ICE agents in Minneapolis. Is this a police force or an occupying army designed by Trump and his team to sow fear in our communities?
Let’s get real: ICE is not just a rogue police agency. It’s actually a domestic terrorist organization designed to cow us into silence.
Let’s review the last few weeks. Trump sent hundreds of ICE agents to invade the US city of Minneapolis (population 3.7 million) to arrest immigrants. Most are Somalis who fled violence and persecution in their homeland and are living in the US legally. During a tactical operation on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed an unarmed citizen named Renee Good by putting three bullets in her head. In my view, this was murder under any reasonable legal definition. Rather than investigate Ross and hold him accountable, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate her widow for any “ties” to activist groups. It is standard procedure for the civil rights division of the DOJ to investigate police killings that appear to deprive people of their civil rights or are motivated by hate, as this killing apparently was; Trump and his team instead ordered the civil rights division of the DOJ to stand down and not investigate. He also refused to do a joint investigation with Minnesota’s state law enforcement agency, which is standard operating procedure.
Think about it: a federal cop just killed an unarmed civilian in cold blood, called her a “fucking bitch” as he shot her, and there’s not even an investigation from the Department of Justice.
To the contrary, Trump is using the cold-blooding killing of Good by one of his own agents to double down and launch an all-out military occupation of Minneapolis by masked ICE agents recruited from far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys.
These men and women, almost all of them white, are the modern-day version of the old slave patrols. They essentially hunt down people of color to try to have them removed from the country. ICE is amassing more power as I wrote this. It has doubled in size (now 22,000 officers) just in the last year; that’s more people than every urban police force in the country other than New York City. At the urging of Trump, Congress over the summer allocated $150 billion to super-charge ICE and border “protection” more broadly. That includes $45 billion for new ICE detention centers, mostly built and operated by for-profit prison companies that will allow for the incarceration of and additional tens of thousands of people beyond the 60,000 already held by the agency. (For details on the ICE expansion, see this article from Bloomberg.)
The sort of invasion taking place in Minneapolis already has happened in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Portland, and other cities whose multi-ethnic and multi-racial character is a direct challenge to Trump’s conception of America as a white Christian nation.
Many of the ICE agents carrying out the Trump agenda are openly abducting people of color (many of them citizens) from their cars and homes. The purpose is to freak out, intimidate, and terrorize the local population to submit to Trump as our strongman leader. It’s also to divide the working class based on race and ethnicity while we get fleeced by the oligarchs. Terrorism is the wanton infliction of violence to produce fear across the population to achieve political ends. This particular iteration is in service of Trump’s brand of fascism. And it’s happening not just in Minneapolis, but all over the country in Democrat-led cities.
ICE agents are the true threat to public safety, not immigrants in our communities. This is an agency that must be abolished, not reformed.
What can we do about this? It is clear that the Democratic party leadership has gone AWOL; Schumer and Jeffries have so hollowed out the Democratic Party that we no longer have a real opposition force in this country capable of mobilizing popular resistance. These leaders won’t even call out ICE for what it is; they criticize it around the edges.
From The New York Times this week. There’s still some courage left in the ranks of the Department of Justice, but those willing to speak out are slowly getting fired or leaving their jobs.So any solution has to come from the people and the elected leadership in the cities that are bearing the brunt of this illegitimate and anti-Democratic agency. Here’s my proposal: we must hit the streets to force ICE out of our cities and demand that it be abolished. This must be a central part of any political platform for the next national election. A massive rally scheduled for January 23 in Minneapolis combined with constant 24-hour monitoring of ICE operations are examples of how to do this work effectively.
In the meantime, state prosecutors in Minnesota should charge ICE agent Ross with murder for killing Renee Good. More broadly, local police must start protecting us by arresting ICE agents who violate our rights through assaults, shootings and false arrests. In New York City where I live, our new Mayor must try to create a model for the nation along these lines. For more on how ICE agents can legally be charged criminally by local prosecutors, read this recent article by my colleague Marjorie Cohn.
Let’s be clear about the purpose of ICE. It’s not about protecting public safety. It’s about threatening public safety in service of Trump’s power grab. Once we understand that, we can proceed more effectively. 👊👊
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Steven Donziger has spent nearly three decades as a lawyer and activist battling Chevron and Big Oil to protect Indigenous communities and the Amazon from environmental devastation. He secured a landmark $9.5 billion judgment—the largest environmental win in history—but Chevron retaliated by imprisoning him for nearly three years in a controversial contempt case. Undeterred, Donziger emerged stronger alongside his Indigenous allies and now writes on environmental justice on Substack.