William McGurn turned his Wall Street Journal “Main Street” column over this week to a simple operation: construct a violent mob from a few scattered facts, pin the blame on the governor who tried to contain the violence, and sweep the federal agency at the center of the protests out of the story almost entirely. The piece, which ran June 1 under the headline “Mikie Sherrill Wrongfully Blames ICE,” deploys five distinct propaganda techniques across its eighteen paragraphs; this column walks through them as they appear.
Protesters descended on Delaney Hall, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark, N.J., this weekend. For a while it looked as though we might see a rerun of Minneapolis, where two people were shot and killed by ICE agents in January amid protests designed to thwart enforcement of immigration law.
In Minneapolis, ICE agents operated without the cooperation of local and state law enforcement. The chaos made Gov. Tim Walz look hapless and incompetent. The newly installed governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, is determined not to repeat Mr. Walz’s mistake.
Ms. Sherrill decided on a very New Jersey solution: Call in state police to set up a security perimeter around Delaney Hall so ICE could do its job. This way she could claim to uphold law and order.
The opening moves are straight from the page’s standing frame kit: chaos versus order, with ICE set as the legitimate enforcer and protesters as the chaos-agent. The phrase “protests designed to thwart enforcement of immigration law” is the frame-engineered relabeling that establishes the apparatus’s standard operating procedure at the outset. The operation begins by converting a federal law-enforcement agency that has repeatedly drawn judicial rebuke — as Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minnesota documented when ruling ICE is “not a law unto itself” regarding compliance with court orders — into the passive subject of a local failure. This is the full-court frame job: the operator supplies the vocabulary, the outlet prints it, and the reader digests the agency’s preferred framing as independent observation.
Notice how McGurn notes that two people were shot by ICE in Minneapolis but doesn’t pause to examine whether those shootings were justified or what the protests were about. The two killings become atmospheric — “chaos” — not a reason anybody might show up at an ICE facility with a grievance. The real difference between the two cities wasn’t gubernatorial spine but who was protecting whom: in Minneapolis, ICE operated without local cooperation and shot two people; in Newark, Sherrill deployed state police precisely to keep ICE from escalating violence against protesters, not to abandon order. The blame is pre-loaded onto the locals and the dissenters, letting the federal apparatus slide by without a single skeptical question. We spent two decades building message-discipline apparatuses that did exactly this — feeding terms like “thwart” and “chaos” into the press wire so the public accepted the narrative before the facts had been verified.
But in her public statements, the governor argues that most of the blame for the violence belongs to ICE—instead of the protesters who came to Newark itching for a fight.
At a press briefing Saturday, Ms. Sherrill alluded to Minneapolis. Clearly she intended to draw a contrast between her decisive actions and Minnesota officials’ failure to go after those who caused the mayhem. “I refuse to let that happen in New Jersey,” she said in her best zero-tolerance voice. And she named those responsible for the violence outside Delaney Hall.
“I will not give ICE a pretext to expand operations at Delaney Hall or across our state,” Ms. Sherrill thumped. “I will not put lives at risk.”
It’s a whopper, but New Jersey being what it is—a blue state whose gerrymandering will only get worse under Ms. Sherrill—no one questioned it.
Here is the projection built atop a strawman. McGurn reduces Sherrill’s position to “most of the blame belongs to ICE,” then calls it a “whopper.” But Sherrill never said ICE is solely to blame. She said she would not “give ICE a pretext to expand operations” and deployed state police to protect protesters from federal agents, not to shield the agents. By turning her nuanced stance into a cartoon version — “in her best zero-tolerance voice” mocking her command without addressing any of its content — McGurn avoids engaging with the actual substance: the governor’s concern that ICE’s aggressive crowd-control tactics were escalating the violence. The ad hominem about blue-state gerrymandering finishes the dismissal as if a governor’s credibility is determined by districting.
