Diabolical Lies - ICE is a Public Jobs Program for Losers

00:00:00.520 Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Jack Boot Barbie and her public jobs

00:00:05.400 program for losers, the Copaganda Industrial Complex, the completely real ICE Office of

00:00:11.240 Television and Motion Pictures, the War on Terror again somehow, and Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Laquan 0.94

00:00:17.380 McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Courtney Harris, Freddie Gray,

00:00:21.900 Sandra Bland, Philanica Steele, Alton Sterling, Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,

00:00:25.980 Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, and every other American civilian summarily executed by an

00:00:31.540 armed agent of the state in the name of public safety.

00:00:34.580 Yeesh, rest in power, my God. 0.99

00:00:37.320 Yeah, Carol always has, like, the ideas for all the fun episodes where she shows up and

00:00:41.160 she's like, we're going to talk about the gay hockey show, and then I come in and I'm 1.00

00:00:44.680 like, shut up, everybody. 1.00

00:00:46.700 Buns over. 1.00

00:00:47.880 We're talking about the police state today.

00:00:50.400 Well, in my defense, Luigi Mangione was also a thirst trap side door into the terrorist

00:00:57.200 conversation. So I'll be curious to see what hotties we're talking about today.

00:01:01.620 So, Carol, before we get started today, do you want to give an update on our Q1 redistribution?

00:01:08.140 Yes, we have decided to make an executive decision and to donate 100% of our redistributions for

00:01:13.420 quarter one to ICE-related organizations. We're going to focus specifically on ones in Minneapolis,

00:01:19.340 but also look at some federal ones as well.

00:01:22.000 And we will give confirmation to you guys

00:01:24.220 which organizations those are

00:01:25.560 once we reach out to them

00:01:26.960 and confirm that we can wire the funds. 0.56

00:01:28.960 We also want to celebrate our Minneapolis liars

00:01:30.900 who have been creating resource bags

00:01:33.360 and working on the ground.

00:01:34.380 And we are so blown away

00:01:35.960 by the work that you guys are doing

00:01:37.120 and want to continue supporting you

00:01:38.440 however we can.

00:01:40.100 Yeah, we are going to set aside

00:01:41.140 a little bit of money 0.99

00:01:42.000 to find Christy Nome a new injector

00:01:44.020 as just part of our ICE-related organizations.

00:01:46.680 As part of our charitable work. 1.00

00:01:49.520 If we have to look at her lying bitch face every week, 1.00

00:01:53.440 I at least don't want to be offended by the quality of her filler, okay? 1.00

00:01:58.040 Her lying bitch face. 1.00

00:01:59.520 At all of the internalized misogyny in my body, 1.00

00:02:03.460 I just unleashed like a fire hose on Kristi Noem. 0.97

00:02:06.000 Well, she deserves it.

00:02:08.340 Okay, let's do it.

00:02:10.360 Ice very much has a, sometimes to make a tomlet, 0.60

00:02:14.040 you have to break a few Greggs approach to force where the Tomlet is a ethnostate and breaking 0.68

00:02:20.060 Greggs means tear gassing children. So I mean, I, today's going to be fun. It's really what I'm 0.99

00:02:27.760 trying to say. So to give away my thought process a little bit up front here, I think that talking

00:02:34.580 about ICE, like it is a story about immigration actually feels like a little bit of a red herring

00:02:41.440 to me. This is less about immigration or the legality, you know, therein, and more about our

00:02:48.420 comfort and complacency with the militarization of law enforcement and mass incarceration in this

00:02:54.280 country. So today, I want to have a conversation about three things. Number one, how media is used

00:03:02.840 to manufacture consent, how it has traditionally been used to manufacture consent, and how new

00:03:07.420 media might actually be changing that. Number two, where individual identity does and does not matter

00:03:13.800 when it comes to state violence. Number three, what public safety and order really mean and what

00:03:20.660 these concepts are used to justify. And I lied, there is a fourth thing. It's how we can contextualize

00:03:26.220 what we are experiencing now as just another chapter in the same story that's been unfolding

00:03:31.480 for the last 250-odd years.

00:03:35.020 I feel like making a list and then saying,

00:03:37.120 I lied, there is a fourth thing,

00:03:38.600 is like a motto for this podcast.

