Trump’s War on America |
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis last week, unleashing a wave of anti-ICE protests and sentiment throughout Minnesota and the rest of the United States.
On Wednesday evening, federal immigration agents shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, adding to the tension in the Twin Cities. President Donald Trump threatened to send in troops to crush the unrest.
“What should be very clear to all Americans now is that there is no way to wage war on ‘illegal immigration’ without also waging war on American citizens,” says Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington examines how the Trump administration’s brutal deportation agenda is unfolding in Minnesota, sparking national backlash and renewed demands to abolish ICE; the historical legacy of immigration enforcement in the U.S.; and the administration’s racist vision of reshaping American society.
First, Minnesota Public Radio reporter Jon Collins shares an update on the Trump administration’s siege. “The national audience needs to understand this is not just unrest, this is not just protests. … This is an invasion,” says Collins. “The justification from this administration, the way that they’re portraying what’s happening here in Minnesota — it almost turns on its head how we think about our constitutional rights in this country. Instead of protecting the citizens from the government, what they’re arguing for is protecting law enforcement from any transparency, from any accountability to the people.”
“The biggest organization of terror in this moment is the Department of Homeland Security,” says Rep. Delia Ramirez, who shared exclusively with The Intercept that she is introducing legislation to limit the use of force by DHS agents.
The Illinois congresswoman described the bill as the “bare minimum” to curb DHS’s abuses, calling for Democrats to use the appropriations process to “hold” funding to the agency and ultimately dismantle it.
“Every single Democrat and every single Republican should be able to sign on to this bill,” says Ramirez. “Because it’s basic, bare minimum, and not signing on is indicating that you’re OK with what’s happening on the streets.”
“What we’re seeing today has a long history,” says Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois Chicago. Federal immigration agencies’ budgets depend “on apprehensions, detentions, and deportations.” That “institutional imperative,” he says, “is going to lead to all kinds of problems, including incredible discretionary authority … and tremendous abuses.”
Serwer points out “the violence that you’re seeing that federal agents are engaging in against observers, against activists, not just against immigrants, is a reflection of [an] ideological worldview. Which is that those of us who do not agree with Donald Trump are not real Americans and are not entitled to the rights that are due us in the Constitution, whether or not we have citizenship.” He adds, “The truth is, a democracy cannot exist when it has an armed uniformed federal agency who believes that its job is to brutalize 50 percent of the country.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
ICE Invades the Twin Cities
Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.
Since ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good last week, the Trump administration has deployed about a 1,000 more immigration agents to the Minneapolis area. That’s on top of the roughly 2,000 federal agents already in the area to conduct the “largest immigration operation ever,” according to Trump administration officials.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar: There are like 600 sworn-in officers in Minneapolis, and 550 or so in St. Paul. The ICE agents are literally overwhelming our own police force.
JW: As the city becomes the latest target of the administration, yet again, we see a wave of videos on social media showing heavily armed masked immigration agents tackling, dragging, shoving, and intimidating people.
Sound of tape from ICE arresting Jose Roberto Beto Ramirez: [Whistle sounds] Let them scan your face. … Why did you hit him? No. [Screaming.]
Sound of tape of federal immigration agents tackling Target employee:
Unknown speaker: What’s your name?
Johnny Garcia: Johnny Garcia. Jonathan Aguilar Garcia. … I’m a U.S. citizen.
Sound on tape of ICE carrying a woman from her vehicle: I’m autistic, and I have a brain injury! Put me down! I was just trying to get to the doctor …
Sound on tape from Noah and Judy Levy’s ICE encounter:
Unknown agent: Hello, Judith.
Judy Levy (SOT): Do not threaten me. … God bless you.
Judy Levy: And as more people started showing up and people were honking their horns and making a commotion, they started driving away. So we started following, and they led us to our house.
JW: That last clip is of Noah and Judy Levy, a St. Paul couple who were observing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The Levys were speaking to Minnesota Public Radio reporter Jon Collins. He joins me now to talk about the latest from the Twin Cities.
Jon, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Jon Collins: Thanks so much for having me,
Jessica Washington: Jon, we just heard a clip of your interview with a couple from St. Paul, Minnesota, telling you about their encounter with immigration agents on the street the day before Renee Good was killed. Can you tell us more about that interaction?
JC: We had heard many different accounts from observers that they were being intimidated by ICE and other federal agents. And so I tried to track down some of the people who had direct experiences with it, and these are some of the folks who were willing to talk on the record.
They told me they went out. They heard there was a caravan of ICE agents staging in a vacant parking lot near their home. They went out with other neighbors. What typically happens happened — which is that the ICE agents stopped the observers, they surrounded the cars, they started yelling at them, they threatened them with arrest, that sort of thing. But the Levys, in this particular case, after this incident, after they were stopped, kept following. And one of the officers had come up to Judy’s window and scanned her license plate, took pictures of her, of course, and then said, “Hello, Judith.”
So that’s when they first realized that the feds were using some sort of tool to identify them, but they didn’t know the extent of it because as they continued to follow this ICE caravan, the ICE caravan drove onto their street. And they have video showing ICE agents out in front of their house.
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At that time, they were advised by other observers to go to a safe place. But they were shocked that ICE agents were somehow able to access their private data in order to — what they saw as — intimidate them.
JW: Have you investigated other stories that are similar? Are there other types of surveillance happening in Minneapolis that you’ve encountered?
JC: There’s certainly a lot going on especially since the surge here started, the ICE surge, started in December and that had fewer agents, but they’ve been sending more and more agents here. There’s all sorts of allegations of different tools that ICE agents are using to identify people.
