And now, the main event…

Earlier this week, Dan Bilzerian, the bearded hedonism influencer and gun-loving poker chud—no one’s idea of a progressive—launched an unexpected verbal attack on ICE following the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis. “I don’t believe the ICE agent’s life was in danger,” Bilzerian posted on X. “I think he went into the interaction angry & it was a bad shoot. I don’t care if she was a blue hair liberal, this isn’t about the right & the left. This is about government tyranny & overreach. I don’t trust the government.” The last sentence is an understatement: Bilzerian routinely posts conspiracy theories, antisemitic memes, and rants from Candace Owens. Like most occupants of the manosphere, Bilzerian would be hard to pin down on any kind of conventional left-right spectrum. But he said Good didn’t deserve to die. “If you’re more afraid of liberals than your government, then you aren’t paying attention,” he added.

The shooting also caught the attention of Tim Dillon, the right-leaning comedian who advocated for Donald Trump in 2024. “I don’t believe the cop was justified in shooting her three times in the face,” Dillon said on his podcast last week. “These are not well-trained law enforcement people in ICE. They’re not the cream of the crop.” Calling the proliferating raids “performative” and “psychotic,” he also declared ICE agents buffoons who “answered an ad on Craigslist” and wouldn’t be qualified to work security at the mall.

These comments don’t signal any kind of widespread anti-Trump mutiny over ICE on the right, and no prominent Republican has crossed the president on the issue. Still, the observations of these loudmouth podcasters reflect something real in the public mind: The eyewitness video of the Minneapolis tragedy has broken through to normies, who don’t like what they see. This week, a poll from The Economist and YouGov found that a mind-boggling 69 percent of Americans had seen the clip. If extrapolated, that would imply a total viewership larger than last year’s Super Bowl—for a video of a masked federal agent shooting a woman three times.

Of those who saw the clip, a majority (50 percent) said the shooting was not justified. Most say that the ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, should face criminal charges. Only 30 percent of Americans said the killing was justified, putting the Trump administration decisively on the wrong side of public opinion. Importantly, the poll found that 47 percent of Americans believe ICE is making the country less safe, compared to just 34 percent who say it’s making the country safer.

Of course, social media has a habit of perverting and distorting how we understand the world, especially for the journalists, partisans, and political junkies who squabble about current events on X. There, members of the Trump administration—J.D. Vance most prominently—have joined a chorus of right-wing voices to defend Ross, arguing that the shooting was justified and that the “radical left” is out of touch and out of control. Sometimes the MAGA crowd can post so much, and so stridently, that it almost seems like they have a point—except that social media is an epistemological hell, creating the illusion of a consensus that doesn’t exist. In all the confusion, it might take an aberrant scoundrel like Bilzerian to speak up and cut through the noise with some moral clarity. But if the muscle man isn’t for you—well… we’ve got polls. And polls don’t lie.

To say explicitly what is now obvious: Americans do not like ICE. Period. In just a single year, ICE’s reputation has collapsed so dramatically, and so quickly, that it would be a punchline if not for ICE agents’ tragic, real-world behavior. After Trump’s inauguration, ICE had a +16 net favorability rating with Americans, according to YouGov. Now, the agency is underwater with a –14 point favorability rating. That’s a 30-point swing since last January, an unheard-of political collapse.

These overwhelmingly bad poll numbers are an embarrassment for the Trump administration, which has long made immigration its calling card and has allocated tens of billions of dollars to ICE via the One Big Beautiful Bill. Americans continue to trust Republicans more than Democrats on matters of immigration, but ICE’s conduct—captured in thousands of viral videos—has been so egregious that Americans now view it as something separate and more sinister than just federal immigration enforcement. Indeed, the agency is so loathed that 46 percent of Americans now support “abolishing ICE,” YouGov found. That’s right: “Abolish ICE”—the radically toxic left-wing slogan that was once popular only in Bushwick bars—has gained steam in recent weeks. Even 14 percent of Republicans support disbanding the agency. (That said, few Democratic politicians are willing to go there. Even the liberal Minnesota Democrats at the center of the shooting, Mayor Jacob Frey and Attorney General Keith Ellison, are condemning ICE overreach without saying the agency should be eliminated.)

The data—and there’s a lot of it—speaks for itself: ICE is the second-least-popular federal agency, barely beating out the Internal Revenue Service, according to Pew. Meanwhile, a healthy majority of independents in most polls—around 60 percent—disapprove of ICE’s conduct, and last summer, majorities of Americans believed that ICE’s tactics had “gone too far,” according to Marist. My story in Puck last week, digging into how young men are souring on the Trump administration, included polling on Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, who runs ICE. Her favorable rating among young men was at a lowly 17 percent—the same poll number as “incels” in the data set.

