Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have discharged their weapons at least 16 times since President Trump and Stephen Miller launched their mass intimidation and deportation campaign last summer. Renee Nicole Good, who died last Wednesday in Minneapolis, is not even the first of these victims to have been killed.
We have been told by the Trump right that these are officers of the law struggling to do their jobs in the face of unlawful disruption. But when Americans catch glimpses of ICE agents on social media, they are not typically in orderly pursuit of undocumented migrants. Quite a lot isn’t really immigration enforcement at all, but moments of escalatory panic and rage — chaotic episodes in which often masked agents scramble to intimidate, coerce and ultimately pacify groups of civilians whose sympathies lie not with the state but with its nominal targets. Increasingly, what we are seeing resembles a war against the liberal resistance.
The spectacle looks from one vantage like a horrifying break with soft-focus American history. But there are also obvious continuities, not just with the country’s long history of vigilantism but also with a very recent period of militarism: empowered mercenaries treating the cities in which they’ve been deployed like intimidating war zones, seeing opposition and hostility around every corner and treating anyone who dares stand in their way as a terrorist or insurrectionist. This isn’t border enforcement; it is a kind of blundering counterinsurgency.
For more than two decades now, left-wing critics of the war on terror have warned about the possibility of what they often called the “imperial boomerang,” drawing on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argued that it was European colonial brutality that eventually enabled the rise of fascism at home, and Hannah Arendt, who endorsed the theory in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (Michel Foucault later picked up the thread, too.)
Sometimes the prophecy seemed to suggest an element of karma — that in launching an open-ended war of choice America might reap what it had sown, with that cruelty and excess abroad returning from the imperial periphery not just in the form of soldiers’ trauma but also in the form of blood lust and violence, too.
But journalists, including Evan Wright and Radley Balko, and intellectuals, such as Chalmers Johnson and Julian Go, also offered some particular and pretty concrete predictions, including about the way that advanced military equipment, once purchased, would eventually find its way into the hands of domestic law enforcement officers, who would surely find something to do with all of it — helicopters and tanks, tactical gear and flash-bang grenades and sniper rifles. As the active campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan subsided, giving way first to less visible military operations and increasingly to remote-control warfare, the writers Noura Erakat, Connor Woodman, Richard Beck and Spencer Ackerman have warned of the paranoid logic of the forever war and the authoritarian drift of the state, and about the growth of repression and surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties, the militarization of normal police action and the elevation of any conflict to a kind of “Clash of Civilizations” status.
And here we are, with an Iraq veteran in tactical gear, surrounded by comrades swarming a car partially blocking his way, firing point-blank at its driver. In the immediate aftermath, sympathetic nativists justified the shooting by describing a Minneapolis taken over by Somali refugees, but also by pointing to the victim’s divorce and sexuality, the social justice curriculum at her child’s elementary school and the obstinateness of liberal white women.
The crisis in Minneapolis began when the Trump administration sent ICE surging into the cosmopolitan city, which just five years ago had given rise to the largest protest movement the country had ever seen, not because there was some sudden burst of migration but to respond to a large-scale social-services fraud scandal, an obsession of the right-wing online ecosystem. This was the equivalent of dispatching the military to clean up a failed state, with “blue” now effectively a Trump administration synonym for “failed.” And the immigrants accused of perpetrating the fraud scheme were Somalis — many of them former residents of the quintessential failed state, a Muslim country in Africa that has been hit by more than 130 U.S. strikes since Inauguration Day. On the very day of Good’s shooting, the Fox News host Jesse Watters proposed to Vice President JD Vance that the Democrats in Minnesota have “a little bit of a Somali problem.” The vice president laughed, “America has a bit of a Somali problem.”
Over the last few years, noting pandemic-era peaks in crime and homelessness, it was possible for conservatives to demagogue blue cities as hell pits of social disorder, discrediting liberal governance of any kind. But crime has fallen so far and so fast that national murder rates are now lower than they ever were in records dating back to the 1960s. The migration surge that produced a spasm of American nativism is inarguably over, too. Since Trump’s second inauguration, actual border crossings have fallen close to historic lows.
But the logic of the forever culture war is that it must continue. In the last year MAGA has grown obsessed with government fraud, even after an empowered Elon Musk failed to find any meaningful major waste in federal spending. At the same time, it has embraced a throwback Islamophobia that has probably generated more references to Sept. 11, 2001, than we’ve heard in years.
In 2025, ICE has brought the border to blue strongholds quite literally, turning whole sanctuary cities into zones of open conflict — between state leaders and federal ones, city police and federal agents, resistance liberals and a descending force of outsiders who see a “The Future Is Female” bumper sticker and imagine the driver is a domestic terrorist.
Officers have already arrested and assaulted and harassed many dozens of citizens, many of them for the supposed crime of documenting ICE operations, as though journalism is a form of violence. They have arrested elected officials engaged in protest under false pretenses, too, as though political opposition has been criminalized. Agents have reportedly dragged pregnant women, pointed guns at children and left victims to seek out medical attention on their own. They have used banned chokeholds, according to ProPublica, at least 40 times.
Much ICE activity, though certainly not all, has unfolded within the distressingly capacious boundaries of American immigration law. But the shape of that immigration law, too, and the entire enforcement apparatus that has grown up to police it, is the result of the war on terror. ICE was created relatively recently, as part of the 2002 domestic legislative initiative that created the Department of Homeland Security, too — based on the logic that, given the imminent-seeming threat of terror, immigration enforcement would have to grow more expansive and sophisticated and militaristic in response.
Over time, what once looked like unstoppable war-on-terror jingoism soured into rage and regret, which destabilized American politics for a decade. Will ICE’s domestic campaign produce a similar blowback?
For the moment, Americans seem to be recoiling as they watch border-police vigilantism documented every day now, by citizen observers circling federal agents — each side filming the other in a kind of livestreamed mutual surveillance state. Last summer, support for immigration was at a record high. Recent polling from YouGov showed that abolishing ICE, once a widely mocked position of the online left, is now more popular than not abolishing it. By a 25-point margin, Americans believe the amount of force used in Good’s shooting was not justified; they oppose the use of military-grade weapons and the use of force against protesters by similar margins. Nearly 60 percent of the country supports the criminal prosecution of ICE agents who kill civilians, according to polling, and a similar share believes that what is happening in our cities can be fairly characterized as a conflict or war.
But just as alarming as what ICE has done in American cities in the first year of Trump’s second term is what the agency has in store for the next three — no matter the tide of public opinion. Last year Trump’s signature domestic policy law helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers and hiring 10,000 new agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.
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