Metro)Aral Balkan
in reply to Davey • • •Billionaire Dies After Swallowing a Bee During Polo Match
Luis Prada (VICE)Aral Balkan
in reply to Davey • • •Alt text (full text):
Billionaire Dies After
Swallowing a Bee
During Polo Match
By Luis Prada
June 17, 2025, 2:40pm
What people are saying
Commenters mourn the loss of "Comrade Bee," who died after being swallowed by a billionaire during a polo match. Many praise the bee's sacrifice, likening it to a heroic act against the wealthy elite. Others lament the loss of a valuable pollinator and express admiration for the bee's apparent targeting of the billionaire.
Davey
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Davey • • •Calamitous ORTBO
in reply to Davey • • •