I don't doubt this, but it's interesting that "morale" is only explicitly invoked when it's down. I don't recall the Trump admin, or its supporters, explicitly saying during his presidency that morale at ICE was up, or high. (The people saying that were generally criticizing it.)
To be clear the “morale is only invoked when it’s down because the line employees don’t agree with the policies” thing is also 100 percent true on the dovish side of the bureaucracy, e.g. refugee and asylum officers under Trump.
!! I stand corrected: When Homan left ICE in 2018, then-Secretary Nielsen noted that morale at the agency was at its highest since 2010. dhs.gov/blog/2018/04/3…
The 2010 date is interesting to me personally, as that's the year the ICE union issued a vote of no-confidence in then-Director John Morton for issuing a first-of-its-kind memo instructing agents to de/prioritize certain types of unauthorized immigrants in enforcement.
So depending on timing, either morale was high _despite_ a total lack of confidence in leadership, or morale was high and then suffered a sudden and catastrophic turnaround from which it didn't recover until a year after Trump came into office.
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I do, FWIW, think the first clause of that tweet is important. "Kids in cages" was a meme that referred to several different specific policies/events/periods, and also served as a catch-all for the ~feeling~ that Trump admin was abusive toward asylum seekers.
Lifting up this counterpoint which I think is arguably correct but also goes to show the elasticity of the phrase
It deserves saying explicitly, both because it’s not the way things have gone for the last four years and because it’ll help with critical news consumption: we’ve had very near 24 hours of talk from the WH _about_ what’s in these EOs, but we haven’t actually seen text yet.
That means not just that reporters don’t have ability to assess likely efficacy of EOs, or notice anything the WH doesn’t want to draw attn to, but that we can barely even use our own words and be sure we’re describing them accurately—which means it’s very hard to de-spin them.
FULL TEXT of border/asylum EO--posting before reading, for benefit of those who didn't get the email (1-4 of 8)
-Staff journalists don’t get paid to tweet, but to produce content for our brands.
-There are lotsa downsides to breaking news by tweet (but contextualizing it means getting “scooped” by someone just tweeting it out)
-Non-journos are out here tweeting like they’re journos anyway
I limited replies to this bc last bullet point is guaranteed, on this hell site, to get misconstrued as snooty credentialism. That’s not what I mean. I mean specific folk who act as if they’re breaking news, w/o any structure for accountability for if they are wrong or spinning.
And to be clear this is not supposed to be my Contribution To The Discourse About Whether Journalists Should Tweet. I find that whole thing to be totally ludicrous, as a journalist who got my career mostly through tweeting. This is me being annoyed with a different dynamic.
80 pages of introduction and Emily Wilson failed to prepare me for just how much I would want to punch Telemachus in the nose
The thing about hearing Nestor say that Telemachus talks like Odysseus, before we’ve heard from Odysseus directly, is that I’m starting to wonder if Odysseus really is as clever as y’all say
(This is not a full tweeting-along-with-reading thread, just a talking-smack-about-Telemachus thread)
The storming of the Capitol really highlighted how both @nytimes and @washingtonpost’s visual teams have come of age on second-draft-of-history stuff. Well done both.
(No I have not fully articulated the second-draft-of-history thing; seems like the kind of thing I would do in a paid talk, tho)
(Come to think of it, if someone forced me to do this it would probably force me to talk in public about my tattoo...just saying)