DAVID MARCUS: How airport duty melted Democrats' absurd smearing of ICE
Sometimes in life, the most important thing is getting to know people. Over the past few weeks, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents started helping to shorten lines in our nation’s airports, much of the country has gotten to know them, much to the lying Democrats’ chagrin.
Take podcaster Charlamagne tha God, who had been a blistering critic of ICE tactics under the Trump administration. Here is what he had to say of his encounters with the agents at a New York airport:
"They were great, to be honest with you. Like to be honest, I'm just like, they were, and for that particular terminal, I was flying out of LaGuardia, I forgot what terminal it was, but yeah, they were being extra nice like Chick-fil-A workers."
This has widely been the experience of most of the millions of air travelers of late, and it has begun to melt some of the harsh rhetoric that saw ICE agents called fascists and even Nazis.
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However, despite the buffing up of ICE’s image, the Democrats are still holding the country hostage with their pointless shutdown of Department of Homeland Security funding, under which thousands of behind-the-scenes ICE employees remain without pay.
The reason Democrats are sticking with this fabulist story of out-of-control ICE agents stalking our nation is because they think they have finally found an effective way to smear law enforcement, after a few botched tries.
We all remember the attempts to paint police as evil during the George Floyd riots. But the problem there for Democrats was that too many people know cops. They were too obvious a part of our lives to be blatantly lied about.
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Then, during the Biden administration, it was border patrol agents who were painted as evil, right down to border agents on horseback being falsely accused of whipping migrants in Texas, when even the person who took the video immediately said there was no whipping, just reins being handled.
It would have been funny if the administration, including then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayaorkas, had not maintained the lie for nearly a year, before sheepishly admitting its error.
ICE agents were a new and juicy opportunity for the left to attack law enforcement as the second Trump administration began, because unlike cops, nobody really knows ICE agents, and, unlike Border Patrol, they were operating not just on the border, but in our communities.
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Democrats pounced on the fact that ICE agents wear masks to protect themselves and their families against doxxing. They pretended that streamlined training programs meant racist yahoos were just being handed guns and badges and told to round up brown people.
Then, finally, when a coordinated leftist campaign of harassment was launched against ICE in Minneapolis, it predictably led to the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. With that, Democrats had all the excuse they needed to shutdown DHS and throw sand in the gears of governance.
But today, after the boy-scout routine to speed up air travel, and after Trump replaced the hyper-aggressive Kristi Noem with the more measured Markwayne Mullin as DHS secretary, a move demanded by Democrats, the shutdown seems absurd.
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This did not stop Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed from appearing onstage with antisemitic heartthrob Hasan Piker on Tuesday and saying, "ICE cannot be reformed, ICE cannot be restrained, ICE must be abolished."
El-Sayed, who has said that many of his constituents are in mourning over the death of Ayatollah Khameini, wants no enforcement of immigration laws, even in the face of recent Islamic terror attacks, including the attack on a synagogue in Michigan.
There is much for the administration to learn from the airport charm offensive, and perhaps a chance for a bit of a pivot.
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In fairness to Noem, she was tasked with creating an image of ICE that was a little scary. In her now infamous TV ads, she warned that anyone here illegally, not just the worst of the worst, would find themselves deported.
There is a strong argument to be made that this aggressive posture helped lead to the 2 million self-deportations we have thus far seen under Trump 2.0.
But the number of people willing to self-deport is likely finite, which means it may be time for ICE to take a more targeted approach. That leaves it less vulnerable to Democrats’ lies.
In our airports, ICE agents melted the hearts of the traveling public. Now they must do the same with the rest of the nation.