Masked federal agents, mass arrests, and mounting protests expose the human cost of Trump’s intensified immigration crackdown.
Smashed car windows and people dragged from their vehicles. Individuals knocked to the ground and pinned to the ground. Guns pointed at unarmed civilians. Citizens and migrants alike, shot and killed in their cars. Protesters pepper-sprayed directly in the face or choked with tear gas. Anyone who dares to speak accented English or who has brown skin is forced to randomly prove their citizenship. These are scenes that have become commonplace in Donald Trump’s America, a country whose cities, especially those governed by Democrats, have been besieged by immigration agents who patrol predominantly Latino neighborhoods and lurk in courthouses looking for migrants to arrest and deport.
In the first year of the Republican’s second presidency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, its now globally recognized and feared acronym) has become the primary enforcer of his anti-immigrant offensive, which has resulted in more than half a million deportations in 12 months. The agency has been described as a paramilitary force and, according to the government itself, operates with “absolute immunity.”
In Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s latest target, the agency’s most violent face has been revealed. Some 3,000 federal agents have arrived in Minnesota’s most populous city in just over a week, since the first week of January, for what ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, has called “the largest immigration operation ever conducted.” The result? A city terrorized, with businesses closed, in-person classes canceled, and families sheltering in their homes.
The agents, masked and armed, travel in unmarked cars and get out anywhere without warning. Even so, locals have learned to recognize their vehicles and try to warn others of their presence whenever possible: they know that the SUVs with tinted windows that disregard traffic laws are usually theirs, and they start blowing their whistles or honking their own horns. But little deters them from their mission: they grab the migrant they were looking for and take whoever gets in their way, regardless of whether the person begs and shouts that they have legal permission to be in the country or that they are a U.S. citizen.
The protests against the agents’ presence in Minneapolis have been daily, and the unrest in the streets has only grown with each passing day that the Trump administration refuses to end what local and state officials denounce as a “federal invasion.” Now, tensions have reached a boiling point from which it will be difficult to recover: after two shootings by agents, one of which resulted in the death of a 37-year-old woman, the president has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to send the U.S. military to the city to quell the protests.
“I will quickly put an end to the farce that is taking place in that once-great state,” the Republican declared last Thursday. In his view, the ICE agents deployed in the city, including the one who shot and killed Renee Good on January 7, are all “patriots” who are “just trying to do their jobs.”
