The Residents of Minneapolis Are Fighting for All of Us |
For as long as Donald Trump has deployed his ICE brownshirts in the “Democrat” cities he so despises, Americans have been out in the streets, confronting his masked goons and making sure the rest of the world sees what’s going on. One of the first witness videos I saw was in Washington, D.C., in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where my father grew up. A woman espied three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents loitering in the area, harangued them, ran them off their roost, and then followed them around until they finally piled in their car and drove off.
ICE confrontations have necessarily evolved since then, as agents have become more wantonly violent. The New Republic has been chronicling the community response to ICE, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. But one thing we haven’t done, and which I feel compelled to do, is simply say this: I think the people risking their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors are the best of us, and I feel like we all owe them a debt of gratitude.
I’m thankful for all the people who’ve filmed ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s icy streets. Fascism is more a set of aesthetics than it is a legible system of political beliefs, so it actually matters that we make fun of these jabronis—humiliation pushes our lines forward. Creativity is needed, as well. I’ve thrilled to the sight of Minnesotans gathered outside the hotels harboring these hoodlums, banging on drum kits late into the night. And ordinary citizens seem very composed and ready to protect their city. One especially inspiring sight came this week when ICE agents pounded on the door of the Wrecktangle Pizza shop in Minneapolis’s Lyn Lake neighborhood: There’s a “tweet tweet” blast on a whistle, and suddenly scores of people swarm the sorry ICE agents and run them off.
While we should be rightly delighted by these sights, they might be occluding a darker part of this story. The murder of Renee Good has engendered a righteous fury in the people of Minneapolis, but if my friends there are any guide, it’s also sparked genuine sorrow and spiky, persistent fear. People that I know normally to be rocks of confidence are communicating a despair that I’ve never heard them express.
In my group chats, I’ve been told about restaurant workers who’ve disappeared from their workplaces. Those friends of mine with kids have had to go to exhausting lengths to protect them. One told me about how his daughter’s preschool had to close because the Methodist Church that hosted it was tipped off that ICE would be executing a raid on its property that day—the day of the church’s food pantry. And the reason ICE was rumbling Wrecktangle Pizza, I was told, was because the chain raised $85,000 to help area restaurants cope with the strain of their agents’ presence in the city. ICE knows who the most vulnerable Minneapolitans are, and also the ones who’ve done them the most damage, and they are targeting both, with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and the tacit permission of the Trump administration to terrorize.
Minneapolis truly can be likened to a city under siege from a foreign threat. As The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, the Trump administration’s plans to deploy as many as 3,000 ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities would make the occupying force “equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Moreover, they report, it would be “close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.”
This is an important side of the story to tell for many reasons, not the least of which is that ICE cannot deploy enough people to put every American city in check. So for the moment, Minneapolis is really taking it on the chin for most of the rest of us. The reason the streets of my own dense liberal enclave are not ringing out with shouts and whistles is because Trump’s “day of reckoning” isn’t being fought here—yet. When this fight does come to our own neighborhoods, we will have Minneapolitans—like the Chicagoans, Portlanders, Los Angelenos, and Washingtonians before them, among others—to thank for cheering our hearts, deepening our knowledge of how to fight back, and making these ICE deployments more costly.
The people of the Twin Cities feel isolated and alone; local officials have lamented that they are literally outgunned, and politicians in Washington have offered little respite beyond the occasional galaxy-brained idea. We owe a debt to the people of this besieged city. We should take some time to comfort friends and loved ones who are under fire. We should share their stories, good and bad, widely, with an eye toward building a repository of evidence that a future federal government can use to prosecute lawless ICE agents and those who gave them marching orders. In the meanwhile, to everyone putting your bodies on the line in this fight, you have my thanks. And to the ICE agents out there causing violence and mayhem, let me say—from the heart—get fucked.
For those interested in ways to help the people of Minneapolis, there are a number of organizations to which you can donate. Unidos MN has been helping to train Minneapolitans to observe and report on ICE activity and run the city’s rapid response hotline. Take Action MN is constructing a hub for mutual aid groups in the city. Families Helping Families has organized 120 parents to do grocery and rent relief, student transportation, school patrols, and more. Isaiah is a multiracial organization of faith communities that has organized rallies to remember Renee Good. There are a number of national civil rights organizations operating in the city, including the Immigrant Defense Network, the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee. There are a number of legal aid organizations, as well, including the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
I think Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has summed up the past week in American life more succinctly than I ever could: “We are going to look back fondly on 2025 as ‘the sane year’” of Trump’s second term.
Here’s where we left off in 2025: Trumpism isn’t working, ordinary people are being crushed under the wheels of elite impunity, the cost of everything is going up, the administration either has no answers for it or doesn’t care, and the president is deteriorating before our eyes, dogged by obvious health concerns and the slow-rolling Jeffrey Epstein affair. And as the year drew to a close, it looked for all the world that the president—an inveterate telegrapher of his own punches—was about to launch a regime-change war in Venezuela.
When the news finally came, on January 3, that the invasion had begun, it was even more chaotic and loopy than one might have imagined. The U.S. has abducted a head of state on cocaine-trafficking charges, an offense that would not seem to warrant either military intervention or the wholesale destabilization of a state. Trump has given the strong impression that the objective was the plunder of Venezuela’s oil, but that makes very little sense from either a business or an economic perspective—and, in a weird move for an “America First” movement, it will seem to require a pillage of taxpayer money to finance. Meanwhile, the administration’s tantrums have already moved on to other targets—Greenland and Mexico among them.
