“The most peaceful way to carry out this vital public safety mission is for Republicans and Democrats to do it together, and for state and local law enforcement to work together with federal law enforcement.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
It is ridiculous to call it manslaughter when people committing felonies, armed with deadly weapons, get killed in the chaos they've started. It has been documented that both Good and Pretti were part of well-organized, well-funded operations that interfere with federal law enforcement, a felony and arming oneself with a firearm when setting out to do this especially indicates malicious intent.
It is obvious what is going on. The previous administration allowed 10-20 million people to enter the U.S. illegally and flock to sanctuary cities and states. They are counted by the Census and increase the representation of these areas, and with motor-voter and lack of serious voter ID they strengthen the Democrat base. If this sort of thing is not reversed it will continue and worsen, destroying the American system and our social contract. The organizations disrupting enforcement of the law should be shut down, and the members and funders arrested and prosecuted, if liberty is to be preserved.
Photographing law enforcement is not a felony. The only thing Preti is seen doing in the multiple videos is holding a camera and trying to help a woman who had fallen or been pushed down. He is then assaulted by multiple agents. One of them seizes the firearm that he is legally carrying and has made no use of, two others then shoot him.
What part of that do you not believe and what videos support your views? Why is that not manslaughter?
How about we change the law to count only citizens for apportioning Congressional representation, and stop federally funding immigants (legal or not). If states want to fund immigrants they can do that themselves. Change the incentives, behavior will change. Would that (hypothecially) satisfy you?
I think David is being generous in saying it's manslaughter. That might fly for the Renee Good killing, but for Alex Pretti it's pretty clearly murder. He wasn't shot until after he was subdued and disarmed. Before that the "chaos" he was causing appeared to be helping an old lady that an agent had knocked over. If I was on a jury I'd definitely find the agent who shot him guilty of murder in the second degree.
There is no evidence that illegal immigration has increased the amount of House seats in blue states. On the contrary, since so many illegals end up in red states like Florida and Texas, they likely help Republicans (if you recall Ron DeSantis did a political stunt a few years ago where he bused illegals to blue states specifically to protest how a disproportionate amount of illegals were in red states).
I think a much more likely explanation for the wide opposition to ICE stems from two factors:
1. Liberals tend to see immigration laws as similar to laws like the speed limit. No one cares if you go 5 mph over the speed limit or treats it as a profound miscarriage of justice that speeders walk free (unless they were going really, really fast). From their point of view, the ICE crackdown is a draconian punishment for a minor and unimportant crime.
2. Liberals feel intense compassion for poor people in third world countries, and conservatives really don't want to admit this because if it was true that would mean that liberals are, by at least one metric, better people than they are. So they desperately look for some explanation for how liberals must have a secret selfish ulterior motive, like improving their electoral prospects. I hate to break this to you, but that search is doomed. Therr is no ulterior motive.
I think your analysis omits an important point: the difference between enforcing the law and abusing it. The current ICE and CBP operations are being conducted in an unconstitutional manner with a clear political agenda.
The administration's strategy is punitive. They are breaking laws, ignoring court orders, and killing innocent people. The President is advocating violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 14th Amendments. Is anyone surprised that states would not want to participate in this misguided enforcement?
If the federal government began arresting only Democrats for marijuana possession (enforcing a federal law), would states refusing to help really be defying the law? Or would they be upholding the Equal Protection clause? State resistance here isn't just federal vs. state's rights, it is a necessary check against selective and abusive enforcement.
DF is correct, as is Frank. We have been here before. What did we learn? Federalism died decades ago, at least since 1913. As Dave92f1 says, incentives matter; they matter a lot.
There is a historical episode that resembles the current situation much more closely than Prohibition. That is the original Nullification Crisis, 1832/33. South Carolina declared the 1828 Tariff Act [Tariff of Abominations] and the 1832 Tariff Act, which reduced the original a bit, null and void, and unenforceable even by the Federal government. Threats ensued and South Carolina began amassing troops. [Shades of the Minnesota National Guard being mobilized at present. Threats to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.]
This was settled by a political compromise within Congress reducing the 1832 tariffs further.
For the original problem, you don't want a state to not allow tariff revenue collection. At the time, tariffs were the source of 90% of federal revenue. Talk about pecuniary externalities! So, no federalism solution. But the original problem points to a central solution: Change immigration policy by ordinary political means -- Congress makes a law.
