Former Republican chairman Michael Steele was enraged Friday night when discussing a recent incident in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials dined at the El Tapatio Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minnesota, then came back hours later to arrest the waitstaff.
“Can I just ask a question … arrest them for what?” Steele asked former GOP strategist Tim Miller. “Did they have a subpoena? Had they identified the workers in that restaurant as gang members or as felons or as individuals who are engaged in other illegal activity in this country, maybe belonging to a gang? You sat your a– down at their restaurant and ate their food, and then you come back with what? Where were the warrants when you looked at that server in the face? Did you know? Oh, there’s a criminal. Let me go check some database because I recognize them from some other, some other investigation?”
“It’s not just the cruelty is the point. It is just the sheer insanity that they think the rest of us are deaf, dumb and stupid to what they’re doing!” exclaimed Steele. “I just don’t understand how that happens, Tim. I mean, I’ve listened to you and, you know, just sort of, just put the right finger on the pulse here about what this really is in this moment.”
“This is a political effort,” said Miller. “And it’s also performative, right? It’s politics and it’s performance.”
“It’s not public safety. That’s not what they’re doing,” Miller continued. “They’re saying that they’re here to go after the worst. And like, they barely even pay lip service to that anymore. You know, if they wanted to, you know, figure out a way to just go after the worst people that had committed crimes here, they’d do it … if they wanted to deport the most people, but with the least disruption to communities, right, where there was no performance in it, what they would do is they would go to the big donors, right? They would go to the owners of, you know, construction companies and agricultural plants, and they’d say, sorry, we can’t. We need to come look at your employment records and go that way.”
“But they don’t want to do that because they don’t want to anger, you know, big supporters of the president,” he added. “So instead, what they’re doing is this, like they’re going into these neighborhoods, they’re going into the communities, they’re menacing people. They want to scare people.”
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