Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has his first day of hearings for his nomination to the top Justice Department job today. He’ll spend most of the day answering questions—or, more precisely, not answering questions, because the rules the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee imposed on this hearing (ten minutes of questioning per senator only) basically guarantee that Blanche can blather, platitudinize, and filibuster his way through the whole thing. Happy Wednesday.

New ICE, Same as the Old ICE

by William Kristol

After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked widespread public outrage, and with Democrats in Congress blocking additional multi-year funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration made some adjustments. Two of the most visible faces of the mass deportation effort, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, were fired. Incoming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he hoped to have DHS generate less controversy. And as Republicans in Congress muscled through multi-year funding for ICE, there was talk that ICE would itself initiate various reforms, like having its agents wear body cameras.

All of this helped Trump’s mass deportation regime weather the political storm, get its multi-year appropriation, and avoid all requirements of accountability or transparency. By summer, ICE was unabashedly back. Under renewed pressure from the White House to meet higher immigration arrest quotas, the agency ramped up arrests to roughly 2,000 a day—about twice its daily total compared with the spring.

Then in the last ten days, in the course of its deportation frenzy, ICE has once again killed two innocent individuals. When 52-year-old husband and father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot a week ago in Houston, DHS lied that he had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” A week later, when 26-year- old husband and father Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Biddeford, Maine, DHS retreated to the meaningless claim that the agent who shot Guerrero was “fearing for public safety.” ICE has shared no evidence from videos or witnesses about what actually happened in either case. It has not told us who those agents, acting and killing in our name, are. We do know that they were supposed to be looking for men other than the ones they shot. And we’ve been told they were not wearing body cameras.

Houston’s top prosecutor, Harris District Attorney Sean Teare, has been more forthcoming. He has said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in, and that “either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.” Or both.

And these recent shootings didn’t come out of the blue. In recent weeks, we’ve seen videos and heard reports from all around the nation of illegal and indecent behavior by ICE agents. So while billions more dollars have been spent and thousands more agents have been added, we have no more transparency and accountability than before.

Now, after the killings, and after widespread criticism of the practice of vehicle stops, there were once again some suggestions that things might change. On Monday night, ICE ordered a suspension of vehicle stops during enforcement operations. But by Tuesday afternoon, border Czar Tom Homan was reassuring Fox News that the pause on ICE agents conducting vehicle stops is not a policy change but rather a short-term review, and that ICE agents will “get back to doing what they do best.” And our president posted this morning to tell us that “the men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job,” adding, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

There’s no reason to think there’ll be any kind of fundamental change to this thuggish and lawless agency, or to the mass deportation agenda that incentivizes and excuses its thuggish and lawless behavior. In fact, all evidence now points to things staying the same.

My colleague Adrian Carrasquillo reported yesterday that at a small vigil in Houston a Mexican-American man told Ronaldo Salgado,

I see you as my sons. We’re the generation of your dad . . . We don’t ask anyone for anything. We hand our children over to this nation, and with all my heart, I see you as my son. And I know you make your father proud, and your father is watching you. And you make him proud.

The fact that immigrants like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero want to come here and live here and work here and raise their families here should make us all proud. It is the acts of our own government that should make us ashamed.