Renee Nicole Good37-year-old American mother of three, killed in her car by three shots fired by Jonathan Ross, a federal agent ICE. He, protected by what Donald Trump’s government claims to be “absolute immunity”; the victim’s widow, investigated.
And five year old boy arrested with his father and transferred to another state, but not before being used as “bait”. A little one who needs resuscitation cardiopulmonary and like two brothers ends up in the hospital when the car in which their parents were taking six children back home after a basketball game ends up in smoke bombs.
a citizen Hmong refugee taken without arrest warrant and at gunpoint from home in underwear and at sub-zero temperatures. A citizen with autism who was going to the doctor detained after being violently extracted from her car. A young man who remains blinded in one eye by the point-blank impact of a rubber bullet. Countless people affected by “non-lethal projectiles”by tear gasby arrests and arbitrary acts of violence affected by masked agents, impossible to identify, who record with their mobile phones instead of body cameras and, at the same time, accuse citizens who record and document their actions of impeding their work.
Tell what is happening in Minneapolisits twin city of St. Paul and the entire metropolitan area of this point in Minnesota necessarily goes through these episodes. To them we must add infinite more: warrantless raidsrandom citizenship interrogations conducted by racial prejudice (with the endorsement, since September, of the Supreme Court), arrests without grounds for suspicion…
Memorial in memory of Renee Good, who was shot three times by an ICE agent on January 7. / ANGELINA KATSANIS / AP
We must also add Empty businesses, terrified immigrants who do not leave their homes and community as numb with fear as organized to help those affected and outraged for what he is seeing and suffering since the government of Donald Trump Operation Metropolitan Reinforcement began in this area with just under 600,000 inhabitants.
Transformed and reinforced by Trump
This is a deployment that has reached the nearly 3,000 federal agents, five for each local police. There are some 800 CBP troops, the border agency and some 2,000 from ICE (an acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement). And the aggressive tactics they are deploying have triggered tensions and have especially put ICE, a police agency, successor to the Immigration and Naturalization service, which was integrated into the Department of Homeland Security when this It was created after the 9/11 attacks and it has been definitively transformed with Trump.
Originally the agency functioned as the law enforcement branch to investigate and enforce immigration laws and logistical issues. Its agents, divided between those dedicated to investigating cases and those carrying out arrests and detentions, used to work in the interior of the country, focusing on the cases of immigrants with the worst criminal records. Efforts were made to carry out the arrests as smoothly and safely as possible, without setbacks. Places such as churches, schools or courts were left out of operations.
In this second term of the Republican things have changed. ICE increasingly operates as a virtually paramilitary force, like a private and secret police. In addition to putting themselves at the service of the promise of a massive deportation operationis doing much more: calms demonstrations, represses protests and dissent and unfolds like a political, propaganda and intimidation tool. It is no coincidence that during arrest operations or raids, videos are filmed and then promoted in the media and social networks. Spreading the image of toughness and fear and fueling the possibility of voluntary self-deportation is part of the equation.
Although at the head of ICE, as Secretary of Homeland Security, there is Kristi Noemthe most direct connection with the White House is through Stephen Miller, Trump’s advisor, champion of a relentless and racist iron fist with immigrants. As reported in the summer, he has been maintaining daily conference calls with ICE.
Money and toughness
The priority that this White House gives to ICE was reflected in the “great beautiful law” signed by Trump last summer. Destination 170,000 million dollars in four years for immigration projectson the border and interior. and in that cake the biggest piece goes to the agencywith 75,000 million, or 18.5 billion dollars a year. With the 10,000 that it already had budgeted last year, it has become the police force with the most budget in the entire USabove that of the armies of many countries.
Many of the leadership positions in local ICE offices are in the hands of CBP staff, the police force of borderswhich has always been noted for its harsh tactics with immigrants recently entered the country. And the maximum exponent is Gregory Bovino, the head of the Border Patrol, who was in charge of federal deployments in Los Angeles or Chicago and is now in Minneapolis, projecting an image of toughness in which many identify worrying historical comparisons.
