Finally Friday Reads: We are all Minnesotans Now

“The hypocrisy of this Trumplican administration continues to reach unfathomable levels. If you’re not paying attention, shame on you. If you’re paying attention but ignoring it, shame on you. Violent protest is what they are provoking. Contest the alternative so-called facts everywhere you can, woke is what they fear! Elon hasn’t funded a vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus, yet.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

My home and I have been going through a major streak of Danshari (断捨離) at the beginning and end of the year. It sure feels good to throw junk out and get down to the basic, simple life, but wow, is it time-consuming and brutally exhausting after living in a house for 25 years and letting things accumulate. My house is quite small, and still, stuff piles up. Time to toss out all the things that you don’t need, don’t want, and that really create a burden on your way of life and take up needless time.

This is how I feel about the Trump administration. We never needed them; the health effects of having their garbage pile up are devastating and exhausting. Time to toss them all out.

Having gone through a period of ICE Raids and watching other American cities suffer in similar ways, I have to admit that what’s going on in Minneapolis right now is beyond the pale. It’s like they used the rest of us to beef up their levels of assaulting normalcy, morality, and decency. Time to remove the real refuse and live a simpler, more productive life.

This first suggested read is from the AP. “Federal immigration agents filmed dragging a woman from her car in Minneapolis.” This is not the American Dream. It’s an American Nightmare.

A U.S. citizen on her way to a medical appointment in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and detained by immigration officers, according to a statement released by the woman on Thursday, after a video of her arrest drew millions of views on social media.

Aliya Rahman said she was brought to a detention center where she was denied medical care and lost consciousness. The Department of Homeland Security said she was an agitator who was obstructing ICE agents conducting arrests in the area.

That video is the latest in a deluge of online content that documents an intensifying immigration crackdown across the midwestern city, as thousands of federal agents execute arrests amid protests in what local officials have likened to a “federal invasion.”

Rahman said that she was on her way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when she encountered federal immigration agents at an intersection. Video appears to show federal immigration agents shouting commands over a cacophony of whistles, car horns and screams from protesters.

In the video, one masked agent smashes Rahman’s passenger side window while others cut her seatbelt and drag her out of the car through the driver’s side door. Numerous guards then carried her by her arms and legs towards an ICE vehicle.

Philip Bump, writing at MS NOW, has the Op-Ed up. “Trump could be close to unleashing the state violence he’s always wanted. President Trump suggested on Thursday that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s wanted to do that for years.” He’s doing this while trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which still blows my mind. He’s also after protestors while telling Iraq we will attack them if they attack peaceful protestors. Go figure. You may remember that Bump was noticeably crying during the reporting on the death of Renee Good, imagining her small child and the backseat filled with stuffed animals.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested — not for the first time — that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy active-duty soldiers to combat protesters. The president’s musing about the Insurrection Act should not be understood as a reaction to what’s happening right now. It should instead be understood as the next link in a chain of events that Trump set in motion back in his first administration — and dramatically accelerated in his second.

Trump seems to have lingering regrets about not doing some of the things he wanted to do back in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spawned unrest across the country and outside the White House.

When Trump was hurried to the bunker at the executive mansion one evening, it projected weakness. Members of his administration pushed back against his ambitions to unleash more forceful responses — such as deploying soldiers against protesters. This frustrated the president, contributing to his removal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Trump returned to Washington last year even angrier at the establishment and his opponents, but now he’s well-versed in the levers of power and understands how flimsy the barriers to that power can be. Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent. And he’s staffed his Cabinet with people who aren’t likely to object.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies insisted that immigration laws needed to be tightened and that people living in the country illegally needed to be removed. They often insisted that they would prioritize criminal immigrants, people who — Trump said — were known to law enforcement and could be rolled up quickly.

Once inaugurated, however, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security initiated sweeping dragnets, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (which includes Border Patrol), were given free rein to aggressively detain immigrants — and anyone who stood in their way.

Speaking to reporters in May, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, warned Democratic leaders in blue states that they could expect to see federal agents in their cities.

“If we can’t arrest a bad guy in the jail … you’re gonna force him in the community to find him,” Homan told reporters last week. “If we can’t find him in the community, we’re gonna find him at the worksite. So we’re going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”

Comply or we’ll blanket your streets, Homan warned. And they did.

Notice that Homan framed the threat as being about criminals: If cities wouldn’t hand over criminals who were in custody, ICE would “flood the zone” everywhere else. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated this framing in an interview on Fox News this week centered on the current operation in Minnesota.

