No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let’s just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration’s bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio:

MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday to prevent federal immigration agents from taking a local resident into detention, although the city of St. Peter denied the intervention in a statement Saturday.

It’s believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago.

It won’t be the last. But it’s sure to anger the administration, which has already made it clear it thinks local officials are to blame for the two people federal officers have murdered in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.

The person federal officers ran off the road, threatened at gun point, dragged out of the car, and arrested was someone who was merely observing what they were doing. It was one woman in one car and yet federal officers felt compelled to box her in and approach her with weapons drawn. They treated this like a felony stop, as though they were in the process of apprehending a known violent criminal, rather than one person armed with a dash cam and a cellphone.

She wasn’t doing anything illegal. She was doing what anyone could have done: recorded law enforcement officers performing their public duties. Just because ICE et al would prefer to go about their business unobserved (hence the rented cars, dummy license plates, and face masks) doesn’t make being seen by others an illegal act.

Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to tell others to call 911 on her behalf. Federal officers arrested her and drove her towards the Whipple Federal Building, presumably in hopes of getting her on the next plane to wherever the fuck before she had a chance to contact anyone.

But her 911 call derailed this:

“I couldn’t hear what was being said, but within 30 seconds after they hung up, they exited on, an exit that goes into Le Sueur… and then turned around, didn’t say anything to me, and started heading back towards St. Peter.”

The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.

Shortly after that, Chief Grochow drove her home from the St. Peter police station, where the federal officers had left her.

This is frightening stuff. If her husband hadn’t managed to talk to an attorney and if that attorney hadn’t reached out to the police chief, this US citizen might still be sitting in an ICE detention center.

And if that’s not frightening enough, there’s this coda, which makes it clear this administration is willing to punish anyone who won’t immediately try to lick the boots pressed to their necks:

MPR News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident.  A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman’s name, date of birth and “A-number,” or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them. 

What the fuck. This isn’t normal. This is a rogue administration that answers to no one and has made it clear to the federal officers who serve it (rather than the public they’re supposed to be serving) that they’ll never be punished for behaving like violent, lawless thugs. Many more people are going to be brutalized, if not actually killed, by this government simply because they refuse to ignore what ICE, etc. are doing.

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For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about “values” and “belonging” and “bringing your whole self to work.” If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats.

Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the tech industry’s sudden, conspicuous rightward lurch. His argument is refreshingly blunt: this isn’t about ideology. It never was. It’s about leverage.

There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s re-election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.

This tracks with everything we’ve observed about how these companies actually operate. The notion that tech CEOs underwent some kind of ideological awakening—either leftward in 2020 or rightward in 2024—always gave them way too much credit for having coherent beliefs about anything other than what would help them with Wall Street in the long run.

What actually happened? This is where my undergrad degree in labor relations actually comes in handy: because, as Aaron notes: labor economics happened. When you’re in a vicious war for talent and engineers have infinite options, you do whatever it takes to keep them happy. And if that means mental health stipends and letting employees “bring their whole selves to work,” then that’s what you do. Not because you believe in it. Because replacing a top engineer costs a fortune.

Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode, and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning.

The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly intense period in the industry’s war for talent. Hiring exploded. Meta nearly doubled to 86,000 employees in 2022 from approximately 45,000 three years earlier. Amazon added over 400,000 employees in 2020 alone. As Silicon Valley recruiting teams relentlessly poached one another’s people, tech labor had infinite choices and all the leverage.

So what did companies do when a generous compensation package was no longer enough to win over candidates? They instead sold a sense of belonging. Amid fierce competition, many companies realized that encouraging workers to bring their perspectives and passions to the office could increase their loyalty and their willingness to work hard. That, in turn, served the real financial objective: higher job acceptance rates, lower employee attrition and faster growth.

So when tech companies said all those nice things about diversity and belonging and employee voice, it was merely a calculated business decision to attract and retain workers in a brutally competitive labor market. The “whole self” culture wasn’t a political movement. It was, as Zamost puts it, “a labor-market artifact where talent war conditions made employee empowerment economically rational.”

