Minneapolis, USA

Destroying the US to 'Save' It

The Trump administration continues to double down in its defense of the indefensible with respect to the killings by ICE agents in Minneapolis of two peaceful citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Rather than treating the killings as the avoidable tragedies that they were, Mr. Trump and his administration are twisting the facts in both cases to blame the victims. Should he succeed in doing so, the US will cease to exist as a nation with reconcilable differences. People can work through differences of opinion, but not separate facts.

The multiple videos of each of the killings provide political Rorschach tests, with various factions playing politics with the facts. The Trump administration’s moves to protect both its immigration policy and its deployment of ICE to implement it emerged from the ‘lessons’ that Mr. Trump learned during his first term. Unfortunately, as covered in more detail below, they were the wrong lessons. It was state actors--- agencies of the Federal government, that screwed Mr. Trump in his first term. That he doesn’t understand this is a problem.

Chart: deaths of humans in ICE custody were the highest in 2025 that they have been in twenty years. This contrasts with Trump administration claims that ICE agents are in danger. No ICE agents have been killed by protestors or ICE targets since Mr. Trump restarted his deportation campaign. This suggests that being an ICE agent is in fact dangerous--- for the other 345,000,000 of us. Source: guardian.com.

The ICE killings came during the Trump administration’s efforts to ‘secure the border‘ of the US with Mexico, which serves as a portal for migration into the US from Mexico and Central and South America. These migrants are overwhelmingly fleeing the violence that the US has inflicted on their nations through the insertion of right-wing governments to boost US business interests. The US kidnapping of the elected President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, are a recent example of US behavior that is driving migrants north.

The Trump administration now risks going ‘full Nixon’ in its (well earned) paranoia. As covered in more detail below, whatever its ‘natural’ demeanor, Mr. Trump was attacked politically by organized forces (CIA, MI6, FBI) during his first term. In contrast, the explanation developed by his administration is that 1) liberal / left forces allied against him, 2) because they are being paid to do so by ideologically motivated political actors, 3) that are hidden in universities, non-profit corporations and NGOs. Readers will note that Mr. Trump spent his first months in office attacking these institutions for their alleged opposition to his political program. This is the reason why.

ICE aggression in Minneapolis appears to be the product of orders from the Trump administration to ‘get tough’ with both protestors and ICE targets. Doing so means one thing when one imagines that the protestors are paid agents of one’s political enemies, and quite another when they are the citizens of the nation that you allegedly represent via elected office. Mr. Trump’s ‘President of half of the country’ schtick with respect to Minneapolis is worthy of the Democrats.

Chart: following the criticism that Democrats leveled against Donald Trump for the brutality of his deportation program, deportations quadrupled under Joe Biden. Although regular reports had it that Mr. Biden was using the same ‘babies in cages’ tactics as Mr. Trump had, I’ve yet to meet a Democrat that knows that deportations increased under him. This matters for present purposes because moral outrage that is uninformed regarding one’s own actions is called hypocrisy. And it tends to thwart one’s moral argument. Source: nytimes.com.

Over the last year, no ICE agents have been fatally attacked by either protestors or ICE targets in the US. The Trump administration’s ‘get tough’ tactics fit its ‘peace through strength’ rhetoric with respect to US foreign policy. Note the administration’s framing. American protestors are the equivalent of the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China--- as enemies to be contended with rather than fellow travelers linked under the umbrella of nation-state. Had the Democrats not spent 2016 – 2020 doing the same, they might have a rebuttal.

Regular readers will recall that it was Joe Biden who set the recent record (chart above) for mass deportations following his party’s enthusiastic condemnation of Mr. Trump’s border policies during his first term. Yes, after non-stop insistence that the Democrats were the party of open borders, Joe Biden deported several multiples more immigrants from the US than Mr. Trump had. This was the partial basis for my asking my Republican friends why they don’t vote for Democrats given that the policies are the same?

What the Biden administration accomplished was to turn away migrants at the border rather than trying to extricate them from homes, jobs, families, and social connections after they were settled in the US fact. In so doing, what was demonstrated is that the Democrats are as opposed to open borders as the Republicans are. Mr. Biden wasn’t challenged by anyone on ‘the left’ for massively increasing deportations. That Democrats don’t know this history is what makes them Democrats.