My guess, and it's only a guess, is that this is not gonna happen, on account while immigration seems like the single most salient wedge issue at the moment, in 1832 the tariff was the real wedge issue. Then there was nothing important enough to make policy trades on, so compromise on that single issue was the only solution short of secession. At present there is no incentive to make policy trades at all, for what's at stake is "who will rule", so secession does not appear to be an option. Karoline Leavitt's stated wish of the parties cooperating I think is chimera.
My cynical view is that immigration has the scariest three words in the English language, “Broad Bipartisan Support” from the doner class, both of whom are motivated to import a permanent underclass to make 1. Cheap labor 2. Clients of state largesse and 3. CHEAP LABOR. I observe that no administration in my memory—going back to Reagan 2–has ever made any concerted effort to punish companies who hire people of questionable employment status.
I contrast that with China, who when I worked there wanted not only my application for a visa but an officially sealed letter from my company stating exactly what sort of work I was going to be doing—what they said didn’t make a whole lot of sense in English—and how long I was there to do it. It was explicitly stated that I was to have my passport and my work permit in my possession at all times for police inspection.
They never did, probably for much the same reason the prostitution that officially didn’t exist nonetheless seemed to be readily available pretty near to the drug dealers who officially faced the death penalty, but I saw no great need to violate any of those laws.
The parallels between Hitler and FDR are interesting. Both came to power in 1933 after four years of depression, and Hitler after ten years of street battles between Nazis and Communists. Germans were resentful of Germany's "unfair" treatment at the hands of the Allies in the Great War. When war started in 1939, draftees had been 12 when both came to power, and no one under 30 remembered the Great War in any detail. When both died and the war ended in 1945, draftees had been less than 6 when both came to power. An entire generation knew only that Germany had started a third war, both leaders presided over the end of the Great Depression, and America won and Germany lost another world war. Both populations began to recover from their one-man autocratic rule and assert some independence again. But both made long-lasting changes in society and government, neither for the better.
“ Germans were resentful of Germany's "unfair" treatment at the hands of the Allies in the Great War. ”
I heard in an interview with a historian that this isn’t exactly right. Germans were resentful of their government for having sheepishly given up too easily, or something, a narrative (of obviously questionable truth, in retrospect) spread by one faction—the Nazis, I think—within Germany.
The 3 alternative endings given* are missing the most likely 4th:
State & local police begin cooperating with the Feds, in opposition to the radical Dems who want to fight the Feds.
Note that Pretti was armed, and resisting arrest, and is the type of person to attempt to provoke agents into using, in a split second calculation of fear, excessive force. (Looks like excessive to me from some angles. But here's the likely admin story (David doesn't specify his links):
That's what official history will write, and the officer won't be successfully prosecuted.
The killer of Ashli Babbitt was worse, she was unarmed & not resisting arrest, tho climbing thru a window broken by somebody else. Not even an indictment.
The infiltration of the organized Signal group, coordinating the legal and illegal protest actions, which includes some state govt officials, is a further Fed threat to those officials.
When the local police arrest those illegally interfering with immigration enforcement, the drama & the killings go down, as well as the clickbait.
#4 to shift focus back to fraud.
And, maybe, Iran.
*"It will be ended, if it is ended, either by the election of a president with different views, probably from the other party, by congressional action, or by the current administration concluding that the political costs of continuing its enforcement efforts are more than it is willing to pay."
"From my standpoint, also from the traditional conservative standpoint, the fact that large scale federal funding of state and local expenditures makes federalism less workable is an argument against the funding. For those who support the funding it is an argument against federalism, in this and other contexts."
The devil is in the details. It seems to me that the method of funding in the federal cases I know of -- the US, Germany, and Canada -- is that central government largesse is used to circumvent federalism! The cash is given to subsidiary governments, not to people. At best I could guess at the specific political interests and their coalition partners that make this happen, but that's what's going on.
If we get back to the immigration question, and imagine that federal dollars were given to people, we'd at least have a clearer situation for individual voters to decide on. Should illegal immigrants receive transfers from the central government or not?
