Nine days before Renée Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Hennepin County, Minnesota, an ICE operation took place in the same county 20 minutes away. More than two dozen officers, masked and wearing bulletproof vests, were recorded on video escorting a solitary man wearing a white T-shirt out of the Ridgedale Service Center.
No gunfire occurred during his arrest. Violence did not break out at the service center, which is home to both a courthouse and a library. Still, it was a show, a theatrical operation — basically a platoon arresting a single person — almost certainly designed to attract as much attention as possible. Heavy-handed displays of ICE’s power are the point. Vivid examples of such overreach abound online.
According to a YouGov/Economist poll of U.S. adults, almost 70 percent of respondents say they have seen a video of Good’s shooting. In a poll conducted that day, a majority of Americans already thought ICE’s tactics were “too forceful.” Since the shooting, they say ICE is making the country less safe — 47 percent, compared with 34 percent saying more safe — and that they would support “abolishing ICE” altogether, 46 percent to 43 percent. This marks a fast and notable change: Last summer, just 27 percent of respondents supported abolishing the agency.
Donald Trump likes visual proof of his influence and legacy. In the business world, this meant putting his name on the towers he built (or selling his name to adorn some he didn’t) and making cameo appearances in movies filmed on his properties. In government, it has also meant putting his name on things, like the Kennedy Center and the TrumpRx website, which is supposed to connect patients to cheaper drug options.
In the same vein, the Trump administration has directed attention to its ICE raids, working to make arrest videos go viral, The Post reported. The effort is backfiring spectacularly. Federal law enforcement is both consequential and delicate: It necessarily allows some people to have power over others, on the condition that officers do not impinge on fundamental rights afforded to citizens and immigrants. Turning their operations into a warped form of entertainment has almost certainly helped drive down Americans’ support for ICE since last summer as they question the legality and humanity of its operations.
Then there are the videos shot on phones as everyday Americans witness ICE agents in action. Immigration enforcement keeps turning into physical confrontations with protesters. In some of these instances, protesters are looking to ramp up the volatility, and arrests are justified. But far more often, lookers-on are exercising their First Amendment rights or simply going about their days. Americans see an ICE agent at a gas station shoving, then chasing, a protester, seemingly without provocation. Or they’re returning their shopping carts at the entrance to a Target store and see a scrum of ICE agents tackling a teenage boy working there, who turned out to be a U.S. citizen. Those incidents both occurred recently in Minnesota, where residents are on alert for ICE misbehavior, but others can be found all across the nation.
This is not a government strategy so much as it is a spectacle — one that has little to do with the president’s promise to deport violent criminals. The performance starts at the recruitment stage. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out” reads the current ICE sign-up page. “CHOOSE YOUR MISSION.” Deportation operations are being treated like a video game — one that comes with a signing bonus of up to $50,000, significantly scaled-back training and the federal government’s full backing.
Approximately 3,000 federal agents now cover Minneapolis, a city with 600 police officers. More clashes seem inevitable, including the kind that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem might call acts of “domestic terrorism.”
Many Americans see something different. They see masked agents, armed to the hilt, demanding passersby provide proof of citizenship. That ICE agents are not supposed to target U.S. citizens no longer seems to matter. Agents appear emboldened, so much so that they are going door to door, car to car, abandoning both their remit and the law as they demand papers, please.
It’s no mystery who emboldened them. “The president stands with ICE. I stand with ICE,” Vice President JD Vance announced at a White House news conference just a day after Good was shot, adding that the ICE agent involved, Jonathan Ross, had “absolute immunity.” Instead of prioritizing a serious investigation into the shooting — the altercation alone might be a sign that their deportation strategy has gone horribly wrong — the president is suggesting instead he may use the Insurrection Act to “stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.”
The closing of the southern border to illegal immigrants has been Trump’s great victory in the eyes of voters since he returned to office. Yet the more he shows off his deportation strategy, the more the public becomes wary. The president has succeeded in drawing national attention to what his federal forces are doing, and millions of Americans are horrified by what they see.
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