Trump STUNS with new ICE announcement

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (0:01)
Trump uses a new ICE announcement to help himself in the next election. And I chat with Jim Acosta live on stage as part of my book tour in Washington, DC. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.
So there is a pretty stunning new story in the New York Times that unto itself is dangerous, but I argue has pretty monumental implications for the election that no one's talking about. So according to the Times, the FBI has quietly told field offices around the country that it will no longer investigate certain confrontations involving ICE agents, specifically assault on federal officer cases, which is the exact category of investigation that has historically produced the evidence needed to hold ICE agents accountable when they shoot someone. And instead, that responsibility shifts to Homeland Security Investigations, which is a division of ICE itself, meaning ICE would be investigating ICE. In other words, the agency accused of killing people would be the agency deciding whether the agency did anything wrong. I'm sure you can see the problem here. And the timing here isn't a coincidence. This guidance reportedly went out just days after two fatal ICE shootings happened within a single week. There was a Mexican man killed in Houston, who officials claimed tried to run over an officer, which is a claim that eyewitnesses dispute. And days later, a Colombian father of three killed in Bitterford, Maine. By some counts, this is at least the seventh, but maybe as many as the eleventh fatal shooting involving ICE agents. And that's not even counting the 22 people who've died in ICE detention this year alone, on top of 33 last year. So when the accountability mechanism gets quietly hollowed out the same week that the body count is spiking, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.
Now, DHS and DOJ naturally are calling this reporting fake. They're insisting that nothing has changed. But Borders' Art Tom Homan went on Face the Nation this weekend. Here's what he said.

**Tom Homan** (1:52)
Let's be clear, you can attack the men and women of ICE all you want. It comes on to one simple fact. These people fail to comply with law enforcement. Even some of the major chiefs in this country, who don't necessarily agree with this administration, says you always comply with law enforcement. But the hateful rhetoric that ICE isn't a real law enforcement agency, I see these signs, they will resist.
Let's abolish them, they're fascists. When you keep that hateful rhetoric for a year and a half, there's going to be that percentage, that population that's going to be emboldened to take action, because they're not real law enforcement agencies. I should resist them.
All they had to do was simply comply with law enforcement. If you don't like what law enforcement did to you, then go to the court, sue, call the ACLU, do whatever you want to do. We should always comply with law enforcement. If they did, they'd be alive today.

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (2:44)
That if only people had complied, they would be alive today, meaning there is zero introspection happening when it comes to DHS and ICE, meaning they will continue to kill people and then retroactively pretend that they bear 0% of the blame.
But I want to zoom out here, beyond the depraved killings that we're seeing at the hands of this rogue agency, because I actually don't think that this is incompetence. I think ICE is doing exactly what Trump wants it to do. And here's why.
So Trump has been asked repeatedly on camera whether he'll rule out ICE agents going to the polls. And every time, he and his administration officials all have the exact same tell. They don't say no. Caroline Leavitt literally told reporters that, quote, she can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November. She didn't say we won't do that. She didn't say that's illegal. She just refuses to guarantee it.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch, he's gone further. He publicly defended the idea. Asking why anybody would object to ICE at the polls. And once you see that, this FBI story starts to look less like the bureaucratic machinations of what an agency is going to do and more like what I think it actually is, which is preparation for November. Because Trump and Republicans want you to fear ICE expressly because they will be able to act with impunity and simultaneously wants to use those agents as a voter suppression tactic at the polls. And fear only works as a voter suppression tool if it's credible. If ICE agents shoot people and there are real consequences, meaning real investigations, real prosecutions, then the threat of ICE at a polling place is just a threat. But if ICE can shoot people and simply investigate itself and let itself off the hook, then there's no real accountability at all. And then that fear becomes real. It becomes rational. And specifically brown and black voters who are deciding whether it's safe to leave their house on election day, they're going to take that into account because now they're watching an agency that's operating on a documented platform. That's not a side effect of what's happening here. I think that is the point. Trump doesn't need armed agents at every polling place in America to be able to suppress the vote. He just needs enough fear in enough communities that people who would otherwise vote against him decide that it's not worth the risk. And if that fear occasionally turns lethal, meaning if American citizens and immigrants end up dead in the process, that's clearly not a bug. It is a feature of a plan that they've calculated they can live with, so long as it keeps the right voters at home in November. So no, this isn't like a story about FBI jurisdiction. It's a story about what a president is willing to let happen to actual human beings in order to rig an election without ever technically touching a ballot.