Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.
Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the Border Patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.
Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.
Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.
I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.
David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.
We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.
The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.
Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous Border Patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Alex Pretti.
I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse. So it’s wild to hear Federal Bureau of Investigation head Kash Patel say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.
Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?
French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.
One of the saddest things about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.
Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.
The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened.
Polgreen: For me, this is what makes the community response in Minnesota so heartening. We’ve seen an astonishing outpouring of action and support from ordinary citizens who have decided not to accept this dual state. They refuse to be lulled, and insist on their continued citizenship in the constitutionally governed United States.
One thing that has irked me is how so many call the people out on the streets in Minnesota protesters. Yes, they are motivated by an urge to protest what is happening in their communities, and yes, protesting is an important act of citizenship. But what I saw in Minneapolis is better described as organizing and concerted action. It is an important distinction because so much of what is happening is invisible — people engaging in a form of neighborhood watch, walking vulnerable kids to school to shield them from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Church groups organizing food parcels for families too afraid to leave home. Community groups using encrypted messaging to compile spreadsheets of suspected ICE vehicles and activity. Others are logging and archiving endless amounts of evidence of ICE atrocities. This is the product of deep community organizing, not merely spontaneous actions driven by immediate anger.
Goldberg: I agree with Lydia and it’s the one thing that saves me from despair. Jews were less than 1 percent of the population in Hitler’s Germany. Trump is at war with a plurality of his country.
I’d love to know what you both think about the possibility of civil war or some kind of crackup. David, you wrote a whole book about the danger of the United States splitting up. I have to say, if I could vote in a referendum tomorrow for a national divorce from MAGA strongholds, I’d do it in a heartbeat. This is one of those ideas that I’ve flirted with in the past but always discounted because it means betraying a lot of people who’d be stuck in Trumpistan, and because it’s hard to see how you’d draw lines when the split is urban vs. rural as much as red state vs. blue. But it feels untenable to be ruled perpetually by people who’d murder us in the street and then slander us for it.
I was struck by the secretary of defense posting “ICE > MN” on social media. These are not people who think they share any bonds of citizenship with Democrats. Obviously, the answer is to win elections. But we’ve seen how Trump’s movement responds to losing elections, and that was before Trump had repurposed ICE as a personal militia.
Polgreen: We may yet come to an actual civil war, with armed people on different sides. Already, you have the local police in an uneasy middle ground between civilians and federal agents. Things could get worse if we end up with a National Guard, deployed by Gov. Tim Walz, and federal troops, deployed by Trump, at odds over who has the authority to exercise the state’s monopoly on violence.
In a way, the Trump administration has already started a civil war in which a set of leaders and citizens are behaving in a manner loyal to the historical traditions of our Constitution, and a president who believes his word is law and has surrounded himself with loyalists ready to dispense with their constitutional duty and execute his dark vision.
Michelle’s suggestion of a kind of national divorce is seductive at moments like this, but Minnesota is in many ways an illustration of why union is the only solution. Yes, it is a resolutely blue state in presidential elections, but it is quite closely contested in state and congressional elections, with all the urban-rural, blue-and-white-collar divisions you suggest. I am struck at how we’ve seen almost no counteraction from the right in Minnesota, which suggests to me that even some of the MAGA factions within the state are taken aback by the federal incursion’s indiscriminate violence, and sense the great cost to their state should it continue for much longer.
French: I think I wrote my book too soon! It came out in September of 2020 — this was after the racial reckoning and many of the Covid protests, but before Jan. 6 and the chaos of Trump’s second term. My thesis was pretty simple — that every single significant cultural, political or religious trend was pulling us apart more than it was pushing us together. And if we can’t find a way to reverse these seismic forces we would risk our national union.
Lots of readers thought I might have been too alarmist, but everything is unfolding as I have feared. We don’t have to debate whether some kind of national divorce is imminent (I don’t think it is) to understand that enmity between red and blue is still growing, and that the more hatred permeates our society, the more unstable it becomes. We are creating the conditions for a catastrophe.