00:03:43.640 Okay, so obviously we are here today

00:03:46.700 because almost five years to the day

00:03:49.120 from the insurrection at the Capitol,

00:03:51.600 an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross

00:03:53.680 shot and killed a woman named Renee Good.

00:03:56.900 And we know a lot about this encounter

00:03:59.340 because it was filmed from nearly every angle.

00:04:02.580 We know that one agent is telling her to drive away

00:04:06.220 while the other is telling her to get out of her car.

00:04:09.060 We know that the agent who kills Renee

00:04:11.160 is walking around the back of her car

00:04:13.500 filming, holding his phone in his right hand.

00:04:16.720 We know that her wife, Becca,

00:04:18.140 is filming the agent who ultimately kills her.

00:04:20.700 And right before he shoots Renee,

00:04:22.840 Becca's kind of mouthing off to him

00:04:24.420 and making it clear that she is not afraid of him.

00:04:27.540 We know that after Becca calls him big boy, we can now see his shadow in Renee's car door,

00:04:33.420 and we can see him switch his phone from his right hand to his left hand as he begins to

00:04:38.560 reach for his weapon and then steps in front of the car. We know that the last words Renee Goods

00:04:45.000 said were, it's okay, dude, I'm not mad at you. We know Renee was shot at least three times in the

00:04:51.080 head and chest, and we know that as her car careened away that Jonathan Ross or another 1.00

00:04:55.840 agent nearby muttered under his breath, fucking bitch. There was a lot that felt familiar to me 1.00

00:05:03.040 about this video. It felt like so many videos of this nature that I have seen before in which you

00:05:09.400 are airdropped into the middle of an already tense situation where usually several officers

00:05:16.780 often acting aggressively are descending upon a single individual. And there is an immediate

00:05:23.500 sense of foreboding because you know that you are about to witness something horrifying. There's

00:05:28.620 usually yelling. There's usually authoritative sounding orders being barked, sometimes

00:05:32.900 contradictory. And before long, you either hear or see gunshots or you see someone getting their

00:05:38.540 neck kneeled on or their face pressed into the pavement to the sound of onlookers screaming.

00:05:44.740 But there was something very different about this video than most of the videos of this nature

00:05:50.020 that we see. Do you know what that is?

00:05:52.180 Uh, Renee Good is a white woman? 1.00

00:05:54.260 That's right. The person being killed in these types of viral law enforcement murders are usually 1.00

00:05:59.900 Black men. And, of course, this happened in Minneapolis, about a mile from where George 0.93

00:06:04.900 Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. So, after this happens, of course, our fearless leaders,

00:06:10.680 they're shocked, they're horrified, they condemn this agent immediately, they pledge to investigate 1.00

00:06:15.980 the killer who called his victim a fucking bitch after shooting her on film oh sorry wait no no 0.99

00:06:22.620 they did what law enforcement often does when it kills somebody which is uh promptly criminalizes 1.00

00:06:27.200 the victim and then lies about the circumstances wait really quickly i don't know if you've seen

00:06:32.360 this but i was dying i there were a few like statements by democrat leaders where they like

00:06:36.940 really showed you know some force like i think they're like stop i said stop literally jacob 0.95

00:06:44.160 fray who is i think the mayor of minneapolis made a big show of saying get the fuck out to ice 0.92

00:06:48.400 and i watched the funniest tiktok where i was making fun of democrats being like 0.99

00:06:51.760 fuck damn and like looking around waiting for everyone to be like super impressed that they're 1.00

00:06:58.600 swearing now like wow you must really you guys better get the fuck out and just like waiting 1.00

00:07:04.360 for something to happen oh they're serious now yeah it's pretty when you went at first i was 0.99

00:07:10.380 moved, I was like, wow, he swore. And then I was like, oh, that actually doesn't do anything for

00:07:14.220 anyone. So. Okay. I'm going to have you read from the truth that Trump posted in the aftermath of

00:07:20.700 Renee's murder. Okay. And as a reminder, my only job today is to try to provide occasional

00:07:26.480 comedic insight and timing for this otherwise extremely sobering conversation about America.

00:07:33.440 It's very clever what he did with Truth Social, that he's posting truths.