"The split this time is largely an ideological difference between red tribe and blue tribe. The split, both when prohibition was passed and when it was repealed, was largely ideological, in part religious, between those who viewed drinking as both a moral and social evil and those who did not."
It is fascinating what happened to that ideo-religious split between enactment of Prohibition and its repeal.
Here is a lovely YouTube of Orley Ashenfelter on the Economic Effects of Prohibition
speaking to the authoritative American Association of Wine Economists in 2025.
Well into the video, Ashenfelter points to the individuals in Congress who voted for Prohibition and then changed their minds and voted to repeal it, presumably upon learning of some of the effects.
Congress could easily reduce—even to zero—the welfare grants that the federal government gives to states that refuse to enforce immigration law. Indeed, the federal government is in the driver’s seat, and could easily compel the states to co-operate with it in any of its programs; that, I think, is the main defect in your “federalism solution.” (But perhaps the federal government would restrain itself and allow federalism to work.)
I hadn’t known about the anti-commandeering doctrine. Still, if Congress specified that its welfare grant to states was to be used only for legal residents, I don’t think that would be considered commandeering, and that would be enough to shield the American taxpayer from having to finance welfare payments for illegal residents permitted by a state government.
Perversely, I suspect Trump's myriad impoundments might actually move the needle here.
Congress isn't going to wholesale neuter its means (the spending power) to meddle in areas outside its enumerated authority so long as the money is guaranteed to reach its intended recipients. But I (IANAL!) remain unconvinced that the Constitutional case against impoundment (including legislation proscribing it) is as airtight as those addicted to Federal money would have us believe.
If SCOTUS ruled that impoundment is an inherent power of the Presidency, then States (and their subordinate polities) would be much less eager to take the bait in the first place. After all, why needlessly expose yourself to the whims of an Administration of the other party?
Also the log rolling that produces the grants in the first place would likely break down. If the other guy following through on voting for your thing doesn't ensure it'll materialize, there's no deal to be made.
It is ridiculous to call it manslaughter when people committing felonies, armed with deadly weapons, get killed in the chaos they've started. It has been documented that both Good and Pretti were part of well-organized, well-funded operations that interfere with federal law enforcement, a felony and arming oneself with a firearm when setting out to do this especially indicates malicious intent.
It is obvious what is going on. The previous administration allowed 10-20 million people to enter the U.S. illegally and flock to sanctuary cities and states. They are counted by the Census and increase the representation of these areas, and with motor-voter and lack of serious voter ID they strengthen the Democrat base. If this sort of thing is not reversed it will continue and worsen, destroying the American system and our social contract. The organizations disrupting enforcement of the law should be shut down, and the members and funders arrested and prosecuted, if liberty is to be preserved.
Photographing law enforcement is not a felony. The only thing Preti is seen doing in the multiple videos is holding a camera and trying to help a woman who had fallen or been pushed down. He is then assaulted by multiple agents. One of them seizes the firearm that he is legally carrying and has made no use of, two others then shoot him.
What part of that do you not believe and what videos support your views? Why is that not manslaughter?
How about we change the law to count only citizens for apportioning Congressional representation, and stop federally funding immigants (legal or not). If states want to fund immigrants they can do that themselves. Change the incentives, behavior will change. Would that (hypothecially) satisfy you?
Probably need to amend the constitution, not just change some laws.
I think David is being generous in saying it's manslaughter. That might fly for the Renee Good killing, but for Alex Pretti it's pretty clearly murder. He wasn't shot until after he was subdued and disarmed. Before that the "chaos" he was causing appeared to be helping an old lady that an agent had knocked over. If I was on a jury I'd definitely find the agent who shot him guilty of murder in the second degree.
There is no evidence that illegal immigration has increased the amount of House seats in blue states. On the contrary, since so many illegals end up in red states like Florida and Texas, they likely help Republicans (if you recall Ron DeSantis did a political stunt a few years ago where he bused illegals to blue states specifically to protest how a disproportionate amount of illegals were in red states).
I think a much more likely explanation for the wide opposition to ICE stems from two factors:
1. Liberals tend to see immigration laws as similar to laws like the speed limit. No one cares if you go 5 mph over the speed limit or treats it as a profound miscarriage of justice that speeders walk free (unless they were going really, really fast). From their point of view, the ICE crackdown is a draconian punishment for a minor and unimportant crime.