And then the market shifted.

Growth slowed. Interest rates rose. Suddenly companies didn’t need to compete for labor at any cost. And the moment that leverage flipped back to management, all those “values” evaporated faster than you can say “return to office mandate.”

It’s worth asking whether many tech companies’ professed values were ever real. We’ve seen leaders who built their reputations on defying authority become foot soldiers for the administration. The same elasticity informs their rollback of the culture they once championed.

Four years ago, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce boss, said, “Office mandates are never going to work.” He now works from home in Hawaii much of the time while most of his employees are required to be in-office three to five days a week. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would donate $10 million to groups working on racial justice. Last year he rolled back Meta’s D.E.I. programs. Did his values change? Or did the power dynamics?

The answer, obviously, is the power dynamics. And this isn’t a particularly controversial thing to say. The thing that gets lost in all the discourse about tech’s “MAGA turn” is how utterly banal the explanation actually is. It’s got nothing to do with ideology. These are business actors responding to incentives. When employees had leverage, executives catered to them. When executives got leverage back, they stopped.

Zamost makes an important point that may get buried by the rest of the article though: the response to all this from tech workers hasn’t been outrage. It’s been detachment. And that’s going to boomerang back on these tech leaders.

This about-face will prove counterproductive over the long term. In my conversations with tech employees, the result hasn’t been anger at hypocrisy so much as detachment — a loss of tribal loyalty (fewer T-shirts emblazoned with tech company logos), and a clearer understanding of the limits of corporate idealism.

This is the part that should worry these executives. They’ve revealed the game. They’ve shown that all the talk about values and culture and belonging was contingent on market conditions. And employees noticed. They’re not mad—they’re just not going to forget.

And, yes, the cynical among you will say “come on, no one ever believed these companies were serious” and perhaps that’s true. But there was a time when Silicon Valley employees really liked where they were working and really felt like, as a team, they were achieving stuff.

That’s gone.

Labor markets are cyclical. At some point, these companies will need to compete for talent again. And when they do, they’re going to discover that the employees they’re trying to recruit remember what happened. They remember that the “values” disappeared the moment they became inconvenient. They remember which executives lined up behind Trump. They remember the layoffs and the return-to-office mandates and the sudden silence when it actually mattered.

The recent reassertion of managerial prerogative was only possible in an economic environment where top executives could flex their muscles like a boss. It won’t last forever. When labor is scarce again, many of these companies will rediscover the values they abandoned. The question is whether employees will forget just as quickly.

The optimistic read is that employees won’t forget. That this period will serve as a permanent reminder that corporate values are, at best, marketing. That the next generation of tech workers will enter these companies with clear eyes about what the relationship actually is: transactional.

The pessimistic read is that Zamost is right to pose it as a question. Because companies have been pulling this bait-and-switch for decades, and workers keep falling for it. Maybe the cycle just repeats.

Either way, the lesson isn’t really about politics. It’s about understanding what these companies actually are. They’re not movements. They’re not communities. They’re not families. They’re businesses that will say whatever they need to say to achieve their business objectives. And right now, the (somewhat short-sighted) business objective is staying in the good graces of an administration that has made clear it rewards loyalty and punishes dissent.

So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code.

The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

The administration’s racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump’s return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable.

The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process and access to legal representation. Officers grabbed people, sent them far from their home states, and shoved them into planes headed to foreign hellhole prisons as quickly as possible in hopes of nullifying the inevitable legal challenges.

The 14th Amendment got kicked while it was still down when the administration decided birthright citizenship was no longer a thing. And the entire administration simply pretends the First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who says things or does stuff it doesn’t like.

The Fourth Amendment got turned into a doormat last May when the DHS Office of Legal Counsel (usurping the role usually held by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel) told federal officers they no longer needed judicial warrants to enter homes so long as they could semi-credibly claim the person they were seeking was subject to immigration court order of removal.

