For the first fifty years of Bill’s life, ICE didn’t exist.
We can definitely abolish ICE.— Emily Farris (@emayfarris.bsky.social) May 6, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Something that I think is important, and we'll need to watch this, especially if they pass a huge increase to ICE/CBP's personnel budget, is how able they actually are to hire.
One of the quiet things that happened in Trump's first term was ICE/CBP got so flash-point-y that the jobs were unpopular.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Basically: it was really hard to recruit. The jobs are physical, law enforcement, pay is government pay, and if you're running around doing things like cutting pensions to give billionaires tax breaks, you're taking some of the main reasons people do government work.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM
But it's also because ICE/CBP become really messy politically and culturally. A lot of people really don't want to work in a mass deportation agency/gestapo. Positions are funded but just.. stay open.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM
You say "Ah hah, but what about contractors?" and sure, you can give Blackwater a bunch of money I guess, but those actors have limited capacity as well. The size and scope of what we're talking about here is going to require tens of thousands of new employees.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM
It should also be noted that local PDs are also having a pain of a time recruiting even as the past 8 years saw them stuffed to the gills with cash and offering truly astounding sign on bonuses and pay.
— Cuddles_the_destroyer (@cuddlessmash.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 1:32 PM
when I was looking for work every job fair was filled with PDs in a 5 hour drive radius offering a 6 figure salary plus like 30k sign ons and they were clearly getting minimal bites.
— Cuddles_the_destroyer (@cuddlessmash.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Elizabelle
I am pondering how happy I am that you are back posting, AL. Continue to feel stronger!!
Suzanne
Nobody wants to work anymore!
Can’t say I blame them, I don’t want that job, either.
bbleh
Perhaps an unintended side “benefit” of the now-imminent Trump Recession. Higher prices, higher unemployment, general stagflation = more people looking for jobs that pay well, even without long-term benefits. Add a heavy dose of kulturkampf-based resentment and voila, goon squads.
Be cool if every other dating-app profile included “ICE swipe left” or something like that…
tobie
@bbleh: if no one has real, tax-paying jobs any longer, and the GDP is lagging, and the Soc Sec trust fund is hollowed out for tax breaks, how will ICE pay its workers? I feel like I’m living in some bizarro world in which economic realities no longer apply.
schrodingers_cat
Before ICE there was the INS and INS had an enforcement arm and it also dealt with admin stuff. After 9/11 INS was broken into 2 agencies USCIS and ICE.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I watched this happen in Flyover Country for decades: build prisons in the middle of nowhere because everybody who remains there will lap up the jobs. It’s a) a job, and b) a job with benefits.
I usta say back in Misery that the state motto was “Build Prisons, Not Schools” but it sure as hell could have applied to red rurl KS, IA and NE.
It’s all about seemingly replacing a hollowed out rurl ‘Murka from a manufacturing standpoint but now, Prisons!.
The usual clueless people on the nominal left who poo-poo the ability of red states to pull this off don’t actually live in those areas or have lived in those areas, I have and know them well. You’d be surprised, particularly if they disperse the facilities not unlike how DoD disperses manufacturing of boondoggles like the F-35. They’ll take those jobs.
Kent
If we can abolish USAID through a simple EO then we can do the same thing with ICE.
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat: INS was under DOJ — DHS / ICE created in the wake of 9-11 that is problematic.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: And if it’s like Pennsylvania was (and maybe still is, I’ll have to check) even thought those prisinors can’t vote THEY ARE COUNTED as residents at the prison locality for apportionment of State Senatorial and House districts and US House districts too! So it’s a win-win for the rethugs in rural areas!
Jackie
@Suzanne:
You’d think the MAGAts would jump at the chance to help deport “illegals!”
JerseyBeard
I would love some intrepid reporter to ask the Commandant of the Marine Corps how he feels about May 8th being celebrated as the day we won World War 2.
Tim C
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeingEvilSucks
sab
@tobie: Borrowing with our international reserve currency, of course.
schrodingers_cat
@Anyway: Wasn’t it one of the recommendations of the 9/11 commision.
dnfree
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I was on our local school board in the late 1990s. Dick Durbin, much younger then, spoke at the Illinois school board conference. He very eloquently said that at the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 20th century, the United States was building high schools, all around the country. At the turn of the 21st century, he said, we were building prisons.
tobie
@sab: Thanks. That makes sense in a MAGA way. Blow up the natl debt to fund an American paramilitary force. Time to lose myself in a mystery to forget this disaster for a while.
Suzanne
@Jackie: Eh. If ICE really has a shortage and they need more people to work, they can raise their compensation.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): Apparently counting Prisoners as residents of the place where they are incarcerated has stopped in PA as of Aug 2021. Per Whyy.org
Also incarcerated persons with only misdemeanor convictions and persons in pretrial detentions can vote! But very few do because of lack of or mis-information.
Gin & Tonic
I have to echo that tweet or skeet or whatever about PD’s having a bitch of a time recruiting. I’m on the budget and finance committee for my little town, and this is a common refrain among police departments statewide. They just can’t find qualified candidates at the salaries they’re able to pay.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Sure seems like it would be a rather crappy job.