Facial scanners is one, and that’s both for immigrants, that they want to look in their database and see if they’re wanted for any immigration violations — a civil violation, again, not a criminal violation. But also for citizens. So that will be observers, that will be bystanders.
And what people are alleging is that ICE uses this information. And remember, ICE are masked agents, they’re not identified, they don’t typically almost ever have a badge or a number or anything really that holds them accountable — including what agency they’re a part of.
DHS, we know, the Department of Homeland Security, has many different federal agencies under its auspices. Not all of the folks on the street are ICE. And in fact, Border Patrol has showed up in force recently, and they have quite aggressive tactics even compared to ICE. So people have been reporting concerns about federal agents accessing their private information and using all these technologies for weeks now.
And I should say, Homeland Security does not respond to requests for comments. They don’t respond to media questions, and they will not deny or confirm or even acknowledge what tools agents might be using. It’s really a black box, and it causes a lot of concern for privacy advocates.
JW: Yeah, that’s a really good point: The conflation of agents in the street and a lot of confusion and focus on ICE. I was hoping you could give us a little bit of background on why they’re in Minnesota in the first place.
JC: What people are saying is that Minnesota is the home of Gov. Tim Walz. He was the vice presidential candidate who ran against Donald Trump. And people are saying this really fits the pattern that we see across the country of retaliation, using the power of the federal government — in this case, it would be federal agents and immigration enforcement — to retaliate against political enemies.
Minnesota, I should say, is kind of a blue state. It can be relatively close. We don’t have any statewide elected Republican officials, and we haven’t in many years. So in the Midwest, folks will say, we are a pocket of blue surrounded by red. People see some sort of action from the federal government as retaliation for not being loyal enough to the president, essentially.
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Then there have been things in the news about fraud that people see being used as a pretext to come to Minnesota to demonize Somali Americans who have been a longtime community here. That is alarming to a lot of people, because Somali Americans — the vast majority are U.S. citizens.
So when ICE agents are driving around town, masked-up, in very small groups, and grabbing Somali Americans off the street, the vast majority of them, the people being hassled, are U.S. citizens. So people think that the pretext of immigration enforcement is just that it’s a pretext. And what they really want to do is enforce some sort of political orthodoxy on the state of Minnesota and on the people here.
JW: I want to get into the reaction from people in Minneapolis and in the Twin Cities in general. Thousands of people have taken to the streets, protesting against the presence of ICE agents after an officer fatally shot Renee Good, a mother of three, who was acting as a neighborhood observer.
Jon, what have you been hearing from residents about how they’re responding to the shooting and to ICE’s, and as you’ve pointed out, larger federal agencies’ presence within the city?
JC: I think one thing a national and international audience needs to understand is what we’re seeing here is not like what happened after George Floyd here and in other places around the country. Of course, there have been vigils after Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. Of course, there was a vigil of 10,000 people in the neighborhood, and there have been protests. There was 20,000 people a mile from here over the weekend.
But most of what is happening is not what we think of as “protests.” It’s not clashes between protesters and federal agents. What is happening is we have groups of masked armed federal agents, not identifying themselves, roving around the cities in caravans — and then we have neighbors, some activists, but also many normal people.
“Most of what is happening is not what we think of as ‘protests.’ It’s not clashes between protesters and federal agents.”
One person who’s been working with these folks describes it as “normie Target moms.” Essentially these are folks, just normal people who are coming out of their houses when they hear the whistling, which is the signal that folks use to alert the neighborhood that ICE is around. When they hear honking, they’re coming out, they’re trying to use their constitutional rights to observe law enforcement.
Most of the instances where you see someone being pepper-sprayed, someone being tased, ICE agents breaking a window and pulling an observer out of a car — those are not protest situations. That is a response from the community that is trying to, they say, keep their neighbors as safe as possible at a time when we have thousands of these agents in our communities.
I just want to say really quickly that this is not just in the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities. This is not just in the lefty neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul. This is happening all over the state. The enforcement is happening all over the state, and then the response is happening all over the state.
When ICE agents conduct some sort of action in a place like St. Cloud, Minnesota, a small town, the neighbors are coming out in the same way that they’re coming out in the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, because these are the folks who work at their coffee shops, they work at their restaurants, they’re co-workers, they’re friends.
So this enforcement action is so broad and unprecedented, and folks across the state are really trying to meet peacefully and observe and use their constitutional rights to express their opposition to what’s being done to this state.
JW: I think for many of us who watched that video of ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting Renee Good, watched it from multiple different angles. It evokes a lot of fear. And I guess my question is, from what you’re seeing, is the anger and the love for their neighbors — is that outweighing the fear in people right now?
JC: What’s shocking to me is, every time I talk to someone who say they were an observer, they got taken down in 20 below weather kept on the ground, handcuffed, dragged away, brought to detention, all these different circumstances — everyone I talk to says what they see as harassment and intimidation that they experience only makes them more resolved to go out and use their constitutional rights to observe what’s happening and express opposition to it.
JW: I want to talk about some of those violent incidents that you’ve documented. Federal agents in Minneapolis and throughout Minnesota have violently clashed with protesters throughout the week. What can you tell us about these interactions and how they’ve been playing out in the state?
JC: It’s all over the Twin Cities specifically, but all over the state. And typically what’s happened is ICE agents will go around in a caravan. It’s not clear that they have, for the most part, any actual enforcement plan, but they’ll drive around.
“It’s not clear that they have, for the most part, any actual enforcement plan.”
It just happened down the block here. Two people were detained by ICE at a bus stop, and observers show up because typically they’re trailing these officers trying to keep tabs on what they’re doing.
They will let their networks know. They use Signal and other apps to communicate with other folks in the community, and they will start honking. They’ll blow their whistles. And people from all over the city or all over the neighborhood will show........