00:07:36.940 like that's so perfect for a conspiracy theorist we don't talk about that enough the man's got

00:07:41.840 vision okay this is a truth that he posted the reason these incidents are happening is because

00:07:47.640 the radical left is threatening assaulting and targeting our law enforcement officers and ICE

00:07:53.340 agents on a daily basis they are just trying to do the job of making America safe all caps we need

00:07:59.940 to stand by and protect our law enforcement officers from this radical left movement of

00:08:04.820 violence, and hate. All of those letters were capitalized as well.

00:08:07.960 I love the title case. It's amazing. If Jonathan Ross could read, he would have loved that truth.

00:08:17.720 So in the press conference following Good's murder, you know, the clown show continues,

00:08:23.680 Noam said, and again, this is her comment on the murder of a U.S. citizen, right? That quote.

00:08:29.740 Christy Noam?

00:08:30.300 Yeah. Anyone who is a citizen of this country or is here legally has nothing to fear.

00:08:37.280 Okay? In her statement about the dead U.S. citizen, she says, U.S. citizens have nothing to fear.

00:08:46.280 Kavanaugh said something very similar last year when the Supreme Court ruled that immigration

00:08:50.260 agents in L.A. were allowed to use race as a consideration during sweeps that, quote,

00:08:54.680 if the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully

00:09:00.240 in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. This is not true.

00:09:08.340 We are going to talk about specific examples today, but there is one in particular that I

00:09:12.540 want to highlight. The case of Leonardo Garcia Venegas, who was working at a construction site

00:09:17.980 in Alabama and had two experiences with ICE. The first was violent. He was thrown to the ground,

00:09:24.800 and then the second time he encountered them, it was just like more of a chit-chat in a

00:09:29.540 construction site that he was working on. But both times, he supplied his government-issued

00:09:35.020 real ID to be like, here's my Alabama ID. And both times, they were like, seems fake.

00:09:41.400 he was detained four days both times. Now, the government is, of course, not tracking how often

00:09:49.000 immigration agents detain American citizens, because why would they? But ProPublica's reporting

00:09:54.300 has kept track. They found 170 instances in the first nine months, which means on average an

00:10:02.520 American citizen is being illegally detained every 36 hours. And we have to assume that those are low

00:10:08.300 numbers. Right. That's just the ones we know about. So far, this includes 20 children, two of whom

00:10:14.080 had cancer. Four were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to an

00:10:19.700 attorney until their own congresswoman intervened on their behalf. So it is simply a fantasy that

00:10:28.660 your legal status in this country matters at all right now to these agents or to the immigration

00:10:35.160 system writ large. Yeah. Good wasn't the first U.S. citizen shot by ICE under extremely egregious

00:10:42.440 circumstances. If you will, please read. When CBP agents shot Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old

00:10:50.640 school teacher and U.S. citizen, also in Chicago, they labeled her a domestic terrorist and charged

00:10:56.180 her with ramming a federal law enforcement officer. We know now that the agent, Charles

00:11:01.440 Exum, rammed her vehicle, jumped out with his gun drawn, and said, do something, bitch, before 1.00

00:11:07.340 shooting her five times. The DHS lies were so egregious, and Exum didn't help their case by 1.00

00:11:12.940 bragging about it in text messages that the prosecution had no choice but to drop all the

00:11:17.860 charges. Okay, I just want to pause here and say there is very obvious misogyny taking place, but

00:11:23.260 our little fourth wall break, I am working on an episode right now about the tragedy of

00:11:28.640 heterosexuality. And it's really interesting after all the reading I've been doing over the

00:11:33.380 last few days to see this in full force. So just like think about that and it'll be interesting to

00:11:38.940 have this conversation then have our next one and see how all these forces work together. It's

00:11:43.300 genuinely fucking horrifying that these officers and can I also just say this is an aside but you 0.99

00:11:49.560 and I get flack for swearing on this podcast because we are women. I want to say that very 0.99

00:11:54.220 explicitly. I was thinking about that. We got a comment from someone being like they're interesting

00:11:58.140 but vulgar, blah, blah, blah. Scott Galloway swears all the time. Shut the fuck up. We have ICE

00:12:03.100 officers routinely calling people fucking bitches. And no one thinks that this is indicative. I mean, 1.00

00:12:09.180 besides obviously like people like us, there is an entire portion of this country that thinks that

00:12:14.480 that is entirely appropriate for a law enforcement officer to say. J.D. Vance is like, well, they have

00:12:19.640 trauma, but they have trauma. Exactly. It's just, it's really, really crazy the way that we allow

00:12:25.160 this and the way that we normalize it. Carry on, Katie. There are a lot of angles that we could

00:12:30.480 have taken with this conversation. There's obviously misogyny. There's obviously homophobia.