2. Liberals feel intense compassion for poor people in third world countries, and conservatives really don't want to admit this because if it was true that would mean that liberals are, by at least one metric, better people than they are. So they desperately look for some explanation for how liberals must have a secret selfish ulterior motive, like improving their electoral prospects. I hate to break this to you, but that search is doomed. Therr is no ulterior motive.
I think your analysis omits an important point: the difference between enforcing the law and abusing it. The current ICE and CBP operations are being conducted in an unconstitutional manner with a clear political agenda.
The administration's strategy is punitive. They are breaking laws, ignoring court orders, and killing innocent people. The President is advocating violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 14th Amendments. Is anyone surprised that states would not want to participate in this misguided enforcement?
If the federal government began arresting only Democrats for marijuana possession (enforcing a federal law), would states refusing to help really be defying the law? Or would they be upholding the Equal Protection clause? State resistance here isn't just federal vs. state's rights, it is a necessary check against selective and abusive enforcement.
DF is correct, as is Frank. We have been here before. What did we learn? Federalism died decades ago, at least since 1913. As Dave92f1 says, incentives matter; they matter a lot.
Excellent!
There is a historical episode that resembles the current situation much more closely than Prohibition. That is the original Nullification Crisis, 1832/33. South Carolina declared the 1828 Tariff Act [Tariff of Abominations] and the 1832 Tariff Act, which reduced the original a bit, null and void, and unenforceable even by the Federal government. Threats ensued and South Carolina began amassing troops. [Shades of the Minnesota National Guard being mobilized at present. Threats to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.]
This was settled by a political compromise within Congress reducing the 1832 tariffs further.
For the original problem, you don't want a state to not allow tariff revenue collection. At the time, tariffs were the source of 90% of federal revenue. Talk about pecuniary externalities! So, no federalism solution. But the original problem points to a central solution: Change immigration policy by ordinary political means -- Congress makes a law.
My guess, and it's only a guess, is that this is not gonna happen, on account while immigration seems like the single most salient wedge issue at the moment, in 1832 the tariff was the real wedge issue. Then there was nothing important enough to make policy trades on, so compromise on that single issue was the only solution short of secession. At present there is no incentive to make policy trades at all, for what's at stake is "who will rule", so secession does not appear to be an option. Karoline Leavitt's stated wish of the parties cooperating I think is chimera.
Or, depending on which side you're on, perhaps a comparison to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution might seem more appropriate.
My cynical view is that immigration has the scariest three words in the English language, “Broad Bipartisan Support” from the doner class, both of whom are motivated to import a permanent underclass to make 1. Cheap labor 2. Clients of state largesse and 3. CHEAP LABOR. I observe that no administration in my memory—going back to Reagan 2–has ever made any concerted effort to punish companies who hire people of questionable employment status.
I contrast that with China, who when I worked there wanted not only my application for a visa but an officially sealed letter from my company stating exactly what sort of work I was going to be doing—what they said didn’t make a whole lot of sense in English—and how long I was there to do it. It was explicitly stated that I was to have my passport and my work permit in my possession at all times for police inspection.
They never did, probably for much the same reason the prostitution that officially didn’t exist nonetheless seemed to be readily available pretty near to the drug dealers who officially faced the death penalty, but I saw no great need to violate any of those laws.
The parallels between Hitler and FDR are interesting. Both came to power in 1933 after four years of depression, and Hitler after ten years of street battles between Nazis and Communists. Germans were resentful of Germany's "unfair" treatment at the hands of the Allies in the Great War. When war started in 1939, draftees had been 12 when both came to power, and no one under 30 remembered the Great War in any detail. When both died and the war ended in 1945, draftees had been less than 6 when both came to power. An entire generation knew only that Germany had started a third war, both leaders presided over the end of the Great Depression, and America won and Germany lost another world war. Both populations began to recover from their one-man autocratic rule and assert some independence again. But both made long-lasting changes in society and government, neither for the better.
“ Germans were resentful of Germany's "unfair" treatment at the hands of the Allies in the Great War. ”
I heard in an interview with a historian that this isn’t exactly right. Germans were resentful of their government for having sheepishly given up too easily, or something, a narrative (of obviously questionable truth, in retrospect) spread by one faction—the Nazis, I think—within Germany.
