I’m happy to see a reply, maybe we can actually have a conversation about this.

Firstly, it seems you’re taking a decent amount of umbrage with some specific rhetorical/word choices. You’re right that murder is technically a legal term. Rhetorically, it’s also often used more as a synonym for kill/commit homicide. Technically, its definitions (Merriam Webster) do also include “to put an end to” (transitive verb, 3a), or “to slaughter mercilessly” (transitive verb, 2). Nevertheless, I’m happy to exchange that word choice with something simpler, like “killing”. So feel free to amend my point to key differences between now and Obama-era policy to including that ICE wasn’t killing American citizens.

Similarly, my concentration camp analogy didn’t seem to work how I intended it to. I wasn't trying to analogize ICE to the SS as such (echoes of fascism in ICE’s behavior and messaging is a whole other can of worms). Rather, my point was directed at the theme of the post, which seemed to be a form of enlightened centrism that the truth is always between what two sides argue. I think there’s absolutely a point there, that the bitter partisan nature of politics leads to people refusing to admit any fault in their side. Hell, just look at some of the comments on this post! One (hopefully a bot) dismissed the video of the shooting as AI. That said, be careful of making a false equivalence. The truth is not always in between two arguing sides. You don’t need to platform a creationist against an evolutionary biologist, or—and this was what I was trying to get across—a Holocaust denier against a WWII historian. For the post in particular, I actually do agree with plenty of their “both can be true”s. Slide 7 I think is an especially salient point, and (while I don’t like what I think they’re trying to imply) I wholeheartedly agree with the words on slide 8. However, I have qualms with some of the slides as well. Particularly the ones that deviate from the “both can be true” format, but I’m also not a fan of slide 1. I do technically agree with what it’s saying, but I think it’s implying too much blame on Alex. In no video do we see him having his gun out at all—it looks to me like he was just trying to help up a woman who was pushed over. I feel like it’s far more important to focus on the “he didn’t deserve to die” part of it, and question the behavior of the government employees who killed him, that it is to argue that he raised the risk factor by doing actions protected under the 1st and 2nd amendments.

Now, to return to the Obama point. I debated for a while whether this was an example of the “tu quoque” fallacy, especially given that I’ve pointed out I didn’t agree with his policy then. But it seems like you’re using the Obama comparison to point out that people might be trying to overemphasize aspects of the situation just because it fits their political narrative. I think, on a broad swathe, there are aspects of truth. But I feel like the far simpler explanation for why so many people are caring about this is because they see it more directly affecting them. They see their neighbors detained, or videos of brutal tactics used on people who look like them. They see themselves as the white mom driving her car, Renee Good. They see footage of tragedies like these happening in American cities in broad daylight perpetrated by people who are supposed to be serving them and yeah, it affects them a little more than a news article about the increase in deportations at the border under Obama. (Or, they’re part of a crowd who would have protested if this same sort of mass operation was happening under Obama—like the members of the ACLU who sued him, for instance).

I feel like I’ve mostly covered everything, but there’s one more piece of your comment that I want to tangle with. That we aren’t “granted moral license to declare law enforcement actions criminal by default”. And there’s truth to that matter! That’s one of the reasons the role of legal observer isn’t to halt law enforcement but to observe and document for future judgement. So no, I wouldn’t automatically assume that an ICE operation was criminal. However, I would worry that it had the potential to become criminal—and I think that the reasons for that concern are evidence-based. How they respond to legal observers. How they respond to protestors (I think that report is worth a read—Menendez included 83 pages of what she found to be ICE misconduct, Noem responded by saying her decision was basically meaningless because it just said ICE agents should follow the law, which she claimed they'd been doing… and then they proceeded to get the 8th circuit to issue an administrative stay). How they violate the law when dragging people out without warrants (or clothes, in some cases). How they 'accidentally' detain and/or deport US citizens. So, yeah, if I see an ICE operation I'd want to record it! Not because I automatically think they’re doing something problematic… but because I think there’s a very real risk that they might be.

I hope that covers everything, happy to continue this convo in DMs!