00:12:34.460 And we're going to get into that a little bit. But again, I think that that is where, when we

00:12:39.840 get into the identity conversation here of like where identity matters and doesn't matter when

00:12:44.660 we're talking about state violence, I think we can flesh that out a little bit more. And so when it

00:12:49.180 comes to these specific examples, I mean, we could do this all day. I read countless articles about

00:12:54.480 this across all sorts of media, and I can basically boil down the two sides as follows.

00:12:59.700 The argument on the right is this is only happening because civilians are being disorderly

00:13:06.060 and are attacking our agents. And on the liberal side, there are of course calls to prosecute

00:13:12.220 Ross in particular, but the broader argument is this is happening because the agents aren't

00:13:17.920 trained well enough to follow the law. They're not following the law. So I want to just address

00:13:24.120 both of these high-level arguments before we really get into the meat of today.

00:13:28.000 To address the training and following the law side of the argument that we're going to spend

00:13:31.800 more time on shortly, there are two important pieces of framing for this conversation that

00:13:35.820 we should just cover now. Number one, even before all this ICE shit started, the number of people 0.68

00:13:41.780 killed by police in the U.S. every year has risen since George Floyd was murdered. We have not been 0.98

00:13:48.280 moving in the right direction. Everyone's like, we haven't sent the ICE officers to the IDF yet.

00:13:53.000 They haven't gotten their training.

00:13:55.100 They need their training. 0.94

00:13:56.600 They need to go to Gaza and get trained.

00:13:59.720 Jesus Christ. 0.97

00:14:01.000 So unserious.

00:14:02.900 And number two, Jonathan Ross is a veteran of the Iraq War and has been on the special response team of ICE's enforcement and removal operation for the last decade.

00:14:12.920 He is a veteran in the ICE organization.

00:14:15.660 He is not some guy that walked in off the street last fall.

00:14:19.020 Renee Goode did not die because the agent who shot her was not trained.

00:14:23.960 And to address the rights argument, obviously, everything is being videotaped in these encounters all the time.

00:14:31.320 ICE apprehension videos are all over the internet, so it is worth paying attention to what you are not seeing in those videos.

00:14:39.440 This is an excerpt from a piece in The Nation about the L.A. protests to the National Guard deployment.

00:14:46.640 We've heard a lot about the assault of police officers during these protests.

00:14:50.740 Why haven't we seen it?

00:14:52.200 Where's the body cam footage showing protesters injuring cops, striking them, putting them out of commission?

00:14:57.760 I saw a police officer struck by a water bottle thrown by protesters in a barrage launched around 7.30 p.m.

00:15:04.380 after those protesters spent hours absorbing, quote, less lethal rounds and being deafened by flashbangs.

00:15:11.060 But that's about it.

00:15:12.460 Meanwhile, we've got drone footage of a mounted officer using his horse to trample a protester

00:15:17.740 who lies prone on the ground surrounded by mounted police.

00:15:21.580 We've got cops beating protesters with truncheons, cops deploying tear gas,

00:15:26.480 cops bringing box after box of ammunition to the line so that they could fire again and again and again 0.78

00:15:31.920 into crowds of protesters exercising tremendous restraint throughout the day.

00:15:36.820 If these ICE agents were being assaulted, we would see it.

00:15:39.960 because, spoiler alert for section three of this outline,

00:15:45.200 they are bringing camera crews with them everywhere.

00:15:48.180 Jesus Christ.

00:15:49.480 So we're going to talk about ICE now.

00:15:51.120 Caro, do you know when ICE was started?

00:15:53.560 I want to say recently.

