Congratulations, David Brouillette, you’ve convinced me.

The guy on the right committed the latest ICE murder in Maine. Honestly, I might otherwise leave the death of Durán Guerrero for others to cover. And in a way, I still am.

Except that the Associated Press got a nice scoop last night, reporting on exactly how unfit Brouillette for his job. Go read the other details, but here’s the must-see.

Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.

I’ve never been an “abolish ICE” guy. I tend to think beyond a current administration and more in terms of fixing leadership, implementing proper training and guidelines, adequate oversight, punishing officers when appropriate, certainly not giving them a blank check, etc.

Adrastos said just yesterday that ICE should be abolished. I don’t argue against the position, but it’s not my position.

Well, it wasn’t my position …
… but David Brouillette is the last fucking straw. He’s the poster boy for the difference between stated goals and actual intent. We know ICE’s stated goals. Those are the talking points that simpleton MAGA repeat on a daily basis.

Brouillette symbolizes what Trump and Stephen Miller et al. are really after:

An environment where any non-white person (or sympathetic white person) feels uncomfortable living a life in the United States.

Recklessness in ICE job performance, callous disregard in hiring, knowingly unsufficient training … all these and more are features for this crew, not bugs. We’ve known this. Citizen or non-citizen, doesn’t matter. Justified or not justified, doesn’t matter.

From an administrative perspective, a given victim’s life is just a means to distributing fear more widely and deeply among brown residents in general. If this weren’t what they wanted all along, they would’ve made a real effort to improve the situation by now.

They obviously haven’t, because reckless disregard was the plan all along. And it’s a plan they believe in very, very deeply. They will ride with it until Democrats have the power to stop them. The justifications and coverups and personnel shuffles will continue until Democrats have the power to stop them.

One more time for the people in the back:

An environment where any non-white person (or sympathetic white person) feels uncomfortable living a life in the United States.

I selected the “Terrorism” category for this post because this is plainly terrorism.

There used to be a reasonable person’s argument for ICE. The people who want you to still believe that argument more than ever are the people who have singlehandedly ruined it and ruined the benefit of any legitimate function it might’ve served. That public loss is on Trump.

But at this point, the rot is too far ingrained, and there’s no chance of redemption for ICE. Or if there is, what’s left of America’s integrity doesn’t have time to wait around for it.

Melt it down. If there’s a public need to fill, let it be filled later, by leaders who aren’t a goon squad of white nationalist pricks. Accountability from ICE would’ve been nice. Competence and decency in the first place would’ve been better. But those windows have closed. The only reasonable goal left left is to stall and starve it until it can be disassembled.

I’ll hand it to Roland Orzabal from here.

“It’s in the way you’re always hiding from the light
See for yourself you have been sitting on a time bomb …”