Civil rights weakened
In the Trump presidency there have been disabled mechanisms that allowed ICE to be held accountable. The office of an advocate who was in charge of identifying inhumane conditions in detention centers was closed and although a court forced it to reopen, it has been left practically without staff. Also The office that was in charge of auditing respect for civil rights has been left in a skeleton by the feds.
Whether this respect is occurring is more than questionable. On paper, the mission of the ICE and CBP deployments was to capture and expel the “worst of the worst” from the country, but numerous innocents have fallen into their networks and aggressive tactics, including people with their papers in order and born or naturalized Americans. Close to a 70% of detained immigrantsaccording to an analysis presented in the summer by the libertarian Cato Institute, They had no criminal record. and 93% were never convicted of violent crimes.
L., the 5-year-old Ecuadorian minor, at the time of being transferred by immigration agents in Minneapolis. / EFE
Absolute immunity
In the face of cases such as Good’s death, the Government has also become defensive. Although in recent days both Trump and the vice president, J.D. Vancethey have begun to qualify their language somewhat, they have spoken of what happened as a “tragedy” and in the case of Vance they have promised that possible errors will be “investigated”, the position of the Administration is that federal agents have “absolute immunity”.
Once again, Miller has been the one who has conveyed that message most forcefully, and he did so speaking on television directly to the agents. “They have immunity to carry out their task and no one can prevent them from fulfilling their legal duties and obligations: “no municipal or state office, no illegal alien, no leftist or national insurrectionist agitator.”.
Meanwhile, an investigation has been opened against Good’s widow, something that led six members of the prosecutor’s office to resign in protest. This Thursday, three people who protested last weekend inside a St. Paul Church were arrested, one of the pastors is a local ICE official.
Politicization
Justice has also opened criminal investigations to local authorities, including the governor Tim Waltz; the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey; the mayor of St. Paul, the Hmong refugee Kaohly Her, or the state attorney, Keith Ellison. They are accused of conspire to hinder federal work.
They are all democrats and it is difficult not to see a political shock, especially when Trump has launched messages on social networks such as “the day of final judgment and revenge” is approaching and he continues to lie saying that he won the elections in Minnesota three times (he lost all three).
popular rejection
Trump, Vance, the entire Government and federal officials like Bovino insist that it is the lack of collaboration of these local leaders that is tense and making the situation difficult, they continue to defend that ICE and CBP agents follow the law, and they also speak not of protests by concerned or outraged citizens but of organized agitators. But that official message reaches among the bases most loyal to the president, not much further.
Los polls show that the majority of Americanswith percentages ranging between 50% in a survey by The Economist/YouGov and 61% in another by CBS, They suspend the actions of ICE. In these and many other surveys, the majority believes that the agency’s tactics are not justified, are not appropriate and are too harsh and they are not making them feel safer. Even personalities who are key to the conservative movement and were key to Trump’s last electoral victory, such as the podcaster Joe Roganhave been opposed to ICE’s tactics and have even compared them with those of the Gestapo.
ICE officer Gregory Bovino jokes during an event with Vice President JD Vance, this Thursday in Minneapolis. / CRAIG LASSIG / EFE
In contrast to the official speech from Minneapolis, other messages from “tyranny”, “invasion”, “siege” and “abuses”. And from the field, voices like Lydia Polgreen, a columnist for The New York Times who has covered conflicts around the world, write analyzes like the following: “It may not be a civil war yet but it is not, definitively and primarily, an immigration operation. It is a occupation designed to terrorize and punish anyone who dares to defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to deploy unlimited force against any enemy he wishes.”
the whole country
Although Minneapolis is today “ground zero”, the problematic tentacles of the resurgence ICE They spread throughout the country. Your agents At least 10 cars have been shot at since September. According to a ProPublica investigation, federal agents last year used At least 40 times banned drowning tactics by many police forces.
One of those drownings is also behind the death of a Cuban immigrant in a detention center in Texas. Although the authorities They initially said he tried to commit suicide., The autopsy has determined that his death was a homicide and who died for asphyxia due to compression of the neck and torso.
That man is one of the six dead so far this year in ICE custody who has found an analysis by ‘The Washington Post’. Last year there were 32 deaths, the highest number in more than two decades and above the 26 deaths that occurred in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
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