Cory Booker effectively (though indirectly) pushing the argument that the main issue with what's going on with ICE is that the agents are not trained well enough and we don't run background checks because the the department was in a hurry to hire more agents quickly:
Today I’m taking action to bring accountability to federal law enforcement like ICE. New legislation I’m announcing will require ICE to adopt rigorous training hiring standards, and for their agents to wear body cameras. These are best practices used by aw enforcement agencies… pic.twitter.com/zC7dkkMdlU
— Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) January 15, 2026
As has been observed by others on Xitter and elsewhere, Jonathan Good was a 10 year veteran of ICE. He is not a new hire. So what happened there is not some kind of fluke. It has nothing to do with training. It had everything to do with what ICE sees as its mission and the kind of ideology it has become a vehicle for.
Notice also how he treats the ICE issue as if it is basically a management problem. It is not the basic mission of ICE, the culture that developed around it, and the ideology that feeds into its operations. It's the quality of people who were hired to do the job and how the agency is being run. The problem is not in the foundation and how it's structured, but how it's maintained.
Mainstream Democrats tend to look at all our problems through that lens. The economy, jobs, education, DEI, international politics, climate, healthcare, pretty much everything -- our system of X, whatever that X is, is fundamentally sound, except it is being run by corrupted or incompetent people. No need to dig deeper. Once honest and competent people take over, all will be well again. So vote blue no matter who.
THAT is the root of my problem with the Democratic Party and Booker's video captures the essence of what I don't like about its leadership and the mission it has taken on: "preserve the status quo, just run it better". At the end of day, when I look at the party, I keep thinking THAT is what has to change.