There are reportedly about 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) goons running riot in Minneapolis, or about five times as many officers as are in the city police department. They have been captured on video beating, gassing, and pepper-spraying bystanders, including legal observers; kidnapping people, including children, off the street with no due process; and breaking into homes without a warrant. Several people have been shot, including Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was killed by an ICE agent shooting directly into her driver’s-side window. Another father told local news that ICE threw flash-bangs and tear gas into his minivan containing his five children, which caused his six-month-old baby to temporarily stop breathing and lose consciousness.
According to residents, the basic tactic seems to be ICE convoys driving around looking for any nonwhite person out by themselves, jumping out and dragging them into a van, and then driving off.
It’s like a cross between a half-hearted military occupation and a bunch of extremely racist gangsters hopped up on PCP and drain cleaner whipping themselves into a murder frenzy. And now President Trump is, as usual, escalating the threats. He said he is considering invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the military and federalize the National Guard in cases of insurrection, civil unrest, or rebellion. It would only be the capstone of an outrageous, criminal assault on an American city based entirely on lies.
Minneapolis residents have resisted, with considerable success. In just a few days, they have set up an elaborate nonviolent neighborhood defense network of people who watch for ICE patrols, send the word out when they are spotted, and surround them with whistles and phones. That is seriously impeding the ICE/CBP kidnapping efforts, which appear to be quite poorly organized. During protests over Wednesday night, ICE abandoned several vehicles full of documents and gear, including a challenge coin that looks distinctly like a Nazi Totenkopf.
There is some important background to establish, because it reveals how everything about this is pretextual. The whole thing was touched off by some 23-year-old right-wing YouTuber named Nick Shirley. In a video that went hyper-viral thanks to a coordinated conservative media effort to boost it, he accused several Somali-run day cares of being welfare scams because they didn’t have any children in them that he could see, or they wouldn’t let him in to see the kids. This sparked a classic right-wing online frenzy, and demands for persecution.
Most of Shirley’s specific accusations turned out to be nonsense. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, he visited one day care while it was closed, because it was for parents working an evening shift. At another, journalists who called ahead and identified themselves were allowed in where children were indeed present. Any parent can tell you that day cares will not let random masked men in—Shirley was accompanied by a posse that was not shown on the video—and rightly so in this gun-ridden country. Shirley himself is, shall we say, exceptionally slow on the uptake. But it didn’t matter—that was all the excuse MAGA needed to send in the stormtroopers.
There is some precedent here. Back in 2010, James O’Keefe got the voting rights and community organizing group ACORN defunded—by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, no less—with egregiously dishonest sting videos falsely accusing staffers of being involved in drugs and prostitution.
Now, there was a welfare fraud conspiracy in the Minneapolis community involving some Somali Americans mostly during COVID, but it has already been investigated and prosecuted extensively under the Biden administration, and one of the ringleaders was a white woman. This is a scam-ridden country and these things happen; that’s why Trump has so many fraudsters to pardon after they pay him a fat bribe.
In any case, there is no reason why immigration authorities should be involved in this. ICE and CBP do not police benefit programs; moreover, the overwhelming majority of Somali Americans are American citizens—58 percent natural-born, and of the remainder, 87 percent are naturalized.
In sum: We have an utterly fraud-ridden president pretending to care about a nonexistent scam, and then sending in a police force whose responsibilities do not include fraud to somehow fix the problem that doesn’t exist, who then harass and kidnap people who are not under their jurisdiction. Meanwhile, Trump has done the exact same thing he accused the Somali American community of doing: stealing welfare money from children—except several orders of magnitude more of them—by illegally impounding a whopping $10 billion in child care funding, exclusively for blue states. (I should note that red states are if anything much more prone to welfare fraud; Mississippi illegally diverted a bunch of theirs to Brett Favre.)
It’s hard to guess what might happen if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act. Legally, it is totally unjustifiable—the only disorder in Minneapolis is being directly caused by the Trump administration’s criminal invasion. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tacitly admitted this in a recent interview, threatening that “if anything doesn’t change with Gov. Walz, I don’t anticipate the streets getting any safer or more peaceful.” But we are clearly out beyond the boundaries of legal niceties, and into a more brutal political realm.
What ICE is learning—at least to the extent that any of these bestial freaks are capable of reason—is that violently suppressing dissent is a tricky business. There are about half a million people in Minneapolis, and 3.7 million in the metro area. Given sufficient motivation, it is not that difficult to round up enough people to outnumber any ICE patrol by 20- or 50-to-1. Three thousand people is a lot of officers, but it is not nearly enough to militarily occupy a city. And National Guard or U.S. Army troops might not be so willing as ICE goons to beat or kill their own fellow citizens for no reason other than Trump’s vindictive whims.
If Donald Trump wants to dominate those who oppose him, he might have to pick up some body armor and do it himself. Otherwise, he has a manpower problem.
[Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.]
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