Elite consensus over the past year is that “defund” and “abolish” language from immigrant and Black Lives Matter activists of the late 2010s and early 2020s was a primary contributor to Harris’ 2024 loss to Trump. Despite this conventional wisdom lacking things like evidence, good-faith analysis, or empirical basis, it has quickly been cemented into the conventional wisdom of the Beltway and the media. The narrative, somewhat awkwardly, requires acting as if we jumped directly from 2017 to 2023, and requires ignoring that at the height of “abolish ICE,” Democrats over-performed in the 2018 primaries. And, at the height of “defund the police” rhetoric, Biden used the wave of George Floyd activism to help him capture the White House in 2020. But the story—and make no mistake, it’s simply a story—fit neatly into a left-punching, elite-serving narrative: Harris was bogged down not by a clearly sunsetting Biden clinging to power, not by veering to the center and thus depressing progressive energy, not by her continued support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but some vague brand association that swing voters had with Harris and anti-police and anti-ICE language in the preceding years.
This elite consensus has been, in large part, pushed out by billionaire-backed groups like Searchlight Institute, Third Way, Blue Rose’s David Shor and other influential liberal pundits. It is in this context one must examine this latest PR effort by center-left media and their allies in law enforcement to contain the populist anger over DHS abuses and their attempt to frame said abuse as an anomaly, a one-off deviation from a narrative of progress and reform after the mass protest movements of the late 2010s and early 2020s. A smattering of recent articles is helping do so by attempting to remove police departments from the broad popular outrage over the recent DHS killings and abuses and, instead, holding these police departments up as the anti-ICE paragons of disciplined, progressive policing that shows what professional reformed policing could look like.
There’s only two problems with this narrative: It’s completely baseless in its assessment of “police reforms,” and it overlooks, to the point of outright dishonesty, the role local police departments are playing in assisting ICE, sharing data, and cracking down on those protesting DHS’ extreme violence. The PR effort seems to be largely led by Minneapolis PD Police Chief Brian O’Hara (or his political allies), who is heavily quoted in all the pieces. Large liberal cities, always savvy to risks of public perception, are attempting to distance themselves from the more extreme excesses of the DHS kidnap squads. But in their attempt to do so, outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, the Atlantic, and the Minnesota Star Tribune are promoting an entirely baseless premise of supposedly successful post-2020 “reforms” and allowing the extreme violence of Trump to launder the reputation of local police departments.
Most aggressive on this media beat has been, predictably, the New York Times, which has published three articles in the last month detailing how ICE and CBP excesses are making MPD look bad and undermining a supposed “rebuilding of trust” and “hard won reforms”:
- ‘A Breaking Point’: The Minneapolis Police Chief on ICE (1/12/26)
- ‘It’s All Just Going Down the Toilet’: Police Chiefs Fume at ICE Tactics (1/30/26)
- Federal Crackdown Means Another Repair Job for the Minneapolis Police Chief (2/4/26)
These Times articles assert, without any evidence, that DHS violence was undermining “years of hard-won progress following the murder of Mr. Floyd” and undermining “trust” won by “sweeping reforms.”
“All the progress that [Minneapolis] had made seemed on the verge of unraveling as tear gas filled the air and enraged protesters took to the streets,” write NYT reporters Ernesto Londoño and Campbell Robertson in another article. What “progress” is being referenced here? What evidence does the NYT provide showing this “progress”? Any studies, any polls, anything at all? It has nothing. It’s simply an assertion the police make and one the NYT dutifully morphs into fact by mere assertion.
Police killing of civilians are up since post-George Floyd “reforms,” increasing from 1,098 in 2019 and 1,148 in 2020 to 1,271 in 2024 (the highest on record ever) and 1,201 in 2025.
