NY Times Discovers ICE Has Guns, Again
When ICE agents fatally shoot someone, as they did Abdi Mohamed Osman in Minneapolis, the mainstream press frames it as a discrete event. What the NYT's carefully crafted narrative skips is ICE's consistent pattern of aggression, from forced family separations to a documented history of excessive force and deaths in custody. The agency, established post-9/11 with expansive powers, operates with
minimal transparency, accountability, and a budget fattened without serious Congressional oversight. (One might wonder how many other government agencies receive such uncritical leeway.) This isn't an anomaly; it's a feature. The ICE budget for FY2023 was over $8.5 billion (Congressional Research Service, R43621), far exceeding the budgets of many federal agencies, yet its mandate often appears to
be less about 'secure borders' and more about terrorizing communities. How many more 'incidents' before the media connects these dots, or do we only get to critique state violence when it's abroad?