Graph: Please note the timing of the increase in immigrants into the US. It starts in 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Global South was hit much harder in economic terms by the pandemic than was the North. Economic refugees from the pandemic fled north. The Biden administration responded by increasing deportations (graph above this one). From history, Mr. Biden’s vicious anti-immigrant rants of the 1980s and 1990s set the stage for Mr. Trump’s xenophobic appeals. Source: pewresearch.org.

The reason why Joe Biden deported several multiples more immigrants than Donald Trump did in his first term was because economic dislocations resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic led to a large increase in economic refugees flooding the US (graph above). The point is that Donald Trump would have faced the same influx and used the same tools to address it that Joe Biden did. Claims of large differences appeal to low-information partisans. What Mr. Trump is doing at present adds an additional dimension to the formulation of the immigration ‘problem.’

Sending militarized ICE agents to forcibly remove those not legally residing in the US requires first segregating the people claimed to belong here from those who are claimed not to. Doing so requires assessing the ‘validity’ of every person residing within the US. Six months ago, I tried to help a homeless friend who was born in the US to US citizens get an ID. Impressively, in the county and state that he resides in, one must already have an ID to get an ID. One cannot get a birth certificate without first having a government ID. And one cannot get a government ID without first having a birth certificate.

Missing from the Trump administration’s view of immigration enforcement is that it (the view) comes mostly from rich people sitting in well-padded chairs just making shit up. I know a 96-year-old who was born in the US to US citizens who cannot vote because s/he wasn’t born in a hospital. Hospitals register births. Lots of Americans weren’t born in hospitals. The view of the Trump-right that the US has placed citizens into easily identifiable legal buckets is off by tens of millions of citizens.

The point is that the effort to ‘validate’ citizens is running into of citizens born to citizens who for one reason or another can’t be validated in ICE time. The point isn’t that ‘border security’ is impossible to achieve. It is that any serious effort to do so has to take basic truths about what / how America is into account first. Applying the Cold War anti-communist approach of ‘enemies within’ recasts economic refugees as foreign enemy combatants.

It isn’t as if there is no history to this practice. The FBI has been creating ‘sleeper cells’--- recruiting people, organizing and financing them, creating fake terrorist plots to pin on them, supplying them with weapons, and driving them to and from the alleged locations where the attacks are fake-planned. I warned that this would be the result of consolidating multiple agencies in DHS and putting them to the task of ‘finding’ domestic terrorists.

When the Obama administration was asked how many terrorist plots the US domestic spying program had uncovered fifteen years after DHS had been created, the answer was ’54.’ Sounds great. When pressed, the number turned out to be zero. The Federal government is spying on every American, reading emails, texts and keeping track of us, based on the to-date fraudulent premise that the US has a problem with domestic terrorism. But still, the ‘enemy within’ has the right rattled.

Inserting heavily armed former prison guards, ex-cops fired for reason, ex-military that can’t find meaningful employment, and rent-a-cops into Minneapolis is a guaranteed way to create social violence. What is obvious in the videos of the ICE killings in Minneapolis is that the ICE agents have no idea what they are doing. They have no concept of what is legal and what isn’t, what legitimate versus illegitimate policing looks like, or of the Constitutional protections that apply to the people that they are killing.

The US has a long, ambiguous relationship with its borders because the powers-that-be have prided themselves on the US being a capitalist nation, meaning that commerce takes precedence over other considerations like the environment and border security. Industrialists and small businesses have used insecure borders to flood the US with workers desperate for a paycheck for over a century. In narrow economic terms, these immigrants reduce wages for domestic workers by increasing the supply of labor.

In larger economic terms, migrant farm labor represents a major subsidy of US food costs through its status as a special category that can be paid less than other types of labor. The construction trades now consist of license holders who use their monopoly power (via licenses) to subcontract most of ‘their’ work to undocumented workers. And the H-1B visa system is a way for large employers to lower wages for US workers. Significant evidence exists suggesting that US-based employers support lax labor restrictions.

The point is that debate over borders and border security didn’t begin in 2016. Prior to 2016, those who were pushing for open borders were employers looking to lower their wage bills. In terms of ideology, the open borders argument was up until 2016 the purview of neoliberal economists, of the economic right. After 2016, the American left, which had been anchored by organized labor, allied with large employers to support open borders.

Also, after 2016 urban dwellers whose incomes came from non-profits, NGOs, and state sponsored enterprises--- in other words, the bureaucratic state, reinvented left politics with labor missing. This split ties to the seven-decades-long effort by the CIA to create an American left with labor missing. This new left is what right-wing critics call ‘cultural Marxism.’ This is how ‘left’ migrated from being an anti-capitalist ethos to city folk concerned with the rules governing the use of public toilets.