The piece deploys a multi-audience-targeting analytic in miniature: the elite reader gets the political strategy critique; the populist reader gets the contempt for Democrats; the political operative gets the tactical lesson. We built this exact four-audience machine. We knew that if the sentence carried enough layers of contempt, no one would notice the foundational erasure: the detainees at Delaney Hall are gone from the equation entirely. The column is about the adults arguing while the building they are arguing about burns, except the adults are the protesters and the governor, and the building is the detention center. The operation redirects the reader’s moral gaze from the federal agents — the ones with the guns, the ones who shot Renee Good, 37, dead in her Minneapolis SUV in January, and killed at least four others in the broader crackdown according to the Associated Press — to a state governor “itching for a fight” over the pretext.
Even though the truth of the violence she condemns is obvious to anyone who watches the news. Whatever one’s views of ICE, it manifestly isn’t the problem in New Jersey. These well-supplied protesters mean business. TV footage shows them stocked with gas masks, respirators, goggles and hard hats. They threw rocks and other objects, and they pushed barricades at the state troopers and police. Federal and local police made between two dozen and four dozen arrests.
“The truth of the violence she condemns is obvious to anyone who watches the news” — this is the classic appeal to the invisible consensus. If the reader does not see the truth the way the author sees it, the reader is either outside the addressed audience or intellectually compromised. The piece then supplies the Bandura advantage-comparison mechanism of moral disengagement: by focusing on the protesters’ optics, the column distracts from the ICE apparatus’s operational optics — the baton use condemned by multiple independent outlets, the lethal force that drew judicial condemnation, and the agency’s documented history of non-compliance with federal courts. McGurn lists protective gear as if gas masks and hard hats are weapons rather than standard responses to chemical agents and crowds. The equipment on the protesters becomes the central evidence of threat, while the lethal capacity of the federal agents is rendered invisible by the very prose that claims to describe the threat.
One of these was Nicholas Scelfo. During the protests he was filmed by independent journalist Nick Sortor screaming at ICE agents: “Your children, your wife—all dead! I have your face, m—f—! You’re dead! Dead!” Within 24 hours the Federal Bureau of Investigation had Mr. Scelfo in custody thanks to facial recognition technology.
In a Friday tweet announcing the arrest of another protester, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche included photos of bloody bites the man allegedly inflicted on ICE officers. “These riots are clearly not ‘peaceful protests’ as you can see from the photos of these horrific wounds,” Mr. Blanche said.
Still Mr. Sherrill sticks with her narrative that the unrest is due to officers trying to enforce the law rather than protesters defying the law.
Now McGurn builds the mob. The technique is selective amplification: pick the single worst actor, repeat his words at length, and let him stand in for the thousands. We who built versions of this know the move intimately. A single unhinged voice played on a loop eclipses every clergy member in a collar, every family holding a sign, every legal observer. Scelfo’s vile threats are documented and require no defense — his conduct is indefensible. But the column uses the outlier conduct of individual protesters to retroactively justify the systemic aggression of the federal apparatus. It is a bait-and-switch: point to the worst protester to stand in for the entire demographic, then point to that demographic to justify the worst enforcement.
Then McGurn imports the acting attorney general’s photos and statement — and, crucially, Blanche is a Trump appointee whose institutional interest is in defending ICE. The bites, even if real, don’t answer whether the majority of protesters were peaceful or whether police baton charges provoked the clashes. The effect is a classic anecdote gallop: overwhelm the reader with shocking details so the structural question — were conditions at Delaney Hall serious enough to generate this protest? — gets buried. The biting man and the screamer are treated as the definitive representatives of the people who came to Newark because of the maggots in the food, the conditions reported by the inmates, the deaths in Minneapolis, and the broader crackdown. The column treats the protesters’ violence as a license for the agency’s violence, ignoring the staggering asymmetry of scale, state power, and lethal intent.
It doesn’t pass the straight-face test. The longer the unrest goes on, the harder it will be to maintain the fiction that ICE is the bad actor here.