In another fabrication—this one about police in the US more broadly—the Times wrote in a subheadline, “Many police departments adopted major changes after civilian killings. Now, police chiefs worry ICE is ignoring those lessons and setting back efforts to improve public trust.” This claim heavily implies there have been improvements in civilian killings by US police forces, but the opposite is true: Police killing of civilians are up since post-George Floyd “reforms,” increasing from 1,098 in 2019 and 1,148 in 2020 to 1,271 in 2024 (the highest on record ever) and 1,201 in 2025. So when the NYT says “lessons” were learned, what were those lessons—that police can keep killing civilians and nothing will change?
The Atlantic, ground zero for liberal Tough on Crime messaging, joined the narrative, albeit with a bit more nuance, with its article “Police and ICE Agents Are on a Collision Course.” This breakdown broadly promotes the narrative of a sizable rift between MPD and DHS and, in doing so, uncritically promotes the premise that meaningful reforms were made post-2020. “With crime settling at historic lows,” the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa writes, “local leaders are reluctant to return to the aggressive approaches that soured relations with the community,” The article does not detail what “aggressive approaches” Minneapolis police used prior to 2021 that they don’t currently employ. But it vaguely sounds like an improvement and fits into the The Narrative, so the Atlantic ran with it. Contributing to this narrative was also the Houston Chronicle (“With brutal tactics and one six-letter word, ICE and Border Patrol have undermined local policing”), the Minnesota Star Tribune (“Roper: ICE tactics threaten to unravel trust with local law enforcement”), and the Washington Post (“The Minneapolis police chief tried to repair his force. Can it survive ICE?”)—all running with the exact same thesis as the NYT articles above: “hard-earned reforms” built since 2020 are being undermined by the Trump DHS’s reckless behavior.
What “trust,” hard-earned or otherwise, are these reporters and columnists referring to exactly?
The ICE raids were, according to Eric Roper of the Minnesota Star Tribune, “especially worrisome in this town, which has been slowly rebuilding police-community relations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.” A similar assertion was echoed by the Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Falkenberg via Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. “Maintaining that hard-earned trust in this current climate will only happen if the law enforcement community remains laser-focused on performing our duties with absolute integrity, common decency and the utmost respect for the sanctity of every life,” said the police spokesperson.
What “trust,” hard-earned or otherwise, are these reporters and columnists referring to exactly? On what basis do they make this claim—a claim that, it cannot be stressed enough, is the entire premise of these articles? Aside from the Washington Post and the Atlantic, which heavily imply but never explicitly assert this “restored trust” as a matter of fact, all of the above articles simply state as established fact that there’s been an increase in “community trust” (whatever this means) post-George Floyd and that subsequent “reforms” are somehow improving the conditions of over-policed, surveilled, and incarcerated populations. But the only source for this premise—again, the entire premise of these articles—is the police themselves. Not a single one of the above articles provides or links to any objective analysis, data, or studies showing these police departments have actually “improved trust” with their communities, much less meaningfully “reformed” since the Black Lives Matter movement began in earnest in 2014 and escalated again in 2020. It’s simply a self-serving ideological assertion from a conflicted party: the police.
The data we do have (which is not a lot) on the public perspective of police is generally unchanged since the George Floyd protests. According to the most recent Gallup poll numbers from 2024, by some metrics, public perception of policing has improved; by others it’s gotten worse. And by most it’s more or less stayed the same. Far from any meaningful improvement, the situation—at best—remains roughly as it was in 2019.
This isn’t meant to totally flatten the genuine differences between local police departments and DHS. They have squabbled in public over territory and PR priorities. But the tensions, such as they are, are being overstated in this narrative by a party—local police—that has every motivation to do so. Local police still arrest anti-ICE protestors, defend federal buildings, and deploy tear gas to defend cages holding people that DHS arrested. Police chiefs in liberal cities are concerned with public perception, not objective reality. They have every reason to paint themselves as the buttoned-up progressive counter to Trump’s lawlessness. This is to be expected—PR is a major part of their job. What’s less clear is why our media has to mindlessly echo their self-serving narrative without any empirical reason to do so.
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