Sitting in a Pensacola sports bar yesterday and a recruiting ad for ICE comes on the TVs. Stark. Gray. Brutalist feel, like a battlefield. Sanctuary cites are incredibly dangerous! Help make America safe for Americans! $50K signing bonus. Scenes of ICE goons arresting farm workers, meat packers, roofers, dishwashers, fathers on the way to work, mothers dropping their kids off at school (I didn't see any little brown kids with cancer, but I'm sure it was implied)...

But what you DON'T see, what is conspicuously missing from this stark gray ad of doom and invasion, is any actual DANGEROUS GANG MEMBERS BEING ARRRESTED.

You don't see it on the news either.

Or social media.

Or from the White House or Homeland Security.

You never see Trump in the Oval Office proudly holding up stills of Tren De Aragua or MS-13 gang members, all tatted up, gold grills, sitting in manacles and leg irons in the back of an ICE van. We caught 120 gang members today! 500 tons of Fentanyl off the streets! Look at all these guns we confiscated! East LA, Englewood, Brightmoor are now safe for little old ladies!

And why is that?

I mean there are plenty of images of people the White House SAYS have some tenuous connection to these gangs, those aforementioned farm laborers and meat packers, but it's always a dangerous secret message My Little Pony tattoo or a couple of gang symbol emojis in a text or something that's the evidence. It's never the actual hardcore gangbangers themselves.

ICE will make a big show of raiding some Korean auto plant in Georgia, but you never see them stacked up and rolling into a crack house or some den of human trafficking (of course, if they did bust a human trafficking network, all the trafficked victims would arrested, thrown into the same detention facility as the traffickers, and eventually deported on the same plane. Ironic, eh?)

You don't see any images of actual gang members being arrested by ICE.

And you'd really think you would.

Anyway, when's the last time you saw a $50K signing bonus for teachers?

~Jim Wright