The irony is that it’s the protesters themselves who are exposing this fiction. No one still believes these protests are driven by the horrible treatment of those detained at Delaney. A few days ago we were all talking about the protesters’ claim that maggots were in the food served to inmates, which Homeland Security denied. It is also becoming clear ICE isn’t the only enemy for the protesters. Over the weekend they happily did battle with the New Jersey police Ms. Sherrill called in to protect protesters from ICE.
This may be a clever way not to offend the Democratic base, but the protesters don’t have much patience for the democratic process—or the Democratic Party. They are interested in chaos, as their actions make perfectly clear. They enjoy the protests. They enjoy clashing with police. Does anyone think they care about the quality of food or medical attention inside Delaney Hall? The last thing they want is a political compromise that would take them off the streets.
Here the operation amputates the protesters’ grievance entirely. McGurn asserts without evidence that “no one still believes these protests are driven by the horrible treatment of those detained at Delaney.” His proof is that Homeland Security denied the maggot claim. The denial of one specific allegation does not mean detainee conditions are acceptable, nor that people wouldn’t protest them. It’s an asymmetric standard deployed without shame: the detainees’ charges are dismissed on the agency’s say-so, while the agency’s denials are treated as terminal fact.
Then the pivot into psychology-of-the-protester invention. “They enjoy the protests. They enjoy clashing.” “Does anyone think they care about the quality of food?” This is a propaganda maneuver that absolves the state by pathologizing the crowd. We used this exact play when the cable years required the network to flatten working-class anger into irrational resentment. The author cannot engage with the maggots in the food report, so the piece invents a psychological state — they’re here for the fun of rioting — to explain why the crowd refuses to accept the state’s denial without further investigation. “Happily did battle” reframes the clash as voluntary entertainment, erasing the possibility that protesters were defending themselves against a police line that, by multiple accounts, was aggressive. It treats the denial by Homeland Security as the terminal proof and the protester’s grief over conditions in the cage as entertainment-seeking behavior. The move transforms a civic action into a pathology. And the final sentence — “protests aren’t peaceful” — seals it. By that logic, any protest that involves any clash is not peaceful, which would delegitimize virtually every significant protest movement in American history. The effect is to absolve the state of any obligation to de-escalate or to address the underlying grievances. It’s a clean, chilling technique: deny the conflict, blame the victims, declare the system innocent.
So here is what the column actually does when you move its pieces back into place.
It builds a false picture of a violent, irredeemable mob from a handful of extreme incidents, then uses that picture to erase the reason people were in Newark in the first place: a federal detention facility under scrutiny for mistreatment, a governor trying to prevent a deadly escalation, and a crowd that included families, clergy, and legal observers. The column’s job is to make you forget the detainees. Forget the conditions. Forget the batons. And remember only the screaming man and the bite mark. That is how you sanitize an agency that shot Renee Good dead in her Minneapolis SUV; four other lives extinguished across six months of the enforcement surge; and the uncounted souls inside Delaney Hall chewing maggot-infested meals.
The mob you’re being shown is a product, assembled to keep the camera off the men in riot gear holding the batons. The permission structure the column erects is not subtle. Read in plain light, what it really says is this: enforcing immigration law requires violence, any attempt to constrain that violence is a lie, and anyone who protests is a criminal who deserves whatever force arrives. That is a mirror held up to the page itself — not a defense of law and order, but a defense of lawlessness by the institution the page is committed to protecting. The governor who tried to keep the peace gets smeared as the author of chaos. The protesters who came with a grievance get smeared as thrill-seekers. The lie is not that the protesters threw rocks or screamed obscenities. The lie is that the rocks and the obscenities are the primary story. The lie is that the federal apparatus is innocent of the violence it brings when it cages human beings, feeds them filth, and executes them in their cars. The Journal sells the reader a world where the only crimes are the ones the people commit against the state, and the state’s crimes against the people are simply law and order, properly administered. It is a license for cruelty, sold in the guise of keeping the peace.
— Phukher Tarlson