00:15:54.720 I'm going to guess Bush administration.

00:15:56.800 ICE. Well done.

00:15:58.200 Hell yeah. 0.96

00:15:59.100 That's just like whenever anything particularly like clown show in this country, 0.86

00:16:03.600 it's either Reagan or Bush. 0.93

00:16:04.640 Yeah, it just, it smells like W.

00:16:06.360 ICE was started in March 2003 with the Homeland Security Act as part of the totally reasonable

00:16:14.220 expansion of executive power in the wake of 9-11. Before it was ICE, immigration mostly fell to the

00:16:20.180 INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So the INS was responsible for, quote, border

00:16:26.520 security, interior enforcement, asylum, and immigration benefits. After 9-11, the Department

00:16:33.940 of Homeland Security was established. So the Department of Homeland Security itself is very

00:16:39.120 new as of the 21st century. And within DHS, you have ICE, you have Customs and Border Protection,

00:16:45.280 or CBP, and you have Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. We're going to learn a little

00:16:51.940 bit more about how each of these agencies describe themselves straight from the Homeland Security

00:16:56.940 website, if you'll please read their little recruitment blurbs going left to right.

00:17:03.940 All right, we've got a little, we've got a nice little triptych. On the left is some real tough-looking, diverse folks representing law enforcement, and it says, on the ground.

00:17:13.680 Folks, F-O-L-X. 1.00

00:17:14.980 Yeah, exactly. 0.95

00:17:17.360 On the ground, in the air, across the water.

00:17:20.380 And it says, CBP operates in all 50 states, in over 50 countries, and at 328 ports of entry to protect the American people, Team America World Police, safeguard our borders, and enhance the nation's economic prosperity.

00:17:34.620 Your journey begins here.

00:17:36.560 They're like the people care about the gas prices.

00:17:39.600 All right, next.

00:17:40.820 The next one is a very classic kind of World War II-era Uncle Sam pointing at you.

00:17:44.940 It says, America needs you.

00:17:47.400 It says, America has been invaded by criminals and predators.

00:17:50.560 We need you to get them out.

00:17:52.520 That feels very video game-esque.

00:17:55.220 All right, and then on the right, we have a very clip art-looking American flag that says, 0.85

00:18:00.020 protect the homeland, defend the culture, which I think is Nazi territory. 0.83

00:18:04.660 Little dog whistling. 0.74

00:18:06.160 I think it's dabbling a Nazi. 0.93

00:18:08.900 Little blood and soil there.

00:18:10.320 And it says, become a homeland defender.

00:18:13.260 Join USCIS's critical mission as a homeland defender protecting America from criminal aliens.

00:18:20.840 Protect your homeland and defend your culture.

00:18:24.380 I didn't spend too much time looking into, you know, what specifically USCIS does,

00:18:30.560 but it is my understanding from the articles that I read that it's kind of like the paper pusher division.

00:18:35.340 it's like you're the one that's determining immigration status and you know asylum claims

00:18:40.540 and all that kind of shit so the fact that even that job is being described as homeland defender

00:18:47.700 i'm like oh okay so like no one's getting in no one is getting into this country in the next four 0.57

00:18:52.620 years right and now i just want you to see and please read the only text on the when you click 0.53

00:18:59.520 on the i clicked to join ice i was like yeah fuck yeah let's do it clicked join ice this is the

00:19:04.300 landing page it took me to and um this is all that landing page says all right so we've got 0.63

00:19:09.480 another world war ii era uncle sam really really really really really lazily photoshopped it's like

00:19:17.740 all glitchy at the edges i'm certain that the doge boys were just folded over into the graphic design

00:19:24.300 departments because these scream 20 year old boy who thinks he's better at stuff than he actually

00:19:28.420 is. Okay, it says, America needs you, and the U is in red, it's all caps. America has been invaded

00:19:35.320 by criminals and predators. We need you to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree.

00:19:41.420 Fabulous. I don't know why that got me. Now I'm going to have you read from the History of ICE

00:19:48.560 page. So this is from the ice.gov website. All right. Congress granted ICE a unique combination

00:19:58.340 of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety

00:20:02.780 in answer to the tragic events on 9-11.