In the current context of citizens in Minneapolis being killed while acting within their Constitutionally protected rights, why is it useful to go through this history? Because both left and right are talking past one another on this. The right’s theory of the civil disobedience experienced while Donald Trump has been in office is that it is being carried out by urban dwellers employed by liberal institutions. And this plot is being directed by George Soros, or some such, according to the theory.

What Mr. Trump has wrong is who it is that he imagines has been directing the #Resistance to his policies. What he has had right is that there are multiple entities that are allied to oppose his policies. This is called coalition politics, and is considered legitimate within the US political purview to engage in. What he has wrong is who it is that is ‘directing’ the opposition. The best speculation here is that it is agencies of the Federal government that are.

Evidence that the CIA has been active in domestic politics (in contradiction to its Charter) comes via the Biden laptop story as well as revelations made by Tulsi Gabbard that former CIA Director John Brennan, Barack Obama, et al created the Russiagate fraud. As tedious as this culture war back-and-forth is, according to Ms. Gabbard, the CIA worked hand-in-glove with the Obama White House to promote the unproven charge that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election.

Destroying this university-NGO-non-profit complex consumed much of Donald Trump’s first year in office. It explains why he went after the universities the way that the did, why he fake-eliminated USAID by shifting its regime change arm to the State Department, and why he fired tens of thousands of Federal employees. Not demonstrated is that the people in the streets of the US are 1) directed activists and if so, 2) directed by whom?

Similar charges of outside agitators were used by the CIA and the FBI to disrupt the Civil Rights and the anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. That recent evidence has emerged that the FBI was involved in the murders of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X adds substance to the charge. The ‘outside agitators’ who allegedly killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were working for the FBI. They weren’t outside and they weren’t agitators. They worked for the Federal government.

During Mr. Trump’s first term I wrote that neither he nor the American left appeared to know who was manipulating US politics 2016 – 2020. He (Trump) had appointed about half of the people who were doing so to his administration (Bolton, Pompeo). Then he chose to imagine the problem in ideological terms, as left versus right. From 2016 – 2020, the #Resistance certainly appeared to be taking orders from agencies of the Federal government.

In the view here, this does not describe the protestors in Minneapolis. First up, Mr. Trump exorcised the alleged sources of this resistance in the early days of his current administration. If his theory of who was targeting him was correct, this should have solved the problem (from his perspective). But it quite conspicuously didn’t. Therefore, if state actors have information that protestors are paid agents, they should produce it. Otherwise, the charge reads like bullshit.

The administration’s response of finding what little evidence it can in favor of its interpretation of the facts and making that its story further divides the US between those who believe what the administration says and those who don’t. The problem for most of us, if I may presume, is that the video evidence directly contradicts what the administration is saying. Different opinions can be worked through. But separate facts are irresolvable unless those holding them want them resolved.

The other angle here is that Mr. Trump assumed that it was the people in the streets during his first term who caused his political problems. If only. Trump’s charge is one with the Democrat / left theory that it was displaced industrial workers in Des Moines and Cleveland who were conspiring with Donald Trump to let Russia run the US. The problem with both theories is that Donald Trump governed as an ordinary Republican in his first term.

The bottom line in Minneapolis is that Mr. Trump had the opportunity to implement his immigration policy and he screwed it up. Had ICE agents not killed two US citizens in what look like executions, Mr. Trump’s immigration policy would be intact. Further, his administration’s reactionary defense of the indefensible put it on the wrong side of facts seemingly determinable by any who watch the relevant videos. Asking people not to believe their lying eyes works better for a first ICE killing than a second.

Donald Trump should consider that his ‘enemies within’ theory was also the legal basis for prosecuting his followers over the January 6^th riot at the capitol. Were the Democrats correct that the January 6^th rioters were ‘enemies within?’ The answer here is that no, they were not. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t make them an enemy. Further, multiple efforts over the years to find enemies within-- sleeper cells, what have you, have started with robust accusations and ended without any evidence.

Last, here is Mr. Trump inviting foreign adversaries of the US to take the names of ICE agents in Minneapolis so that they will face legal and political consequences when other nations have had enough of the US killing its own citizens. Don’t take my word for it. According to Mr. Trump (link above), national leaders should be held to account for killing their citizens. This reads like a plan to yours truly. But hey, I’m just the messenger here.