Tea at Trianon: Blame Democrats, Not ICE, for Recent Deadly Shootings

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Blame Democrats, Not ICE, for Recent Deadly Shootings

From Chronicles:

In the wake of recent shootings in Texas and Maine, President Trump’s mass deportation campaign hit another wall. Over the past week, two men, one from Mexico and another from Colombia, were killed during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops.

ICE says that both of the two men, Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, were in the country illegally, but that they were not the intended targets of ICE’s operations. Critics have used these cases of mistaken identity to impugn ICE and Trump’s efforts to secure the nation’s interior. In response, ICE temporarily paused vehicle stops across the country.

However, President Trump on Wednesday used TruthSocial to reverse that policy, writing, “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Fatal shootings by ICE, while unfortunate, are rare. Considering the scale of ICE’s operations, the number of fatalities during these inherently dangerous operations has been very low. ICE agents have been making hundreds of arrests each day across the nation for the last 18 months, and ramped up to 2,000 arrests per day in June. Despite the intensity of its operations and the fierce public backlash, there have been only 11 deaths related to ICE enforcement operations during Trump’s second term beginning January 2025. That is compared an average of 800 people killed in the U.S. every year by police and other law enforcement officers. And yet, left-wing newspapers like The Guardian quote pro-immigrant activists about “terrifying new levels” of ICE violence. (Read more.)