Adam Serwer

Unfortunately, there's no way to be 100 percent safe, especially when you have masked armed men who have been told by the government that they have immunity.

These people who are following ICE around, typically what will happen is you will have two people in a car, one who is listening to a dispatcher who is telling people where ICE might be located.

And sometimes a van or a sport utility vehicle with out-of-state plates will drive by and they maintain a database of ICE verified license plates and they'll run the plate.

The co-pilot will run the plate and then the driver will follow the van if it's an ICE van.

And they'll start honking or blowing their whistles to make sure that everybody knows that ice is nearby.

And generally what happens is that ice will eventually give up and go back to Whipple, which is their staging area in the Twin Cities.

But sometimes these encounters escalate into confrontations, as we saw with Goode and with Preddy.

Well, it's difficult because I'm an opinion journalist, so I'm allowed to say what I think.

But most media outlets and the sort of post-World War II objectivity that is the culture at most mainstream media outlets, it's not really suited to a federal government that blatantly lies about verifiable facts.

Every government spins.

Every government lies.

That in itself is not unusual.

Governments from both parties do that.

What's unusual here is lying about easily verifiable things in a way that you can see that it's not true.

And I think, you know, to some extent, it's very difficult within that culture to say the government is lying.

But you do have outlets like The New York Times doing sort of shot by shot analysis, proving that the various claims made by the federal government are false.

I think it's just a very, very difficult information environment, very toxic information environment.

I just think there's no easy answers other than verification.

But like, you know, most people are not journalists.

They're not going to verify.