While in the USN I worked in the Shore Patrol for 2 months. Not near as much fun as it sounds and it didn’t sound like fun when I was informed about it. It was worse.
Geminid
Three judges on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals just ordered that Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk be returned to Vermont, where requests for bail and other relief can be heard by federal District Court Judge William Sessions. He’s already scheduled a bail hearing for Friday, but the 2nd Circuit judges apparently gave the government a week to comply with its order.
Ozturk was snatched off a Somerville, Mass. street on March 25. The video of the federal agents’ discreditable treatment of her was widely circulated, including in her native Turkiye. Ozturk was taken to Vermont before being transferred to a prison near Basile, Louisiana which is how the Vermont federal court ended up with jurisdiction.
Jay
@Suzanne:
People don’t want those jobs. They pay on average $30hr in places where the going rate is $7.95, as high as $39hr plus pensions and benefits.
p.a.
The kind of people who will take those jobs are the kind of people you don’t want taking those jobs. The people at school voted most likely to push a kid in a wheelchair down a stairwell.
Suzanne
@Ruckus: @Jay: Agree that these jobs sound bad and I wouldn’t want to do it. But, like, if they really need people…. they can compete in the labor market. The MAGA freaks are assuring me that everyone wants to go work in factories doing manual labor and pass their jobs down to their children and grandchildren. Maybe ICE can raise their pay to entice people away from that paradise.
Suzanne
@Gin & Tonic: So I have a couple of relatives who work for large general contractors. They tell me that they are having a very difficult time recruiting workers for their job sites, and they said that their biggest hurdle is drug testing. Even where weed is legal, one can’t be impaired on a job site and thus their insurance companies require them to pass.
Mai Naem mobile
This thread has a real deja vu quality to it as in from TFG 1.0 era. I have extended family who live in the UK, Canada and Australia who are just making jokes about this country. It’s just really embarrassing. I know that’s the most important issue but that’s the way this country is now viewed. It’s like a really bad combo reality show/hispanic novella. BTW I have Canadian cousins who vacation in the US annually to get out of the cold . They aren’t doing it this year. That’s money that will not come here. Multiply that by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.
Jay
@Suzanne:
$113,880 with out OT, plus full benefits and a pension, in areas where $36,000 is the at best the norm. Gun, radio, car, get to push people around and shout “respect my Authority!!!!” at everybody.
And they can’t hire people.
Jackie
O/T But…
Then this:
And then… posted on X:
What the hell hold does Loomer have over FFOTUS? She’s persuaded him to fire administrative staff from DOD and now this?
Jay
@Mai Naem mobile:
Canadian tourism is only worth $20.5 billion dollars a year.
Your “Very Stable Genius” told Carney, “that’s okay, we don’t do much trade with Canada”.
Funny that.
We are your largest trade partner, Mexico is second, China is a far third.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
maybe ?
Yet, the people of Leavenworth Kansas do not want ICE to reopen the closed* for profit prison that is there now. Leavenworth currently, and for a long time now, houses a large military prison
* because it was a hellhole.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Kent: with this Supreme Court? No doubt, abolishing ICE will be considered a major question and even a law specifically ending ICE will be “textually” interpreted to mean keeping ICE forever.
Jay
@Jackie:
Word is, as Melanoma is staying far, far away, that Loomer is DJTdiot’s side piece.
Jackie
@Jay: That was the rumor right around the million years ago FFOTUS/Harris debate, then she (Loomer) disappeared from the limelight, and Melania sort of resurfaced. Loomer’s been out of the limelight since then until the past month when she got FFOTUS’s ear again, starting with the DOD firings. Coincidentally, Melania seems to have disappeared again.
Oh, speaking of Melania:
Soprano2
Our police department has been 55-60 people short of where they want to be on personnel for a long time. This is a conservative area where people fanatically support the police and they still can’t hire people.
RevRick
Off topic, but I just watched a Reel by Leigh McGowan aka Politics Girl where she talks about one of Trump’s latest executive orders that essentially halted the federal government’s enforcement of equality in credit law. The laws passed in the 1970s forbade discrimination by race, sex, religion, and other categories with regard to credit, mortgage and other financial instruments. This EO, with an Orwellian title, directs the federal government to stop bothering banks and other financial institutions about such matters.
The aim, as McGowan points out comes directly from Project 2025, is to take away women’s financial freedom and power and drive them back into the kitchen and pop out babies.
Jacel
@schrodingers_cat: As I recall one of the strong recommendations after 9/11 (and perhaps the earlier investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) was for the CIA and FBI to communicate better with each other, and perhaps be part of the same government organization. Instead, the GWB-era response was to pull the enforcement muscle to of all the other departments and create the DHS out of that aggregation detached from their original missions. Not the same thing at all. ICE especially and a number of DHS components should be reconstituted.
prostratedragon
Moment of Zen: “Practice”
LAC
Oh, golly gee whizzers … is it alright to use the word ‘abolish” against the venerated ICE?
