Opinion | What Stephen Miller Is Signaling to ICE Officers

I want to play you a clip from Steven Miller, who went on TV to deliver a message to ICE agents under fire for brutality and aggression. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties. And no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist, can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.” What do you make of that? I make of that that Miller is trying to communicate to ICE, and to these new members of ICE in particular, that they will not face consequences for use of force specifically. I think he’s speaking to the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minnesota last week and killed her, but also to officers who’ve used tear gas, who’ve pushed and shoved and arrested protesters who’ve claimed that people who are filming them are impeding arrests and using that as a pretense to either take those people into custody or have some violent altercation with them. It is very striking. I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and a dangerous one. Usually the concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. And so his fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to. And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. And we’ve seen within ICE people losing their jobs. High-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations. They’re not being aggressive enough. And so I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive. And in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.