Lately I’ve been wondering what it might be like for the residents of the embattled Twin Cities to receive one of those trademark email solicitations from the Democratic Party. You know the ones: The sender is Chuck Schumer, the subject line reads “THIS IS THE END,” and the body of the email explains how the gyre is widening and the falcon can’t hear the falconer and it’s up to you to send $5 to hold back the blood-dimmed tide. These are annoying during whatever times we might have once considered to be “normal.” With federal agents wilding on the streets and kidnapping children, to hear our problems reframed as something that we can fix by handing the nearest Democrat the change in our couch cushions is anger-inducing.

I’ve heard and read enough accounts from Minneapolitans to know that they’re feeling little connection to Beltway lawmakers, and that by and large they feel abandoned by most Democrats in Washington. This can only go on so long before something breaks: Ordinary people are showing remarkable valor protecting their communities from a corrupt and violent federal presence, egged on by a senescent and (allegedly) incontinent president and his ghoulish hangers-on. Democrats have the power to recognize this effort to protect democracy, provide it with material support and media cover, and thus knit up the fabric between themselves and these brave Americans. 

Let us acknowledge that the answer will not come with a legislative fix. Senate Democrats held the funding of several executive branch agencies hostage over demands to reform the Department of Homeland Security, precipitating a partial government shutdown, but earlier this week a deal was struck to fully fund those other agencies while only keeping the lights on at DHS for another two weeks as lawmakers negotiate reforms.

One Democratic lawmaker to whom Axios granted the veil of anonymity suggested that Democrats expect the base to “get upset” but believes the discontent will wash away because “then you’re going to have the real fight in two weeks.” Whether or not that period ends with any meaningful change in the status quo remains to be seen. Much of what Democrats seek would merely require various federal agents to obey rules and regulations that they’re already supposed to follow as a matter of agency directive—though enshrining these policies as laws would be a step in the right direction.  

That said, there’s still the thorny matter of enforcing any new constraints that are imposed on ICE and Border Patrol. I hope I’m wrong about this, but by the time all is said and done, I don’t expect much in the way of material change where the president’s paramilitaries are concerned. At best, perhaps, people will see the faces of the thugs who are beating them—though not always, if Schumer has his way. 

I think people, by and large, can accept that when it comes to enacting policies, Democrats have little room to maneuver given their minority power. Moreover, the revival of arguments over the party’s unwillingness to use what leverage it has out of fear that closing the government on a long-term basis will lead to larger downside liabilities is, by now, parlor-room talk. Looking toward the future, Democrats must pivot to combat an even greater danger, which Senator Chris Murphy articulated on the podcast of TNR’s Greg Sargent: “I think if people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.”

Murphy continues:

I do think this is a critical moment. The whole country is seized by what they have seen—the statistics suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Americans have seen these videos—and they desperately want somebody to stand up for the rule of law. So, yes, if we do not make a fight right now, I think it could result in just a massive withdrawal of participation in our civic life. 

And that is how democracies die. Democracies die not often simply by force—it would be totalitarian—but by citizens deciding that there’s no one that is willing to stand up and save them.

Democrats, stymied as they are on Capitol Hill, have a freer hand to act in other venues—to undertake the necessary work of standing up for the people and proving that they are all on the same team. They must fight on these remaining fronts with an eye toward forging a greater connection with the broader civil resistance, providing it with rhetorical and material support. There are a number of ways in which Democrats can interact with those fighting to protect their families and neighbors from Trump’s predations that aren’t subject to a presidential veto.

First and foremost, Democrats should play the leading role in waging a campaign for the truth. In the past two weeks, the media has been suckered into front-running for the Trump administration, presenting a favorable narrative that spins a gauzy story: Forces are being drawn down, and the temperature is being lowered in Minneapolis. None of this is true: Minneapolitans are still living with the same brutal fear they were experiencing before Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was sent packing. People with legal citizenship are being abducted from the streets of the Twin Cities and sent to Texas, where they are released and abandoned without the means to get home. Democrats are uniquely positioned to echo and amplify the voices on the ground that are simply saying that the Trump administration is lying; that its abuses are escalating.  

Democrats should ignore calls to keep their distance from the people who are impacted by Trump’s mayhem. That doesn’t mean we need every septuagenarian lawmaker in front of Border Patrol truncheons outside Minneapolis’s Seventh Street Entry, but being present and visible in any way makes a big difference. New York congressional candidate Brad Lander trekked to Minneapolis to help locals protect their neighbors in the same way he’s helped those in his home state. Joaquin Castro and Ilhan Omar made personal intercessions to return the abducted Liam Conejo Ramos home. Castro personally made the trip home with the 5-year-old; his efforts garnered a ton of well-deserved positive attention from the media. 

