Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
Five days and multiple government-inflicted catastrophes ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to tell people to get their priorities straight. The Supreme Court had just ruled that Tennessee could ban medical treatment for trans youth, in a decision that Justice Sonia Sotomayor described in dissent as "indefensible" and having "no constitutional justification." In response to that news, Schumer put up a post on Bluesky:
Republicans' cruel crusade against trans kids is all an attempt to divert attention from ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans.
We'll keep fighting and we'll keep marching on.
Apparently someone thought better of it and the post eventually went away, but the reflex had already twitched. Chuck Schumer is one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party because this is how he processes events: Politics is a series of transient messaging opportunities, set up in sequence to position the party and its officials for some real political action somewhere over the horizon. Everything is a gambit or a distraction; nothing is the thing itself.
In this case, the message was particularly absurd. The Supreme Court supermajority is certainly made up of partisan hacks, but those hacks didn't hand down their anti-trans decision to finesse the midweek news cycle to take some heat off the Republican Congress's efforts to pass an unpopular budget. They handed down their anti-trans decision because they took up an anti-trans case because they are against trans people, because they are bigots with a lifelong organized commitment to inscribing their bigotry into constitutional law.
Political sophistication, though, means never facing the facts of the moment in the moment. "For Democrats," the Washington Post wrote in a headline on Friday, "handcuffs are the latest symbol of resistance to Trump." Below it was a photo of the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, suit and shirt disheveled and face drawn, hemmed in and held by brawny federal agents, his arms disappearing behind his back to where his wrists, out of view, were locked in physical, non-symbolic handcuffs.
"A growing number of Democratic officials," the Post wrote, "are being arrested in tense situations with federal agents over immigration, raising their profiles in a party angry with President Donald Trump's policies." The Post's chosen construction—"are being arrested"—attributed the action to the Democratic officials. But what is happening is that federal agents are arresting elected officials.
The city comptroller was seized by the federal agents, most of them wearing masks, while he escorted someone through the hallway outside an immigration courtroom, attempting to keep that person from being grabbed by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers or other agents working with ICE. The Trump administration, aiming to detain and deport as many immigrants as possible, has begun ambushing people when they try to comply with the law and show up for court; Lander has been volunteering with a group that tries to protect the targeted people. He had already escorted someone else that day, and other people on previous days.
This escalated into a confrontation between him and ICE—and led to Lander's forcible detention—not because Lander set out to manufacture the spectacle of a confrontation, but because ICE has put itself into the confrontation business. Anyone who shows up to insist on due process and the rule of law is going to end up clashing with its agents. Lander wasn't there to raise his profile; he was there to raise the profile of what ICE is doing.
If the video of the encounter did make more people aware that Brad Lander is running for mayor, it also gave the country a clear account of ICE grabbing someone for asking officers to show a warrant, and an obvious counter to the Homeland Security assistant secretary and media attack dog Tricia McLaughlin's claim that Lander had been "arrested for assaulting law enforcement." It was McLaughlin who had earlier posted that California Sen. Alex Padilla had "lunged toward" Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, when Padilla tried to ask Noem a question at a press conference and was bulled out of the room by Noem's agents, wrestled to the floor, and handcuffed.
These events were not symbols of something else. They were what's happening: local or Congressional authorities trying to check the federal government and being met by force. In May, Homeland Security officers handcuffed Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, on a public sidewalk outside a detention center in his own city, dragged him inside the fence, and held him for hours, after which one of Donald Trump's former personal lawyers turned federal prosecutor charged him with trespassing. The prosecutor's office later dropped those charges, and a judge rebuked the Trump administration for "a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power."
The Associated Press wrote that the detention center, Delaney Hall, was a facility that Baraka had "been protesting against." But Baraka—and three members of Congress, one of whom, LaMonica McIver, ended up indicted for assaulting federal officers—weren't at Delaney Hall to protest it. They were there because it had been converted into a detention center without the required city permits, and the Congress members were invoking their legal power to inspect the operations.
A month after Baraka was arrested for trying to enforce city regulations at Delaney Hall, officers at the detention center reportedly used pepper spray to put down a revolt among prisoners who had been overcrowded, kept in sweltering and unsanitary conditions, and deprived of regular meals. Four of the prisoners punched a hole in a wall that New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim described as "essentially just drywall with some mesh inside" and escaped.
The fact that the Newark site was genuinely substandard, like the fact that the ICE deportations are real, was not enough to overcome the view that these incidents could be reduced to tactical political maneuvers. The Post wrote:
While many Democrats contend the frequency of these confrontations reflects the Trump administration's harsh law enforcement tactics, party lawmakers and strategists also say they show how leaders are responding to Democratic voters' desire for a robust resistance that goes beyond staid speeches and statements.
Yet the quote the Post followed up with said something else:
"In this moment of time, we have to find our political courage," Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-New Jersey), who was indicted last month for allegedly assaulting two federal agents during a fracas outside an immigration detention facility, said in an interview. "If we let this get so out of control and let so much space for what this president is doing with no resistance, we are going to find ourselves in a place that we will not even be able to recognize this country anymore."
McIver—whose jostling with officers was described by McLaughlin as "body slamming" one of them—was physically trying to assert her legal power against the Trump administration, not just signaling the concept of resistance. The latter approach was bleakly but succinctly demonstrated by New York representatives Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman last week, when they went to 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan in the name of inspecting the detainee facility on the 10th floor. An ICE official named Bill Joyce, wearing a smirk and a tent-like open-collared leisure shirt decorated with a toucan holding a pint of Guinness, told them to go away.
"As Congresspeople, we have the absolute right to inspect any federal facility, including a detention center," Nadler declared, facing nowhere in particular. "You have no right to say no to us. That's a matter of law."
"Well, that's not our understanding," Joyce said. And then, having asserted the existence of their absolute right not to be denied, the opposition-party officials turned around and left.