00:20:05.840 Leveraging those authorities, ICE's primary mission is to promote homeland security and

00:20:10.120 public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border

00:20:14.120 control, customs, trade, and immigration.

00:20:17.080 Okay, so I had you read that because there are a couple of phrases and words that I noticed

00:20:23.640 came up repeatedly in all of their materials and in all of the media coverage of this event and

00:20:29.060 kind of ICE more broadly. We are constantly harping on the idea of safety and of order.

00:20:35.280 So we're going to come back to that, but I think just kind of like pay attention to that throughout

00:20:39.100 when and how those concepts are deployed. So something that experts have pointed out about

00:20:44.480 these agencies is that because of how they were started as like a reaction to a terrorist attack

00:20:50.180 and then how quickly they expanded,

00:20:52.600 there have always been issues with these agencies.

00:20:56.300 For example, the last time that there was a big surge

00:20:59.520 of Customs and Border Protection agents,

00:21:02.040 an agent was on average arrested for something,

00:21:04.980 whether it was domestic violence or corruption

00:21:07.040 or something else, every 24 hours for seven years.

00:21:12.180 Wow.

00:21:12.980 The ACLU described Border Protection's treatment

00:21:15.920 of people, including children,

00:21:17.340 as, quote, monstrous during the Obama years.

00:21:21.040 I read a few stories of abuse that occurred during Obama's presidency

00:21:24.820 that, like, I don't even want to repeat here.

00:21:26.600 They were so vile.

00:21:28.320 Even by 2017, so a decade after that Customs and Border Protection hiring surge happened,

00:21:34.220 the agency was still seeing an agent or officer arrested on average every 36 hours.

00:21:38.520 Well, you also have an entire agency that's founded on a lie.

00:21:42.900 Like, when you think about the Iraq War, 0.99

00:21:44.660 I think it's now well-trodden territory that this was all bullshit, but I'm just imagining 0.96

00:21:51.020 what it would be like to be behind the curtain and to be working in those agencies, and you're 0.98

00:21:55.340 dealing with officials giving you conflicting information all the time. You're dealing with

00:21:58.800 them constantly iterating on their own story. The entire notion of it is based in Islamophobia 0.94

00:22:04.500 and greed. And so I can imagine, and I'm sure a lot of our agencies are also, I mean, the police

00:22:10.140 state is like founded in the Confederacy, I'm pretty sure. So like a lot of this stuff always

00:22:14.560 goes back to its founding. But when you think about 9-11, it's like, yeah, no shit, it was a 0.98

00:22:18.860 disaster from the jump. That was a disastrous foreign policy moment for us. 0.99

00:22:23.100 Mm-hmm. Then obviously a lot of Americans died and millions of Iraqis died.

00:22:27.280 Mm-hmm.

00:22:27.780 So tragedy all around. There was also a rapid expansion of ICE during Obama's presidency,

00:22:33.920 up to 21,000 agents. And this is when the hiring standards, if they could ever be classified as

00:22:40.120 good really began deteriorating. Did Obama ever answer to this? You tell me. Have you heard

00:22:46.900 anything about? I'll DM him on Instagram. I'll see if he has any report for us. There's always

00:22:51.360 that quote that's like, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed. It's like, these men never answer for

00:22:57.260 any of this. There is never accountability. There are never consequences. Yeah. But Obama is also

00:23:04.020 the president who appointed Tom Homan as associate director of ICE. On the campaign trail in 2024,

00:23:11.160 Harris promised to hire thousands more border agents. In 2018, she pushed back against calls

00:23:17.000 to abolish ICE. She claimed that it had a, quote, purpose, a role, and should exist.

00:23:22.260 Gavin Newsom just reiterated his support for ICE in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro. He was

00:23:27.500 like, we work with ICE. We get rid of criminals all the time. So he's taking the Kamala Harris

00:23:31.680 approach to the presidential campaign. Good. Well, we all know how that worked last time.

00:23:37.620 I'm just imagining Gavin Newsom, like, with Oprah pulling out the gun and being like,

00:23:42.240 I am a gun owner and just, like, doing it to a T. Anyways, this is really satisfying to think about.