Democrats have able-bodied staff, connections to important and influential people, and a bully pulpit. All of these resources can be mobilized to help embattled citizens survive Trump’s onslaught, whether it’s getting more media attention on the daily abrogations of our constitutional rights, helping organizers on the ground with logistical support, or kickstarting fundraising efforts to help the mutual aid organizations central to the fight. They can also bring these efforts home to their own districts: As TNR contributors Ana Marie Cox and Sarah Jaffe separately reported, Minneapolitans were well positioned to offer a stern resistance to ICE because they’d prepared for it in advance. Knowing that the president views any Democratic district as a potential venue for ICE violence, lawmakers should get their own communities prepared for the worst by building the necessary resilience now. 

This is, of course, a midterm campaign season, and there’s no better way to reconnect with those suffering under Trump’s bootheel than to make the solemn promise to hold him and his cronies accountable; impeach them, remove them, forever discredit them, block their paths to power indefinitely. And look, if you’re a one-note Democratic lawmaker who feels like the only thing you can freely talk about is affordability, you too can suck it up and play a role: ICE violence is currently one of the primary drivers of the affordability crisis. 

Recently, Indivisible’s Ezra Levin said something interesting about the kind of email missives I made fun of at the top of the piece. Today’s “political system,” Levin wrote, “largely treats people like small-dollar ATMs that vote every two years. Everybody gets deluged with emails asking for money. It feeds cynicism and burnout. Rarely do you get a ‘help me organize our community’ email.” To Levin’s reckoning, it may not be the case that Democrats are asking too much, it’s that they are asking for “too little.”  

People under tremendous pressure and mortal fear have spontaneously spun up a vibrant civil resistance that puts the lie to so many of the assumptions upon which Trumpism was built. The democracy movement already has leaders. It would be to the benefit of all if Democrats find new and novel ways to join them.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them.

The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.

The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. “Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” the memo bleated. “Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”

This is all written at a significant remove from what’s actually happening in places like Minneapolis or even Washington, D.C.—and it’s no mean feat to be out of touch with a community of which you’re ostensibly a member. To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away.

Here’s a disturbing fact: When Minneapolis parents started putting stuffed animals on their dashboards so that kids could identify safe cars driven by the volunteers assigned to ferry them safely home from school, ICE started doing the same thing. What I’m trying to say is that ICE—from Secretary Kristi Noem down to the lowliest desk jockey—really, really has a fixation on abducting children. This is irredeemable beyond measure.

ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be “cured.” ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we’ve learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.

One of the problems with the argument that this mob of sickos can be retrained into something sane and decent begins with the fact that people misconstrue what ICE actually is and does. Searchlight’s statement, for instance, assumes that ICE is performing the task of enforcing immigration law. But ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It’s a rotted tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people. A real immigration enforcement agency would be operating in places like Texas or Florida, which have large numbers of undocumented immigrants, and not Minnesota, which has relatively few. It also wouldn’t be targeting Minnesota’s Somali population, most of whom are American citizens and thus not subject to immigration enforcement. In addition, a real immigration enforcement agency would have a decent working relationship with local law enforcement. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley recently explained, ICE is impeding Twin Cities cops from doing their jobs—and harassing them to boot.

The road back to a competent, humane, and lawful immigration enforcement agency necessarily begins with the elimination of the agency that’s absorbed all the money to perform those tasks while putting it toward an army of jackbooted thugs who harm innocent people. Don’t want to call this “Abolish ICE”? That’s fine, I’m invested in action, not slogans. Whatever gets us to the point where we’re firing all of the paramilitaries doing enforcement and removal operations, re-vetting all the people doing laptop jobs so that we can fumigate the agency of all its cryptofascists, and perhaps housing the enforcement agency at the Justice Department, alongside a bunch of other lawyers and bureaucrats working on immigration and naturalization processes—some kind of Immigration and Naturalization Service, maybe?—would do the trick.

Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts “Reform ICE” at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit.

It’s no wonder that a pretty broad swath of Democratic officials, from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have reached the correct conclusion that ICE is beyond redemption. Here we have a simple example of people who have seen what this agency is all about and understand what needs to be done. To be out here making the case that an outlandishly malevolent gang of brownshirts can be reformed will require a lot of explaining. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The salient fact is this: What most of us see in ICE are people who are not fit to serve in any governmental capacity, many of whom should probably be in jail for serial violations of citizens’ constitutional rights and lawless corporal violence on the residents of major American cities. If you want sane and effective immigration enforcement that doesn’t shame the nation on a daily basis—well, ICE is standing in the way of that. They are a force for misrule. I’m not going to entertain the stupid notion that any of ICE’s current workforce can be meaningfully reeducated, and neither should you. It’s like suggesting a rabid dog can be retrained.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

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........

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