\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, in the streets of Minneapolis. She was at least the fourth person killed in a shooting by immigration-enforcement officers during Donald Trump\u2019s second term. Two more people were shot yesterday when a Border Patrol officer fired at a car during a traffic stop in Portland, Oregon; their condition remains unknown.<\/p>\n
As my colleague Caitlin Dickerson explains in her latest story, the president and his advisers have exerted \u201coverwhelming pressure\u201d on immigration enforcement. The White House has \u201cpumped out rhetoric and imagery that celebrates the merciless, military-style pursuit of deportations,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe overall message to employees, including those who carry weapons, is that anything goes.\u201d Last year, the administration effectively kneecapped three offices meant to protect the public from misconduct: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. Good\u2019s killing is now being handled exclusively by Kash Patel\u2019s FBI, and local investigators have been barred from accessing evidence.<\/p>\n
I spoke with Caitlin, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her immigration reporting, about how the Trump administration is encouraging aggressive enforcement tactics while also scaling back oversight.<\/p>\n
Will Gottsegen: To what extent is ICE no longer subject to some of the guardrails that once helped keep it in check?<\/p>\n
Caitlin Dickerson: Formally and informally, since Donald Trump took office, there\u2019s been this push away from transparency and accountability, which is exactly what would discourage an officer in a tense situation, under pressure, from using deadly force. We still need to learn a lot more about what happened in Minnesota and Portland, and an investigation needs to transpire, but we do know that ICE officers shot more people last year than in 2023 and 2022. There are clear examples of how training and policy seem to have been violated in some recent incidents. So I think the fact that these three offices for accountability are going away is significant in that it\u2019s sending a message to everyday officers that they\u2019re not being watched as closely as they once were and, in fact, that the only thing they can really get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.<\/p>\n
There has been a constant churn within leadership. In addition to high-level reassignments, a significant number of field-office directors were replaced with Border Patrol leadership, who are perceived to be more aggressive. Former officials who spent their whole careers at ICE told me that they don\u2019t recognize the agency anymore. They said things like: I don\u2019t know who these people are anymore, because the standards seem to have changed so much. It\u2019s almost become a completely different agency with a completely different mission.<\/p>\n
The pressure that ICE officers are facing is unprecedented, and it\u2019s not just the pressure to carry out as many deportations as possible\u2014the administration is actually celebrating aggression. When you look at its statements, the memes, and the imagery that it\u2019s publishing, all of these signs seem to be encouraging officers to be as aggressive as possible. There\u2019s no emphasis on trying to minimize harm.<\/p>\n
Will: How does this pressure on ICE officers affect immigration-enforcement operations?<\/p>\n
Caitlin: The kinds of conflicts that we\u2019re seeing on social media every day are not what typical immigration enforcement looks like at all. It\u2019s not what officers are trained to do, and it\u2019s not what veteran officers have any experience with. Normally, with law enforcement, the goal is to have things happen as discreetly as possible: without tension, without conflict, without getting a lot of attention and disrupting the general public. And immigration enforcement looks the opposite of that right now. In the case of Minneapolis and Portland, law-enforcement training 101 says, Do not shoot into a moving vehicle. A retired officer I spoke with today told me what he would have done in that situation: \u201cI\u2019m going to follow them until I get them somewhere where I can control the environment.\u201d Not taking those kinds of precautions could be dangerous for the officers and for people nearby.<\/p>\n
Will: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has said that he\u2019s skeptical that the FBI is going to be able to do an impartial investigation, because multiple federal officials have already adopted the party line that Renee Good got herself killed. The vice president blamed \u201cleft-wing ideology\u201d for her death. Do you anticipate that the investigation will be affected by political interests?<\/p>\n
Caitlin: It\u2019s going to depend on who\u2019s put on the investigation but also which high-level officials get to review and sign off on any assessments before they\u2019re made permanent and public. What we do know is that there are numerous examples of law-enforcement work being co-opted for political purposes under this administration, specifically under Kash Patel\u2019s FBI, which has at times prioritized going after the president\u2019s enemies and critics despite what the facts show. I think there is cause for concern, making it even more important that certain oversight offices have been eliminated from within the Department of Homeland Security. Historically, the FBI may have done the first investigation, but ideally an objective inspector general would have come in next, followed by the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility and then the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. There were lots of layers to get to the truth and to mitigate any political bias. And those extra layers are effectively gone now.<\/p>\n
Related: <\/p>\n
\nHere are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Akshita Chandra \/ The Atlantic. Source: Dixie D. Vereen \/ The Washington Post \/ Getty.<\/p>\n How Sweetgreen Became Millennial Cringe<\/p>\n By Ellen Cushing<\/p>\n Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company\u2019s \u201cchief concept officer,\u201d Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to \u201creevaluating and redefining fast food,\u201d but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also \u201creevaluating and redefining\u201d how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.<\/p>\n In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen\u2019s stock price had declined more than 30 percent \u2026<\/p>\n This is remarkable because, for a golden decade or so, Sweetgreen was the future of lunch. Americans, especially ones who were youngish and worked on computers, were toting green paper bags around coastal cities (and later, smaller towns and non-coastal cities) en masse. Silicon Valley was injecting capital into a restaurant as though it were a software start-up.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Bridgeman \/ Getty<\/p>\n Read. A colloquial translation of Paradiso might make people actually read it, Eric Bulson writes.<\/p>\n Explore. By not allowing the sale of hunted venison, much of the United States is letting good meat go to waste. Yasmin Tayag tried to get her hands on some.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On Wednesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2466,6843],"class_list":{"0":"post-41147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-ice","9":"tag-wasnt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n