ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota
The state has become Trump's most radical experiment with militarized government.
The Trump administration and its media cheerleaders responded to the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by lying about and demonizing the victim while valorizing the shooter. They also used the event as an occasion to intensify ICE’s actions in the Twin Cities.
According to Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, there are currently 3,000 ICE officers swarming the city. That’s five times the total number of sworn officers who work on the city’s entire police force. They know they can act with impunity in inflicting violence on anyone they wish—undocumented immigrants, permanent residents, and American citizens.
I remain deeply uncertain about what we can and should do about this dawning reality. But there is value in simply documenting it in its appalling details. We need to have our eyes wide open about this as we prepare for more—and worse.
The Evidence
Last weekend, Noah Smith wrote a powerful post about the Good shooting and, more broadly, about what ICE is doing in Minnesota and around the country. The piece contains a paragraph with links to reports of abuses committed against people up to that point:
Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. ... Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. … Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. … Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. ... Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.
Things have gotten substantially worse in the intervening week.
Here’s a video of ICE using flash-bang grenades against protesters and reporters. Here’s a claim that ICE officers are knocking on doors, asking residents to identify the ethnicities of their neighbors. Here’s journalist Eric Levitz documenting how white nationalist memes and allusions have been posted on official government accounts over the past year. Here’s the news that the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over their statements condemning ICE activity.
And here’s the text of an email from Jonathan Oppenheimer, the brother of Substacker Daniel Oppenheimer, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and works in its public schools:
They are swarming our neighborhoods in unmarked cars; pulling people over at random; arresting and detaining people with no warrants or cause or justification other than being brown or black; intimidating people with assault weapons in their cars, at the local Target, and at nearly every immigrant-owned business; bashing out people’s windows after traffic stops and dragging them out of their cars; knocking on doors indiscriminately and asking people for documents or to turn on their neighbors. …
[It] wasn’t real to me until I was seeing it up close and personal. Students of mine crying in my room because they’re scared to come to school. Students not showing up in the first place. Students getting pulled over for no reason and being told their car needed to be searched. Coming to work at a school every day where parents need to surround the premises in case they need to document a student or staff member being assaulted by a paramilitary force and whisked away to a detention center that our elected officials are not allowed to visit.
The Twin Cities Are Living Under Authoritarian Rule
This is wrong. And every American whose capacity for moral judgment has not been addled by partisan derangement should recognize it.
Until five minutes ago, nearly anyone who saw these images and read these accounts about any place in the world would conclude, quite reasonably, that the people there were living under a dictatorship. Probable cause, rights of the accused, the need for search warrants, due process of any kind—ICE is proceeding as if such restrictions on government power no longer exist. These are extra-constitutional acts, and they are now happening on the streets of a major U.S. city every single day. The Trump administration is attempting to turn it into a new American normal.
Call it authoritarianism, dictatorship, tyranny. Take your pick. It really doesn’t matter. The difference between life in a functional liberal democracy and life in a dictatorship is that in the former every citizen—as well as noncitizens to varying extents—has recourse to the law. The law applies to everyone. These laws, along with long-established rules and norms, limit state action against individuals. We all know this. Nearly every Republican knew this and swore by it as part of our national creed until, again, about five minutes ago.
Now—in the past few weeks—the true shape, and vast scope, of what’s happening has come into focus. Not just undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes; not just undocumented immigrants who have overstayed visas; not just the foreign-born parents of children born in this country who are American citizens; but anyone, adult or child, suspected of protecting or harboring sympathy for any of the above; or who dares to protest their deportation, or film the actions of an ICE officer; or who even finds him- or herself driving down a street where an ICE raid is taking place—all of these people (and, in a deep-blue American city, that could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of people) have been expelled from the protected circle of those who enjoy recourse to the law.
Is the United States now an authoritarian regime? At the level of the country as a whole, not yet. But in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, right now, it is. The Trump administration has constructed a laboratory of tyrannical rule and deployed ICE in the role of political vivisectionists.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
A version of this article was originally published at Notes from the Middleground.
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Police, ICE, or any federal agents shooting someone is always a tragedy, always wrong. And I am always against heavy handed government and government over reach. I am a pro freedom, a libertarian democrat . Former democrat anyway, covid made me switch parties.
BUT, I have some questions. If there are lots of illegal immigrants in this country due to Biden's open border policy. How do you get them to go home?
Isn't it a problem when protestors actually impede federal agents doing their jobs? As Renée Good did? Protesting is one thing, impeding federal agents is another. Why is this okay?
Of course, she shouldn't have been shot. But lets be real, don't we all know that messing around with armed government agents, police or otherwise, is a dumb and risky thing to do?
Don't the ICE agents deserve some respect? ( and no, they shouldnt shoot people).
What are these protestors really up to? Do they intentionally promote violence? I have been a protestor myself ( for other issues). Its really not hard to stay out of trouble. I am confused as to why protestors who are more or less inviting violence by hindering ICE agents from doing their lawful job - why are these protestors heros?
I agree with many of your points and would certainly like to see ICE use a much lighter touch. That said, sanctuary cities are making essentially the same arguments that the Confederates and the southern segregationists made, that their preferred way of doing things deserves to override federal law. We wouldn't be seeing such ugly incidents going on if Minnesota police departments were allowed to simply hand over convicted felons with final deportation orders, and the Minnesota politicians insisting upon sanctuary policies are behaving every bit as inappropriately and counter to American principle as the ICE officers in the disturbing footage coming out of Minneapolis. I would much prefer to see the administration pull simply pull a major chunk of federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions to encourage them to course-correct rather than the counterproductive antics ICE is pursuing at the moment.