I desperately want to preserve this union, but even more than that I want to preserve the idea that this nation is and can be an instrument of liberty, justice and virtue. And that means vanquishing the forces of hate and division, not separating from them.
Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.
Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.
And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”
I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.
Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass-over-teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.
Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying.
French: I think the administration has done a very effective job at convincing its supporters that enforcement might be messy, but the Democrats left them with no choice. This is what we have to do to protect our nation’s borders, deport criminal aliens, and preserve economic opportunity for Americans. It’s this, they argue, or you have open borders and complete chaos. I hear that sentiment all the time.
That’s a false choice. We can protect our border and enforce immigration laws without a violent, masked paramilitary force taking over our city streets. Presidents of both parties have deported millions of undocumented immigrants without resort to brutality and violence.
There are multiple purposes behind Trump’s aggression. He’s certainly trying to impress his supporters and intimidate his opponents. But he’s also trying to bait his opponents into extremism and violence in response. I’m afraid that he wants riots and a rerun of rhetoric like “defund the police.”
It is vitally important to respond to Trump’s extremism not with an opposing extreme, but rather with reason, good sense and peaceful, courageous conviction. Call his bluff. Show America that it’s not a binary choice between brutal enforcement or unrestrained immigration.
Rose: Recent polling suggests Americans don’t like ICE’s tactics, nor do they approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, but they still trust Republicans more than Democrats, generally, on the topic. Do any of you see an elected official of either party expressing anything akin to the French Theory of Immigration: Protect the border without the masked paramilitaries?
Goldberg: Isn’t this what basically every Democrat is saying? Even the people who are saying “abolish ICE” aren’t calling for an end to immigration enforcement. They’re arguing that this is a rogue agency beyond repair, and they’re right.
I understand why the “abolish ICE” debate has immediately become about polling and midterm politics. Democrats need to win, and they’re still stung by the backlash to “defund the police.” But before we debate messaging, I think we should talk about the substantive issue, which is that ICE, an organization that’s only 23 years old, has become a vehicle of state terror that must be disbanded.
One thing I learned from Ezra’s interview with Caitlin Dickerson is that most ICE agents have been hired in the past year. Many of them are people who responded to a recruitment drive that targeted gun shows, far-right influencers and overt white nationalists. They are showing every day that they are thuggish and unprofessional and regard many of their fellow citizens as their enemies. No politician should be so abject as to fund their own occupiers.
French: I like the idea of getting aggressive and specific in response. Take off their masks. End their immunities. Limit their jurisdiction. Restrain their tactics. All of this can be done through legislation without inhibiting humane immigration enforcement. And if it’s done correctly, legislative reform can lead to greater accountability across the whole of government.
Goldberg: David, do you really think the people who currently make up ICE are capable of humane immigration enforcement?
French: Some, yes and some, no. But you will make ICE infinitely less attractive to thugs and goons if they know they can be held immediately accountable, if they will never get to run around in their ridiculous military-style uniforms (cosplaying like they’re SEALs), and if they can’t break down doors or rappel from helicopters to check a person’s immigration status.
Goldberg: There’s a proposal in Maryland, the ICE Breaker Act, which would bar people hired by ICE under Trump from working in state law enforcement. I’d like to see similar efforts everywhere to increase the stigma of this work, even though the downside is redoubling their commitment to keeping Republicans in office.
French: Hmm. I’m not a fan. I think it’s a mistake to conclude that everyone who joins is nefarious. There are people who join, object to what they’re asked to do, and leave. Or blow the whistle and leave. I don’t want that person inhibited by a scarlet “I” for the rest of their professional life.
Also, Michelle, the downside you identify is pretty big. We don’t want even more people to believe that everything depends on the G.O.P. clinging to power.
Polgreen: David makes a really good point here — this is an emergency, but we do need to think about the future, and how we knit ourselves back together again. As someone who served in our Forever Wars, I am sure he knows many people who signed up for one mission out of patriotism and ended up with deep misgivings and regrets.
French: I absolutely do.