🙄
Deputinize America
I’m still in Italy (left home sometime the last week in April). Had three guides pretty much spit as they decried fascist architecture, that were disdainful of everything Mussolini did. Yesterday’s private guide took us to Herculaneum and Pompeii (with a delightful lunch at a winery on the slopes of Vesuvius) and offered this observation: “about Trump, he is human, and normal biology will take over soon. It is bad, but there is no replacement and you will be done with him.”
NotMax
@LAC
Venerated by whom?
The ghost of Torquemada?
Baud
International weather.
Manyakitty
@Baud: kind of a cross between balloon juice after dark and balloon juice before dawn. Emphasis on BALLOONS. Heh.
NotMax
Mmm. Special din-din for no particular occasion.
Bay scallops* poached in dry vermouth and butter over linguine aglio e olio.
In my happy pace tonight.
*price too attractive to pass up, have been patiently biding their time in freezer for over a month
Baud
Mini fallout from the Australian election. Looks like the Greens leader lost his seat to Labor.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: Oooo, that sounds delish! I love scallops, and it’ll be scalloping season soon!
Baud
Apropos of Suzanne’s comment yesterday, the new meaning of rawdogging.
prostratedragon
World Central Kitchen:
Princess
@Jackie: If Melania single handedly kills the role of First Lady, I will be eternally grateful to her. The executive branch is already too much like a court, and more so under Trump. Ending that role is a small step in the right direction.
I was so grateful to vote in Canada’s last election to NOT know anything about his wife beyond her name — not her job or her favourite recipe or if the family went to church or where or the names or ages or pastimes of their children. I recommend it.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: let’s expand on that phrase “qualified candidates” for a bit, because it’s not just the money. They have to pass drug tests, polygraph tests, background checks, physicals and then manage to pass the physical qualifications for running, climbing, lifting, etc., have multiple references, and pass a psychological profile test and interview to even be considered for admission to a police academy in any decent sized city or town. In many places visible tattoos are disqualifying, as is facial hair. My son’s class at the academy lost new recruits every day the first few weeks of training, and that was after they had survived the gauntlet of qualifying in the first place.
Baud
@Princess:
I think the last election confirmed that American voters want their politicians to entertain them more than they want policies that strengthen the country.
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!):
It looks like this is specifically for the PA state legislature. IIRC, they have to use the Census counts for the U.S. Congressional districts. And the Census counts everyone where they’re actually staying when the Census comes through and counts people.
It’s been >20 years since I worked on this stuff, but IIRC, it’s the law. If you were in a prison in March and April of 2020, that’s where you got counted for Federal apportionment and redistricting purposes, not at the place where you lived before you got thrown in the slammer.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
In the “everything reminds me of a song” category, I now have Simon & Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory” going through my head:
But I, I work in his factory
and I curse this life I’m livin’ and I curse my poverty
Yeah, they’ll love all those non-union factory jobs.
satby
@Baud: I will never read that and not think the old meaning, plus ick.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize America: Trump’s parents were fairly long-lived and despite being surrounded by quacks, he does still have access to the best medical care in America. Robert Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe into his 90s. If Trump lives to be 100 like Jimmy Carter, he could be dictator of the US until 2037, by which point most of us may be dead as a consequence.
MagdaInBlack
@Betty Cracker: One of my favorite restaurants in Greektown (Chicago) has rooftop dining in the summer. Everything they serve “up there” is charcoal grilled. THAT is where I discovered scallops are NOT tiny little chewy eraser type things. =-)
Baud
Baud
Reddit scuttlebutt is that Trump will announce a trade deal with UK today.
Some confusion because apparently UK is one of the few countries we have a trade surplus with.
Princess
@Baud: But maybe not that way? I’m not convinced Walz’s hotdish or cute kid or wife or Harris’s husband’s law career or cute speech or her recipes moved a single vote, and I think that stuff is net bad (though I know supporters eat it up). But I dunno how to entertain the voters, or at least how Democrats can do that effectively. Gladiatorial combat? Roller derby? When I think of it, Trump gives very little of himself or his family to us, really. Every thing we get from him is performance and surface. Democrats give us vulnerability; a sense we know them as they really are. I think it is breeding contempt beyond the base.
Baud
@Princess:
Could be. People seem less tolerant of dealing constructively with the complexity of people. Everything is memeified.
sab
@Princess: That is a very interesting take on things
ETA I think you have made an important comment.
Chris T.
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, but: his siblings have died off younger, he has a crap diet, he’s obviously suffered some sort of TIAs and/or strokes, and he abuses stimulants. While I still suspect Shady Vance might pass him a poisoned “hamberder” at some point, one way or another he’s going to expire soon.
Librettist
@Princess:
Run George Clooney. He’s got hot takes, a fading career, part time wife… and a Q rating.
Librettist
The rural American labor force has demographic issues. This is fact. It’s older and more educated than “throw ’em some prison and assembly line jobs” dumb ass takes.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jackie: it’s more that many of the MAGA types can’t meet the physical standards for the job and/or pass background checks
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: I would agree with that; I work onsite in a drug-free facility, and I really notice the smell of weed from people and cars when I am out running errands as opposed to being at work.