Just as the nation was contending with the possibility of going to war with another country, one of Trump’s ICE goons gunned down a Minneapolis woman in cold blood. The context of this crime cannot be shorn from all the other aforementioned ones. Everything is connected: Trump’s war machine is seizing territory for his mass deportation scheme (that was another goal in Venezuela); his goons plunder the country’s mineral resources with one hand while abducting our friends and neighbors off the streets with the other (some of them to be sent to Venezuela, presumably). It’s a vertically integrated autocracy—tearing a hole in the heart of the American civic fabric while funneling wealth to his plutocratic masters.
As Trump withers in his dog-wagging fugue, casting about for sundry distractions to occupy our attention while his administration fails to deliver peace, prosperity, or liberty to the American people, the rest of us can cut through the confusion: This administration is a criminal enterprise, first and foremost. These are impeachable offenses, plain as day. They must be treated as such. And a recent report from NOTUS finds that a number of Democrats seem to share this view.
Let’s dispense with the obvious: No, there are not enough votes to convict Trump in the Senate. And it’s a heavy enough challenge to get articles of impeachment out of the House—though the passing of California Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa has shrunk Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority to 218–213, leaving us on the cusp of tantalizing possibilities. But the salient point is this: Given the devotion of Trump’s cult in Congress, there’s no way an impeachment effort will end with the removal of the president.
Do it anyway. The rule of law is meaningless if you only take it up when it’s easy. The point of doing the right thing isn’t to merely experience the catharsis of success—it’s to assert standards, uphold values; to acknowledge the existence of moral authority and answer its call for redress courageously. Trump’s lawlessness has to be opposed, if only because the times demand it. This being an election year, Democrats are in need of some simple ideas on which to anchor a national campaign. “The president is a degenerate criminal, and if you send enough of us to Washington we will bring the madness to an end” is a message Democrats should be sending. Even if an impeachment effort hits the skids, it will signal to voters that Democrats have the political courage to defend our values.
Even a doomed-to-fail impeachment effort offers Democrats some distinct advantages. Remember: Democrats are in a content-creation war with the Trump regime. The news media thirsts for conflict and controversy; Democrats going all in on an impeachment effort sets the table for a feeding frenzy. Frankly, the fact that this is never getting to the Senate for a trial should free Democrats from having to strictly tether a case to statutory realities or tailor it to the austere sensibilities of doddering senators. There’s no reason an impeachment effort can’t be a kaleidoscopic panoply of Trumpian misdeeds presented with an eye toward capturing tabloid headlines.
Regardless of whether Democrats want to pursue the formal impeachment process, the larger idea—to hinder the Trump regime by calling attention to misconduct and lawlessness—is critical to Democrats’ messaging in this election year. Their campaign should be a thorough indictment of the president, the dismantling of his credibility, and the exposure of his every misdeed. Criminality is the Rosetta Stone that translates the Trump presidency, and as I’ve said before, the Democratic leaders of the future should be ready to speak fearlessly about putting the members of this lawless cabal in jail.
So let the prosecution of the president begin today. And if the Democrats, bolstered by that message, win back the House in the November midterms, then they can impeach him in earnest next year. Even Trump himself wouldn’t expect anything less.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
As longtime readers may recall, I’ve always wondered if Donald Trump truly intended to win the 2016 election. Howard Stern asked him why he wanted to take the world’s hardest job when he “only had about 10 good years left before he ‘starts to drool’ on himself”—which now seems pretty prophetic. Weeks into his first term, Trump was already giving melancholy interviews about how he missed his old life. It really seemed that his first presidential run was a goof that went sideways, to the detriment of all of us.
But as for his effort to reclaim the Oval Office? I’ve never wondered why he wanted back in. The second time out, he ran on a combination of desperation to avoid jail, a desire for revenge, and unmitigated avarice. He pretty much ran on a platform of looting the country and punishing his perceived enemies. With the gift of immunity from the Supreme Court, he spent the first year of his second term taking bigger swings at double-dealing, committing more brazen acts of corruption. There are far too many examples to do an exhaustive, let alone authoritative, list of crimes. But these are the ones that stuck with me particularly in a year of misrule.
The UAE crypto bribe: It’s not every day one of TNR’s staff writers gets to compare a scandal to Teapot Dome, but that’s how Tim Noah described the shady dealings that went down between Trump and his shadowy backers from the United Arab Emirates, who—in what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history—made a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which is essentially the president’s personal crypto slush fund. With quid like that, you knew that a sizable pro quo was to come. Sure enough, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of U.S.-produced AI computer chips than it was allowed under the Biden administration. Simple enough scandal to understand, right? Well, as Noah later noted, the business press seems to not get it.
Plane and simple corruption: So, it’s kind of hard to do the whole “nothing to see here!” routine when the nothing is a luxury 747 that your Qatari friends want to off-load on the president. Trump tried to sell this gift as the new Air Force One, a generous gesture in return for all the money the United States has spent providing security for our nominal Gulf allies. The plane became the subject of a long-simmering dispute, as Democrats have attempted to block it from being used as Air Force One. Regardless, as Alex Shephard noted, the debasement in this arrangement exceeded the mere quid pro quo: “Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball.”
Death of USAID: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and their wrecking crew of DOGE bros spent the first half of the year visiting destruction upon the civil service; the damage done is something we’ll all be feeling for a long time. But the most damnable part of their legacy may be the dismantling of foreign aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. A Boston University study found that the agency’s demise had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” wrote the Harvard School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.
Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.
Trump’s Binance buddy gets a pardon: Changpeng Zhao began this year the disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, having done prison time for, as the Biden DOJ put it, “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,” violating the Bank Security Act, and allowing money to flow freely to a host of bad actors, including “