The ICE shooting displays the need for equilibrium. But how?

Protesters face federal officers and local law enforcement outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, demonstrating against federal officer activity in Minneapolis, Jan. 9, 2026. The ICE Shooting Displays the Need for Equilibrium. But How? (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)

By ROSS DOUTHAT

It may seem hard to believe when you’re inside the social media cascade, but American society actually stabilized meaningfully across 2025. The homicide and crime rates dropped, finally erasing the surge that began with the George Floyd protests in 2020. Life expectancy began to rise again. Overdose deaths dropped. The suicide rate continued to decline from its 2022 peak. Young people even showed some signs of retreating from the tunnel of a social media-mediated existence. (I am indebted to the prolific Substack poster Noah Smith for his recent list of happy tidings.)

None of this means that the country is suddenly in excellent shape. But the convergence of forces that drove us mad in 2020 — technological, pharmacological, epidemiological — has relaxed its grip a little bit. Health is a long way off, but stability is possible; the gyre does not always need to widen.

The question is whether a similar stabilization is possible in our politics and public institutions. For instance, is there an equilibrium for universities where progressive ideological mania doesn’t return the instant Republican pressure diminishes? Or an equilibrium for public health somewhere in between Faucian highhandedness and anti-expert paranoia?

Let’s take immigration enforcement as a case study, since the tragic shooting in Minnesota has brought that issue to a boil while demonstrating that we don’t need AI deepfakes for maximal polarization. It turns out that people with different beliefs staring at the exact same video clips can convince themselves not only that their interpretation of a tragedy is correct but that the rival interpretation is radical, deluded, monstrous.

But the incredible interpretive gulf exists in part because of a deeper disagreement about the legitimacy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts to pursue interior enforcement and mass deportations. We’re fighting over a shooting video as a proxy for the fight over whether ICE is doing normal law enforcement work or something more fascistic and extreme.

At the moment, regardless of your interpretation of the video evidence, I don’t think there’s a way to establish the normalcy of intense interior enforcement without some concessions to ICE’s nonradical critics. Concessions like agents no longer going masked in so many public situations, or operations being slowed and training extended to encourage professionalism and cut down on harassment. Or allowing a full investigation of any agent-involved shooting before the White House or its agencies denounce the shooting victim.

The administration would presumably characterize some of these concessions as surrender. Longer training would not make the protests stop, unmasked ICE agents could indeed face more danger, and the most reckless protesters might be emboldened by any hint of retreat.

But if you are trying to build a stable immigration enforcement policy, you need backing from the conflicted middle of the country, even if that comes at some cost to your ideal approach. The White House’s aggressive rhetoric suggests a belief that confrontations between protesters and ICE are a 60-40 issue in its favor. I think they could become a 60-40 issue if ICE were seen as fundamentally trustworthy — but right now, if anything, the polling tilts the other way. Which is a good way to ensure that your controversial immigration policy becomes a defunct immigration policy after the next presidential election.

If that happens, it will be the Democrats who have the opportunity to achieve immigration policy stability. They will inevitably be committed to some kind of deportation rollback. But they could end the sweeping ICE operations in big cities and just stop there — maintaining the Trump administration’s border policies and taking any major amnesty off the table.

That combination would send a message that Democrats had learned something from their recent political defeats. It would explicitly seek a third way between Bidenism and Trumpism, and try to match its policies to the public’s (admittedly conflicted) preferences for a sustained period of time.

If the Republican stabilization scenario seems unrealistic because of the Trumpist belief in constant confrontation, the Democratic stabilization scenario seems unrealistic because of the power of anti-enforcement politics within the party’s interest groups. It would take a strong president to impose stabilizing immigration policies on a liberal-staffed bureaucracy — with the more likely dynamic not an immediate return to the Biden debacle but a slow drift in that direction.

Except that culture and politics are not separate spheres. If there is stabilization in one zone, it creates a constituency for stabilization in the other. Greater calm in the American everyday can yield an appetite for calming politics. Like a crown in a gutter, legitimacy and normalcy might be there for the taking — waiting for someone to simply pick them up.