Amanda Marcotte over at Salon just cranked out another masterpiece of left-wing fiction titled New ICE boss, same old lies. In it, she basically says Markwayne Mullin is no different from Kristi Noem, just a guy version, and that nothing has changed at ICE except the PR spin.

According to her, it is all Trump and Stephen Miller’s evil plot for ethnic cleansing, and those poor ICE agents are just sadistic bullies picking on people.

Give me a break.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed in Houston after an ICE stop last week. Marcotte turns it into proof that ICE is a rogue death squad full of unqualified hotheads. She whines about no body cams, cover-ups, and how undocumented status is basically nothing worse than a speeding ticket. The usual script.

Marcotte also brings up two other fatal shootings from last year. Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Yes those deaths are tragic. But treating every use of force as proof of systemic evil while ignoring the dangerous situations agents face daily from people resisting lawful stops is dishonest. Context matters.

Here is what actually happened in Houston. ICE agents were trying to arrest someone else. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was in the country illegally, was driving a work van full of “passengers.” Agents tried to stop the van. According to ICE, Araujo rammed their vehicle and tried to run over an officer, so the agent shot him in self-defense. Araujo died later. The passengers tell a different story, and there is no body camera footage yet. That is the entire incident Marcotte uses to claim ICE is a bunch of sadistic killers running wild.

But Marcotte likes to ignore the truth which is, we have laws. People who dismiss them create situations that end badly. ICE agents are out there doing a dangerous job that most keyboard warriors like Marcotte would never have the guts to do. She’s a bitter, ungrateful shrew.

Marcotte loves painting ICE as full of violent losers who could not get real jobs. Classic elitist smear. These guys deal with resistance ambushes and people who do not want to follow the rules every single day. But to her, they are all cartoon villains because it fits the narrative that securing the border is somehow racist authoritarianism.

She even drags in white supremacist recruitment nonsense and acts like Mullins’ changes are fake. Come on. What never changes is the left’s stubborn refusal to accept that borders matter. You can feel sympathy for a family that loses someone. That is human. But turning it into Trump’s ethnic cleansing while glossing over decades of illegal presence strained communities crime by some repeat offenders and the fentanyl pouring across? That is not compassion. It’s propaganda.

And then Marcotte pulls out the real winner. She claims ICE recruitment materials are soaked in white supremacist slogans. According to her and some Colorado memo, words like homeland, heritage, and invasion are secret Nazi dog whistles. Oh Lord.

As the Intercept reported in May, ICE recruitment materials are so ugly that Colorado’s state law enforcement warned DHS that it could attract “violent extremists” because it mirrors “popular white supremacist rhetoric and imagery.” Mullin blew off the criticism in June, saying these were just words, not “facts.” But that is flat-out false. The Colorado memo clearly laid out the facts, tracing how slogans used in ICE recruitment materials originate with white nationalist groups, Nazi Germany and the KKK. – Salon

Marcotte acts like some Colorado desk jockey wrote the definitive report proving ICE is recruiting Nazis because they used the phrase protect our homeland.

This is peak left-wing derangement. They have spent years calling everything from milk to country music racist, and now basic support for immigration enforcement is white nationalist rhetoric.

Sorry, Amanda, but wanting America to have borders does not make someone a Nazi. It makes them a normal person who lives in reality.

While Amanda Marcotte over at Salon is busy spinning her usual sob stories about poor immigrants and evil ICE agents, actual elected Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud. Take Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who just posted this on X right after the Houston incident:

Disband ICE. Melt ICE. However you want to say it.

There’s no reason for ICE to exist as it exists. pic.twitter.com/Msn5SWSTmL

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) July 12, 2026

There you have it. Marcotte tries to dress up her attack on ICE with fancy talk about moderation and recruitment memos, but Jayapal and her crowd make the real goal crystal clear. They do not want ICE to exist at all. They would rather melt the agency than fix any problems with it. That is the honest left-wing position Marcotte is dancing around. Americans see it for what it is; a dangerous desire to leave our borders wide open with zero enforcement.

Americans voted for border security. We want secure borders, legal immigration that makes sense, and agencies that actually enforce the law instead of waving people through. Mullins’ job is not to make Salon writers happy. It is to fix the mess. More training, better transparency and focusing on threats first? Fine. But the core mission does not change because some columnist has a meltdown.

Feature Image: AI-generated illustration.