I think the view predated the Nazi party, was one of the reasons for its rise.
It’s a generalization. However you want to phrase it, Germans were not in a happy mood.
The 3 alternative endings given* are missing the most likely 4th:
State & local police begin cooperating with the Feds, in opposition to the radical Dems who want to fight the Feds.
Note that Pretti was armed, and resisting arrest, and is the type of person to attempt to provoke agents into using, in a split second calculation of fear, excessive force. (Looks like excessive to me from some angles. But here's the likely admin story (David doesn't specify his links):
https://x.com/i/status/2016160280426815991
>> Alexi Petti reached for a gun and was shot. <<
That's what official history will write, and the officer won't be successfully prosecuted.
The killer of Ashli Babbitt was worse, she was unarmed & not resisting arrest, tho climbing thru a window broken by somebody else. Not even an indictment.
The infiltration of the organized Signal group, coordinating the legal and illegal protest actions, which includes some state govt officials, is a further Fed threat to those officials.
When the local police arrest those illegally interfering with immigration enforcement, the drama & the killings go down, as well as the clickbait.
#4 to shift focus back to fraud.
And, maybe, Iran.
*"It will be ended, if it is ended, either by the election of a president with different views, probably from the other party, by congressional action, or by the current administration concluding that the political costs of continuing its enforcement efforts are more than it is willing to pay."
"From my standpoint, also from the traditional conservative standpoint, the fact that large scale federal funding of state and local expenditures makes federalism less workable is an argument against the funding. For those who support the funding it is an argument against federalism, in this and other contexts."
The devil is in the details. It seems to me that the method of funding in the federal cases I know of -- the US, Germany, and Canada -- is that central government largesse is used to circumvent federalism! The cash is given to subsidiary governments, not to people. At best I could guess at the specific political interests and their coalition partners that make this happen, but that's what's going on.
If we get back to the immigration question, and imagine that federal dollars were given to people, we'd at least have a clearer situation for individual voters to decide on. Should illegal immigrants receive transfers from the central government or not?
"The split this time is largely an ideological difference between red tribe and blue tribe. The split, both when prohibition was passed and when it was repealed, was largely ideological, in part religious, between those who viewed drinking as both a moral and social evil and those who did not."
It is fascinating what happened to that ideo-religious split between enactment of Prohibition and its repeal.
Here is a lovely YouTube of Orley Ashenfelter on the Economic Effects of Prohibition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LAStm-kBNY&t=7s
speaking to the authoritative American Association of Wine Economists in 2025.
Well into the video, Ashenfelter points to the individuals in Congress who voted for Prohibition and then changed their minds and voted to repeal it, presumably upon learning of some of the effects.
We can't prevent all good things from happening.
Congress could easily reduce—even to zero—the welfare grants that the federal government gives to states that refuse to enforce immigration law. Indeed, the federal government is in the driver’s seat, and could easily compel the states to co-operate with it in any of its programs; that, I think, is the main defect in your “federalism solution.” (But perhaps the federal government would restrain itself and allow federalism to work.)
That would violate the anti-commandeering doctrine, based on the tenth amendment, so be struck down by the courts.
I hadn’t known about the anti-commandeering doctrine. Still, if Congress specified that its welfare grant to states was to be used only for legal residents, I don’t think that would be considered commandeering, and that would be enough to shield the American taxpayer from having to finance welfare payments for illegal residents permitted by a state government.
Probably true. But the state officials handing out the money would be the people deciding whether to believe claims of legal residence.
Perversely, I suspect Trump's myriad impoundments might actually move the needle here.
Congress isn't going to wholesale neuter its means (the spending power) to meddle in areas outside its enumerated authority so long as the money is guaranteed to reach its intended recipients. But I (IANAL!) remain unconvinced that the Constitutional case against impoundment (including legislation proscribing it) is as airtight as those addicted to Federal money would have us believe.
If SCOTUS ruled that impoundment is an inherent power of the Presidency, then States (and their subordinate polities) would be much less eager to take the bait in the first place. After all, why needlessly expose yourself to the whims of an Administration of the other party?
Also the log rolling that produces the grants in the first place would likely break down. If the other guy following through on voting for your thing doesn't ensure it'll materialize, there's no deal to be made.