US Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino couldn’t have been more unequivocal Tuesday when talking about the often aggressive and controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations he’s leading in Minneapolis.
“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law,” Bovino said.
But the Trump administration increasingly doesn’t sound so sure that ICE’s actions are faultless.
After initially adopting an absolutist, no-apologies posture in the aftermath of an ICE agent killing Renee Nicole Good two weeks ago, both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have tempered that somewhat in recent days.
Faced with polls that show the American people turning decidedly against ICE, they’ve begun repeatedly acknowledging “mistakes” that have been or will be made. Vance on Thursday even promised the administration would take disciplinary action against agents who make such mistakes – at least when it’s “justified.”
It’s hardly a full-scale reversal. Vance, quite notably, has argued that ICE agents have been put in a difficult spot due to a lack of assistance from local law enforcement, whom he specifically blamed for “chaos” in Minneapolis.
But it’s looking increasingly like some in the administration have decided they can’t defend ICE too hard. And that’s a very notable shift.
Trump got the ball rolling Tuesday. Even the same afternoon that Bovino spoke, the president sounded a different tone during a lengthy briefing at the White House.
He brought up ICE making “mistakes” on his own, in the midst of a very lengthy monologue.
“You know, they’re going to make mistakes sometimes,” Trump volunteered. “ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or – you know, they’re dealing with rough people – or they’re going to make a mistake sometimes. It can happen. We feel terribly.”
Trump then quickly pivoted to talking about Good’s death, calling it a “horrible thing” and citing her Trump-supporting father.
The president didn’t directly call her killing a “mistake,” but it was certainly a softer approach than before. Two weeks ago, he had baselessly accused her of trying to run over the ICE agent, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good’s actions “domestic terrorism.”
Fast forward to Thursday, and Vance also made some significant comments about ICE mistakes.
“Of course there have been mistakes made, because you’re always going to have mistakes made in law enforcement,” he said in Ohio, before traveling to Minnesota.
But the vice president suggested the mistakes were a consequence of the “chaos” in Minneapolis,
Vance then expanded on those comments in an interview with the Washington Examiner, even pledging to discipline ICE agents when it’s “justified.”
“You can acknowledge that mistakes sometimes happen while also acknowledging that 99% of our ICE officers are doing the right thing,” he said.
When pressed on punishing agents who act improperly, he responded: “If we think that there are disciplinary actions justified, then of course we’re going to take those disciplinary actions.”
And in a later appearance in Minneapolis, Vance accused the media of lying about ICE, but also acknowledged “stories” and “videos” that “suggest that these guys, or at least some of the people who work for them, are not doing everything right.”
“But very often, if you look at the context of what’s going on, you understand that these people are under an incredible amount of duress, an incredible amount of chaos,” he said.
The big question from there is what the administration’s bar for “justified” discipline is. Its past defenses of controversial ICE tactics and actions suggest it would be a pretty high bar.
The administration appears to have conducted only a brief investigation of the ICE agent who killed Good, for instance, even though Americans by a large margin say the shooting was not justified – and even as DOJ has more actively probed Good and her widow. Several federal prosecutors have resigned over the matter.
(Vance claimed Thursday that “we’re investigating the Renee Good shooting,” but it wasn’t clear what he was referring to.)
Still, Vance’s comments marked a very notable rhetorical concession.
It was the vice president who just a couple weeks ago was claiming that federal law enforcement like ICE have “absolute immunity” (which they do not). Now he’s talking about potential discipline for potential mistakes. On some level, this is just bowing to political reality. ICE’s numbers were bad before the scenes in Minneapolis, they got worse after Good’s killing, and they’re arguably even worse now.
A New York Times-Siena College poll released Thursday showed 61% of registered voters said ICE’s tactics have gone “too far” – echoing the 61% of Americans who said the same in a CBS News-YouGov poll last week.
That number in the CBS poll has crept up from 53% in October to 56% in November to 61% last week.
Both the new polls show about 7 in 10 independents and even about 2 in 10 Republicans saying ICE has gone too far, along with just about all Democrats.
At some point, you just can’t put too much lipstick on that political pig, and the administration seems to have belatedly arrived at that conclusion.
Of course, the real proof will be in what the administration does – not what it says. Does it actually do something to try and rein in the ICE agents that a large majority of Americans think are going too far?
There’s little sign of that so far. Indeed, the administration right now is defending the quite possibly illegal tactic of entering homes without a judge’s warrant (and instead an administrative warrant), which Vance defended Thursday as legal under “our best understanding of the law.”
But sometimes the first step is admitting you have a (political) problem.
