Libs Turn Against Bodycams for ICE Agents

While pretending that ICE agents are doing something wrong, liberals stridently demanded they wear bodycams to document their misdeeds. Then Kristi Noem said sure. So now, via Politico:

A push to put body cameras on all ICE agents has Democrats running headlong into a new problem: fear that the technology will provide another avenue for mass surveillance of protesters.

Naturally, ICE agents still manage to be the bad guys according to the liberal narrative.

This happened before, during the George Floyd riots. The liberal establishment screeched that local police were oppressing blacks. Officers were made to wear bodycams, which then proved to the astonishment of our supposed intellectual betters that the cops are actually the good guys.

Body cameras have far more consistently proven that law enforcement acted correctly than otherwise. There’s a reason that Secretary Noem is happy to go along with the idea and why most police departments realized that body cams were a good thing once the impact became clear.

If we didn’t have video footage of [Renee] Good ramming law enforcement and [Alex] Pretti assaulting law enforcement, all we’d have are the lies that the media tells.

If LEOs are the good guys, who are the bad guys, other than the criminals and foreign invaders they risk their lives to arrest? That would be the liberal establishment, its media, and its weaponized mob.

No one cares about the truth anymore, old news gets recycled and is given a new angle, which is sometimes in direct contradiction to what was published previously. The same information, regurgitated and repurposed. That’s when the news isn’t news, it’s propaganda.

The administration was against body cameras.

But of course, blame it on something else.

Both Republicans and Democrats - don’t seem to want body cams.

It’s a political issue within the government, and is not caused by external factors, like ‘liberals.’

This is how D.C. puts the blame elsewhere, not where it belongs, with them - the political class.

Body cameras protect people from the potential abuses of law enforcement, i.e., the state, the government.

It’s not just the devices themselves, it’s the staff in the background that has to maintain the systems and software which the cameras rely on to be useful.

The staffing levels for the body camera system in ICE - have been severely reduced. That makes it inoperable, regardless of whether the money is there to fund it.

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-884522

President Donald Trump’s administration opposed efforts to expand the use of body cameras by immigration officers and sharply cut oversight staffing as it surged officers into Minneapolis and other cities, leading to a series of violent clashes.

Cameras worn by officers have long been central to police reform efforts for this reason. The Trump administration, however, moved last year to slow-walk a pilot program to give ICE officers body cameras, urging Congress in June to cut the funding by 75% and bucking a nationwide trend of cameras for law enforcement.

Darius Reeves, who was the director of ICE’s Baltimore field office until August, said a body camera pilot program rollout had been slow in 2024 under President Biden, a Democrat, and “died on the vine” under Trump, a Republican.

A homeland security spending bill passed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives last week rejected that proposal, instead providing $20 million for ICE and Border Patrol cameras.

Still, the bill - which now faces a challenging route to passage in the US Senate - did not require either agency to use the devices.

House says Yes, Senate says No - problem goes away.

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