Polgreen: A lot of people in politics and punditry are overthinking this. It has been clear for a very long time that the general voting public wants a secure border and immigration reform. Anyone claiming that Americans voted for today’s insane policies is lying to themselves. I get frustrated with people who say stuff like, “This is not who we are,” because the United States has a long history of doing terrible things to its citizens and those who seek to make a home here. But I also get frustrated with people who argue that, “This is what America has always been,” because that, too, is fantasy.
The truth is that Americans are proud that their country is the destination of choice for the most ambitious and talented people in the world, and for anyone yearning for freedom under law. And I believe that fundamental to the American psyche is a belief that we are a nation built on a set of ideals, however imperfect our loyalty to those ideals.
Rose: You’ve touched on this already, but it’s worth pausing to consider what’s coming this week. Democrats in the Senate are vowing to oppose a bill that would fund immigration enforcement, which could shut down the government. What should they be asking for?
Goldberg: First and foremost, the withdrawal of ICE from Minneapolis.
Polgreen: I think this is the moment for Democrats to be quite ambitious. Michelle, I agree — ICE needs to leave Minnesota. There is simply no justification for this kind of deployment in a state with so few undocumented immigrants — as a proportion of its population it is less than half the national average.
At an absolute minimum, Democrats should demand an end to masking, a ban on military-style uniforms and a requirement that officers wear badges with identification. The feds must agree to independent investigations of uses of deadly force, and dispense with the fiction of immunity. I think Kristi Noem needs to go, but then whoever replaces her could be even worse.
I think it is quite disgusting that seven moderate Democrats in the House voted for this funding, including media darlings like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine. Democrats need to wake up and realize what time it is. This simply cannot stand.
French: I very much like the Lydia plan. No masks. No immunities. No military-style tactics or uniforms. You don’t need any of those things to protect the border and enforce immigration laws. And yes, end the Minneapolis operation. Now. Don’t make MAGA defend border enforcement. Make them defend the indefensible.
Rose: Two quick questions to finish. First, when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?
French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this — when we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?
This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: “What did you know? What did you do?” Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families, or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.
One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face, and say, “Well, I posted a lot on social media.”
Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help each other. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you.
French: I love this emphasis on connection, Lydia.
Goldberg: Yeah, Lydia, I agree. There are a couple of women on my block — and I hope they won’t mind me referring to them — who are just phenomenal organizers, both politically and socially. One of them is the planner of the block party and the keeper of the free library; this morning I saw her out shoveling snow, not just in front of her own house but in front of those on either side of her. They’re also the ones who are handing out ICE whistles and holding weekly neighborhood meetings and protests.
I wrote in one of my columns that these anti-ICE actions are signs of local civic health. They come, ironically, out of the sort of deep local ties and resulting social trust that conservatives constantly say they want to recreate. So one thing you can do — depending on where you live, of course — is to meet your neighbors, and start talking to them about what you’re going to do if ICE descends.
Rose: And what have you seen that’s been heartening?
French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of Evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.
That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.
But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.
Polgreen: I share David’s wariness of hope, which is very much warranted. Still, seeing the huge turnout in subzero temperatures on Friday in Minneapolis was incredibly moving. When I was in Minnesota, high school students in St. Paul staged a walkout and marched to the State Capitol. It was so very cold, but they came in their hundreds, an incredibly diverse group of kids.
I met a group of white teenage boys, the demographic supposedly lured in my Trump’s embrace of masculine cruelty. And they just weren’t having it. They talked about a kind of masculinity that involved sticking up for the vulnerable, being of service to your community, being a leader in your church and school. When I heard about Alex Pretti’s background — a boy scout, athlete, I.C.U. nurse caring for veterans — I instantly thought of those warm, kind Midwestern boys as his spiritual kin. That spirit lives on.
Goldberg: Watching ordinary people in Minneapolis stand up to ICE has filled me with an almost hokey degree of patriotism. It turns out there are still a lot of Americans with that deep instinct for associational life that Tocqueville wrote about. There is still, in much of this country, an instinctive hatred of tyrants, and a belief that people have the duty and agency to stand up to them. The past year has revealed that many of our elites, especially those in business and technology, are far more craven than I’d ever realized. But it also revealed a lot of everyday heroism.
Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg are Opinion columnists.
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