Last October, thanks to our polling partners at Echelon Insights, I reported that more voters agreed with the statement “ICE is targeting people who are peaceful and not a threat to public safety” (47 percent) than the statement “ICE is targeting criminals and people who are a threat to public safety” (42 percent). The gap has surely widened since then. And half of likely voters say that ICE should not wear masks or face coverings while conducting arrests in public places—including a majority of independents (52 percent).

That’s something Joe Rogan apparently agrees with, too. In a conversation with Sen. Rand Paul on his podcast today, Rogan equivocated on the details of the Minnesota shooting but said it was a “problem” that ICE agents wear masks. “Because if you get arrested by a cop, you’re allowed to ask the cop, ‘What is your name and badge number?’ And you could film that cop. If you get arrested by an ICE agent, you have no such right. They’re wearing a mask. They don’t have to tell you shit.”

At this point, it seems rather obvious that viral videos are inflicting enormous damage on ICE’s standing with the public. Americans are bearing witness—almost in real time—to their behavior and the human anguish on the other end. Most political stories don’t come with visceral, real-world images that bring them to life for Americans who don’t closely follow the news; meanwhile, ICE’s enforcement actions are constantly playing and replaying on the small screen in everyone’s pocket.

But it’s not just Minnesotans documenting this. Everyday citizens all over the country are racking up hundreds of millions of views with on-the-ground videos, and seem increasingly willing to film ICE agents on job sites, at traffic stops, and even on their doorsteps—even while being threatened at gunpoint. It’s a scrappy, diffuse content campaign against the Trump media machine, which likes to turn ICE arrests into highly produced hype videos that look as if they were produced by an SEC football program.

Indeed, in light of the polling, it seems possible the White House might even be hurting their cause by endlessly promoting ICE. After all, the data suggests that the more Americans see, the less they like. Progressive content creators I spoke to this week reported a surge in views on their posts, and at Crooked Media, home to Pod Save America, YouTube content on ICE overperformed their typical engagement after the Minnesota shooting, staffers told me. At MeidasTouch, the progressive media outfit, co-founder Ben Meiselas also said that views on ICE-related content are surging, thanks in part to a partnership they launched with Status Coup, an independent reporting outlet that’s been livestreaming protests on the ground in Minneapolis.

Magnitude Media, a Democratic media-tracking firm, also found that social media posts on left-leaning pages that mentioned the Minnesota shooting overperformed their usual engagement by 72 percent, dramatically outpacing content on right-leaning pages, which jumped by only 5 percent relative to usual performance. The right caught up in views over the weekend after a new video from Minneapolis surfaced showing a new angle of Ross that, in the eyes of ICE supporters, validated his decision to shoot. But overall, the initial footage of Good’s death had a larger impact, with an estimated 230 million views compared to 170 million for the second angle, according to Magnitude.

In any case, that’s the sort of content—focused on everyday interactions with ICE—that seems to be shaping public opinion. Even a cursory glance at TikTok surfaces videos with millions of views, created by regular people whose accounts you’ve never visited. Here are just a few I found on Tuesday: a federal agent drawing his gun on a protester in Minnesota (14 million views); a California man laughing at out-of-shape ICE agents failing to chase down a construction worker (7.5 million views); a poorly trained ICE agent aiming his firearm sideways like a wannabe gangster (2.6 million views); a construction worker in West Virginia perched on a roof while ICE agents impotently try to reach him from a fire engine ladder (1 million views).

Humor also seems to be resonating. In Portland, an activist filmed an ICE agent who was wearing Vans sneakers with his uniform: “Oh my god, is it your first day? Did you forget your boots?” (“He was playing Call of Duty three weeks ago,” one commenter chimed in.) In Minneapolis, a corpulent ICE officer was filmed running at demonstrators, then slipping on a sheet of ice and falling on his backside. An anonymous TikTokker remixed it with the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme and hit publish. That video now has more than 5 million views.

Mocking law enforcement is risky business for the left, which inflicted enormous political damage on itself during the heady days of Defund the Police. But Suzanne Lambert, a progressive content creator who has styled herself as a “mean girl” lib in the second Trump term, said ICE is a different beast and deserves a special kind of scorn. Democrats have traditionally called out bad actors by claiming a moral high ground, she told me, abiding by standards the MAGAverse simply doesn’t care about. “Our messaging instead has to portray their behavior as embarrassing or cringe, because being laughed at is their greatest fear,” Lambert told me. “So instead of calling them bad or bigoted or bullies, call them what they really are: Huge pussies.”

Of course, mockery isn’t going to stop ICE agents from doing their work, and it might even embolden them. But the communal shaming of the agency, waged with smartphones, has clearly blossomed into something more than just a dopamine hit for social media users documenting the drama. It’s actually changing public opinion—a small reminder of a time, only a decade or so ago, when social media had the promise of bringing strangers and citizens together instead of tearing them apart.

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