Immigration enforcement needs moderate tactics

A 37 year-old woman in Minnesota is dead at the hands of ICE agents, while Louisianans can think that “there but the grace of God went we.”

The only proper response by the Trump administration — necessary for public safety and the public good — would be to announce at least a temporary suspension of its aggressively, quite literally extra-ordinary use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Before exploring those two interrelated points, this columnist should note that my own predilections usually run well in favor of law enforcement in general and specifically against widespread leniency for illegal immigrants. On multiple occasions, I have opined in defense of police when national or local media was portraying them as villains, and in years past, I’ve even gone so far as to donate several times to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which supports officers who defended themselves in the line of duty.

Yet even as I strongly support ICE’s legal mission and am predisposed to give law officers the benefit of the doubt, I should — we all should — bow to prudential considerations.

No matter how one interprets the multiple videos of the killing of Renee Good, there can be absolutely no doubt of two conclusions.

First, no matter whether the shooting officer had legally defensible excuses for firing his weapon, it is abundantly clear that both he and the officer at Good’s window did not come close to properly safe, de-escalatory procedures while handling the situation. This is not even debatable.

This sort of tragically incompetent enforcement was not just predictable, but already had been predicted repeatedly, when the Trump administration so rapidly doubled ICE’s size while dropping its recruitment standards and cutting training time in half. The result, all over the country, in videotaped incidents too numerous to count, has been the presence of amped up agents acting in egregiously belligerent ways: forcibly throwing women to the ground even if they aren’t resisting, repeatedly threatening or even detaining people for exercising constitutional rights to video activity on public streets and the like….