00:23:48.720 Gavin's a little pink-glocked. So, I tell you this to say that both parties are reflexively

00:23:53.560 pro-law enforcement. They're not the same. I mean, like, any reasonable person can say that, like,

00:23:58.120 yeah, Trump's approach is worse, but there is no opposition party to ICE in the United States or

00:24:05.260 to forces like them. But in the last year, ICE's size has doubled from about 10,000 agents to more

00:24:13.680 than 22,000. That is unbelievably fast. To more than double the force in a year, a lot of people

00:24:22.860 pointed to that speed alone and said there are going to be problems. And, you know, like one

00:24:27.740 indication that I think there's never been any intent to follow due process here is that with

00:24:32.680 this much expansion on the agent side and an intention to ramp up arrests, you would expect

00:24:38.920 to see a commensurate surge of new immigration judges too. But we haven't seen that. And now

00:24:45.680 it's not a stretch to say that they are just arming random people. So one journalist who

00:24:50.540 went undercover to get a job with ICE wrote a story for Slate about just how shoddy the hiring

00:24:57.080 process was. Many of ICE's critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs,

00:25:04.120 January 6th insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc., for a domestic security force loyal to the

00:25:10.340 president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier. ICE's recruitment push is

00:25:16.100 so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who's joining the agency's ranks.

00:25:21.540 We are all collectively in the dark about whom the state is arming,

00:25:25.820 tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America's streets.

00:25:30.560 She also had a little passage about the demographics of the agency now and the type

00:25:37.360 of people who she encountered while she was going through that very brief recruitment process,

00:25:42.360 which were often people who were ex-military which I find just not surprising but still

00:25:49.440 noteworthy if you can read this the agent then told me a bit about his own background like me

00:25:55.920 he enlisted straight out of high school then got out and vowed to get as far away from the violence

00:26:00.280 of the military as possible like a lot of veterans he had trouble assimilating into the civilian

00:26:05.040 world after about six months I was like these people aren't like me I want to be around like

00:26:10.660 minded people, he said. He found his way into law enforcement. That was well over a decade ago.

00:26:16.460 He's on his way to a very comfortable retirement and he enjoys the work.

00:26:20.160 I like that instant gratification of, hey, that guy committed this crime,

00:26:23.980 these X, Y, and Z, and he's not even supposed to be here, he said. Great.

00:26:28.380 Okay.

00:26:28.980 He's like, I like being judge, jury, and executioner of the American people. It makes

00:26:33.080 me feel good.

00:26:33.740 Makes me feel powerful. It is noteworthy to me that America's foreign policy and the way

00:26:40.420 in which we essentially recruit people straight out of high school, like this kid, this kid who

00:26:47.220 probably had very few other options. We send them to these violent and horrifying and often

00:26:53.020 ill-defined jobs overseas. Then they come back. They are probably traumatized. They do probably

00:27:01.100 have PTSD. They have a very hard time fitting back into a polite society after seeing and doing the

00:27:06.980 things that they saw and did. And law enforcement hoovers them up. It becomes like a way to manage

00:27:13.560 that population. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that, too, and kind of the function

00:27:17.800 that it really serves. On the note of the military, I was thinking about this. I was thinking about

00:27:22.560 the idea of the draft and what it means to be drafted and how that notion would seem so absurd

00:27:27.560 now. But then I was thinking about it and I was like, well, we have an ongoing draft at all times.

00:27:31.960 We have a population that could never afford college, that can't find meaningful work,

00:27:35.920 that can't support themselves

00:27:37.140 and the only way for you to get a free education,

00:27:39.600 0% down is to join the military.

00:27:41.760 That is essentially a draft.

00:27:43.220 That is coercive.

00:27:44.960 So it's obvious that ICE is essentially

00:27:47.980 an unaccountable group of roving random masked people

00:27:50.560 with guns and bulletproof vests

00:27:52.320 who are emboldened to do basically 0.99

00:27:53.900 whatever the fuck they want. 0.97

00:27:55.300 And this is an extremely concerning situation, right? 0.99

00:27:58.640 This is a situation that I think we would all agree

00:28:02.320 warrants some public outrage

00:28:05.080 and some outcry, right?

Diabolical Lies - January 25, 2026

ICE is a Public Jobs Program for Losers

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