Hmmmm....that's a really useful anecdote for Trump critics to try on the perspective of the people he's winning over.

That was a horrible experience for that woman. So take a moment and imagine how she might react if a bunch of Republicans made this argument to her:

"Actually", virtually no U.S. citizens ever get "taken." under these circumstances. If you look at the statistics, virtually everyone that gets seized in these encounters is, in fact, not a U.S. citizen. Yes, there are a tiny handful out of many hundreds of thousands of such encounters. But the crime rate...I mean, the "seize rate".....is actually incredibly low.

So while you certainly felt nervous and upset when this happened to you, the situation was in reality incredibly safe for you. There was never any more than a trivial, de minimis chance that you would actually "not come back" from this encounter. Yes, you felt really terrified and appalled...but we deal with "facts not feelings" when setting policy. These types of incidents may cause you a lot of bad feelings, but when you live in a complex urban environment with lots of tensions between different policy goals, you're going to have to just sit back and take some "feelings" as long as the facts demonstrate that you weren't in any probable danger of a bad outcome.



How do you think our author would respond to that? Do you think she would think, "hmmmm, perhaps I formed an incorrect assessment of how much risk I was actually in, based on projecting my personal history into a context had an exceedingly low rate of bad outcomes for me?" Or do you think she would be insanely pissed off at the people who were trying to tell her that what she experienced wasn't real, that the fear and anxiety she endured didn't matter because those are "feelings" and not an actual high rate of concrete material injuries? That there existed a set of official figures that "proved" that she actually was really safe in that moment, even though she felt terrified by what was happening to her - and what was happening in her broader society that would allow such moments to exist?