Officials in the Trump administration insist its surges of federal agents into Democratic-led cities are necessary to round up undocumented immigrants, but the agents’ mission increasingly looks as if it is to frighten opponents of the administration into submission. But instead of submission, they appear to be sparking deeper and deeper opposition. Since agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have broken out across the nation. Federal agents in Minnesota have responded by increasing their violent attacks, many of which have involved U.S. citizens and have been captured on video: agents breaking into a home with weapons drawn, a teenager dragged away from his job, agents guarding a restroom at Target, engaging in door-to-door searches without warrants, using illegal chokeholds, dragging people out of their cars. Confronted with footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told ProPublica reporters Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk: “Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities.” On Air Force One Sunday evening, Trump cut to the heart of MAGA’s attacks on those resisting ICE when, speaking about Renee Good, he told reporters: “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.” Luke Broadwater and Katie Rogers of the New York Times noted the response of Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to Trump’s comment. Raskin recalled that the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, “violently attacked police officers and called them everything from traitors to pigs to racial epithets, and ruthlessly taunted them and maligned them for hours,” and yet Trump pardoned them. Raskin concluded that “Donald Trump’s very dubious characterization of Renee Good as having been disrespectful is not only factually suspect, but it’s legally irrelevant. The police do not have the right to shoot people in the head because they consider them having acted in a disrespectful way. That legal standard would have led to a slaughter on January 6.” In The Atlantic yesterday, David Frum explained that the administration’s attacks on Good are not at all a true defense of law and order. “For MAGA America,” he wrote, “ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence.” ICE’s social media accounts celebrate videos of armed agents hurting unarmed nonwhite men and women who are then shown weeping, pacing, or with their head in their hands in a jail cell. Most of the situations the videos show, Frum writes, could be managed “with a couple of plainclothes officers bearing holstered sidearms.” But the point is not to enforce the law; “[t]he point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets.” Frum notes that ICE has lowered its standards to fit the deportation targets White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has announced, lower standards that have increased the numbers of untrained and violent agents on the streets, but Frum attributes much of the violence of ICE to the fact that “its main purpose has become theatrical…. ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.” Frum argues that the violence shows MAGA that a government they control is demanding respect from those overeducated coastal elites they think get too much respect. By punishing Good rather than letting her drive away, Ross made sure she didn’t get away with disrespecting him. The scenes ICE is performing seem to be the logical outcome of the idea of cowboy individualism Republicans have pushed since the 1980s: white men reclaiming the government they insist has been corrupted by Black Americans, women, and people of color and using the power of that government to defend the “real” America. In that scheme, anyone resisting the government is not showing proper subservience and is anti-American by definition. But the protests against ICE have created a problem for the MAGA ideology. Key to the idea of the individualist man as a real American is that he will protect white women. And yet white women are among those standing in the front lines against Trump, and now an ICE agent has killed one. On Sunday, David Marcus of Fox News warned that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.” He claimed that those people organizing to protect their neighborhoods from ICE may be “criminal conspiracies.” He complained of “self-important White women” protesting “with a weird and disturbing glee.” He seemed to threaten them by warning: “if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want…, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die.” On Monday, Will Cain of the Fox News Channel echoed Marcus, saying: “There’s a weird kind of smugness...in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.” That idea that anyone challenging MAGA government is anti-American—even, perhaps, white women—helps to explain the Department of Justice’s decision not to investigate the shooting as an attack on Good’s civil rights, but instead to consider it as an assault on a federal officer. It is investigating not the shooting but the ties of Good and her widow to local activists. This continued attempt to blame Good for her own murder has led to the resignations of at least six career prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Reality is crumbling the MAGA fantasy that their leaders could fix the United States if only they purged it of their opponents and stripped away the laws and governmental systems those opponents have created over decades. Americans are demonstrating that they do not want to answer to ICE and CBP agents, decked out as if they are a war zone while parading in groups through the suburbs, cosplaying as military heroes. Rather than seeming as if they deserve respect, they look both lawless and foolish. Rather than hiding, Americans are forming squads to alert neighborhoods to their presence, escorting children to and from school, and helping feed neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes. An Economist/YouGov poll released today shows that only 43% of American adults oppose abolishing ICE, while 46% support abolishing ICE. Popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, today likened ICE to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police. Yesterday, the state of Illinois sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “unlawful and dangerous tactics” agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used in what the administration called “Operation Midway Blitz.” Illinois officials noted that federal immigration agents have enforced immigration laws in Illinois for decades without significant effect on public order or public safety. Now things have changed. Illinois attorney general Kwame Raoul said: “Border Patrol agents and ICE officers have acted as occupiers rather than officers of the law. They randomly, and often violently, question residents. Without warrants or probable cause, they brutally detain citizens and non-citizens alike. They use tear gas and other chemical weapons against bystanders, injuring dozens, including children, the elderly and local police officers.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker said their actions have undermined constitutional rights and threatened public safety. Minnesota and the state’s two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, also sued the Trump administration yesterday. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison called the federal immigration operation that began on January 6 “a federal invasion.” “These poorly trained, aggressive and armed agents of the federal state have terrorized Minnesota with widespread unlawful conduct.” “Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump posted on social media, revisiting the fact-free refrains of his rallies. “All the patriots of ICE want to do is remove them from your neighborhood and send them back to the prisons and mental institutions from where they came, most in foreign Countries who illegally entered the USA though [sic] Sleepy Joe Biden’s HORRIBLE Open Border’s Policy. Every place we go, crime comes down. In Chicago, despite a weak and incompetent Governor and Mayor fighting us all the way, a big improvement was made. Thousands of Criminals were removed! Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people. FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Today, as Trump visited a Michigan Ford plant, 40-year-old T.J. Sabula, a United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker, shouted “pedophile protector” at him in reference to the administration’s cover-up of the Epstein files. Trump responded by giving him the finger and mouthing “f*ck you, f*ck you.” Sabula told Natalie Allison and Dan Merica of the Washington Post that he has been suspended from work pending an investigation, but that he has “definitely no regrets whatsoever.” — |