Now, ICE is coming for what’s left of the Fourth Amendment, as the New York Times reports:

Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

“Amid tensions,” Polish journalists wrote in late 1939. That bit of coyness aside, there’s additional coyness in the memo issued by ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons. There’s very little in the way of legal citations. But there’s definitely a permission slip ICE agents can write for themselves when they head out to terrorize US residents.

Lyons thinks he can redefine legal terms on the fly to allow immigration officers to arrest people without warrants. The memo says “flight risk” (which allows for a warrantless arrest) is not the correct term since it can only be applied after an arrest:

Without explanation, and without any formal policy, ICE previously applied the phrase “likely to escape” as being the equivalent of “flight risk. ” This unreasoned position was incorrect. In fact, there are significant differences between the two standards in the immigration regulatory context and immigration officers should avoid conflating them. A flight risk analysis looks at whether an alien is likely to attend future immigration court hearings, appear before ERO as directed, surrender for removal, and comply with other immigration obligations. Flight risk determinations are made after an alien’s arrest, where the alien has already been identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, and may have had DNA collected.

That’s simply no good for this administration — especially when immigration forces are expected to come up with 3,000 arrests per day. Lyons says (again, without supporting legal citations) that “likely to escape” should be the standard for warrantless arrests, which is a determination agents should be able to make on their own without having to seek an arrest warrant. After all, if they go get a warrant, there’s a good chance the person they want to arrest might be a bit more difficult to find.

While the flight-risk analysis assesses whether an already identified and detained alien is likely to comply with future immigration obligations such as court appearances and appearances before ERO , the likelihood-of-escape analysis is narrowly focused on determining whether the person is likely to escape before the officer can practically obtain an administrative arrest warrant, while in the field. This on-the-spot determination as to the likelihood of escape is often made with limited information about the subject’s identity, background, or place of residence and no corroboration of any self-serving statements made by the subject.

The goalposts are moved. If an officer thinks a person they just happened to come across while performing an arrest with an actual warrant might not stick around to be arrested later, the officer can just arrest them as well, citing the lowered standard of “likely to escape.”

And what makes one “likely to escape” under this arbitrary, completely made the fuck up “legal” standard? Well, it’s a fine blend of “anything” and “everything.”

The subject’s behavior before or during the “encounter,” which covers anything from “suspicious behavior” to simply refusing officers’ commands to let them in a house (without a warrant) or yank them from a car (without a warrant). For that matter, being in a car is all that’s needed to be considered “likely to escape.” (“The subject’s ability and means to promptly depart the scene.”)

Or maybe the “subject” looks like they just may be healthy enough to leave on foot:

The subject’s age and health…

Also on the list: documents an officer “suspects” might be fraudulent (with no demand made that officers attempt to verify documents before engaging in a warrantless arrest). The list also says officers can make warrantless arrests if they suspect the person has violated any immigration law, even though they are not required to do anything at all to seek information that might corroborate their suspicions.

The end result is exactly what this administration wants it to be: a blank check for warrantless arrests that can then be justified after the fact by the officers who performed the arrest. And if they happen to be wrong, they’ll just cut the person loose, secure in the knowledge they’ll never be punished by their superiors, much less held accountable in court now that the Supreme Court has made it impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations.

Given this further erasure of civil rights, one can only assume the coming weeks will bring us DHS/ICE memos declaring the use of private homes as federal operation centers to be well within the confines of the Third Amendment. Perhaps we’ll even see some women jailed for attempting to vote during the upcoming midterms. ALL RIGHTS MUST GO!, says the administration proudly hosting this dumpster fire of a civil liberties fire sale. And once again, the party claiming to make America great continues to eliminate all the stuff that makes America America.

On a recent episode of our other podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike was joined by guest host Konstantinos Komaitis for a far-reaching discussion about online speech. One point that was briefly raised in that discussion was the question of whether AI tools are good or bad for user agency, and since Mike and Konstantinos didn’t entirely agree, it seemed like a good question to unpack in more detail — and that’s exactly what they do on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

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