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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I wonder how that works with a new administration- like the line workers ("agents?") are still there from Obama's time. My little gov agency doesn't really change day to day because the same people are making the same decisions- there may be some high level emphasis change, but you'd be hard pressed to see it.

But ICE: here you were working to do a job you thought good and necessary going back for a few decades, and suddenly you get orders to start tearing families apart? How does an agency geek up its civil servants to suddenly become cruel when they were not so much cruel the day before the new administration? Or is it like cops, "fucking aye, I've been waiting for the gloves to taken off!"

I think it's a combination of your last two sentences. Previously, ICE was purportedly focused on finding people who were trouble -- felons, etc. Like any other government agency, sometimes they were lazy and sometimes they were overeager, and you didn't hear anything about the former for obvious reasons and you would hear about the latter from time to time. But what kind of person goes to work at ICE relative to the alternatives? I'm sure there are a bunch of people at ICE who can get zealous about their job for a range of reasons, and it sounds like the new administration is not only letting them go hog wild (whatever the reason) but encouraging them to do so by setting quotas.