“If [Gov.] Tim Walz and [Minneapolis] Mayor [Jacob] Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said. “Currently, there are 680 criminal illegal aliens [in the city] … people who, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you would never want these people to be on your streets or your neighbors. That’s the people who we are targeting.”

This is untrue. There are numerous reports of federal agents in the city carrying out door-to-door sweeps and stopping or detaining American citizens, who definitionally aren’t criminal immigrants.

McLaughlin’s assertion is also untrue outside of the context of Minneapolis. Data released by DHS shows that more detainees in ICE custody have no criminal records than have criminal convictions or pending charges. A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, summarizes the shift since Trump returned to office: “The result of … changes in arrest practice has been a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.”

Those numbers alone give the lie to the idea that ICE is simply doing what it has always done. It isn’t. It’s doing something broader and more aggressive than what it has done in the past — at the direction of DHS leaders and with Trump’s approval.

Trumpian narratives are never backed by fact. They represent pure propaganda since these talking points are never true. Here’s a take from the Never Trumper Republican folks at The Bulwark. Yes, I’m quoting my strange bedfellow Bill Kristol again. “Fighting ICE’s Reign of Terror.”

The unjustified and indefensible killing of an innocent woman, Renee Good, by U.S. government agents; the lack of any recognition or acknowledgement by those agents or their superiors that what they did was wrong; the intensification of the government’s reign of terror in the streets of our cities and towns; the unabashed defense of brutality by the administration in power, and their wholesale lying about it . . . it’s horrifying.

But the less dramatic stories emerging from our reign of terror are also horrifying.

At around 3 p.m. Wednesday, four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up for lunch at a small, family-owned Mexican restaurant, El Tapatio, in Willmar, Minnesota. They took a booth and apparently enjoyed their meal—though staff at the restaurant appeared “frightened,” according to a witness who spoke to the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

When the restaurant closed that evening at 8:30 p.m., ICE agents followed departing workers and detained three of them.

The agents presumably had a good laugh about this. Perhaps they relished their meal even more because the staff that served them was frightened. Humiliation of their victims, a kind of relish in their fear and misery, a kind of—let’s call it what it is—sadism has become a dominant part of the culture of ICE.

It does not, thankfully, appear to be dominant in the culture of the country. At least not yet. A Quinnipiac poll shows only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 57 percent disapprove. In a CNN survey, 51 percent of Americans say they believe ICE is making cities less safe, while only 31 percent say ICE is making cities safer.

Those numbers in support of ICE are higher than they should be in a healthy and humane society. But still, in today’s polarized politics, a 17–20 percent margin is substantial. If only Democrats could win the national vote this fall by that amount!

White House border czar Tom Homan admits the administration has a problem. Not with the policy, of course. It’s just, Homan said yesterday, that ICE needs “to be better at messaging at what we’re doing.” Still, it’s good to see Homan on the defensive.

The question is whether the Democratic party is going to go on the offensive.

Yesterday Minnesota Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar put out a statement: “Our local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders all agree: The best way to restore order and safety in Minnesota is for ICE to leave our streets. This Administration is escalating rather than de-escalating and it needs to stop.”

ICE of course could care less about local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders, who can do little to stop ICE’s terror. But ICE is an agency of the federal government. It operates under authorities granted and defined by Congress. It uses funds appropriated by Congress.

So if ICE needs to stop what it is doing, it’s Democrats in Congress who need to try to do their best to stop it. Which does not mean offering a couple of pro forma amendments that will lose. It does not mean failing to excoriate Republican senators, by name, for refusing to stand up to their dear leaders. It does not mean going on to approve government funding as usual.

Heather Cox Richardson’s latest offering on Substack, “Letters from an American,”  is bone-chilling.

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.

While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.

In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”

My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.

This is the latest news on their latest reign of terror. It’s from the AP. “ICE says a Cuban immigrant died in a suicide attempt. A witness says guards pinned and choked him.

A Cuban immigrant died in a Texas immigration detention facility earlier this month during an altercation with guards, and the local medical examiner has indicated that his death will likely be classified as a homicide.

The federal government has provided a differing account surrounding the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, saying the detainee was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.

A witness told The Associated Press that Lunas Campos died after he was handcuffed, tackled by guards and placed in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. The immigrant’s family was told by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday that a preliminary autopsy report said the death was a homicide resulting from asphyxia from chest and neck compression, according to a recording of the call reviewed by the AP.

The death and conflicting accounts have intensified scrutiny into the conditions of immigration jails at a time when the government has been rounding up immigrants in large numbers around the country and detaining them at facilities like the one in El Paso where Lunas Campos died.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is legally required to issue public notification of detainee deaths. Last week, it said Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four and registered sex offender, had died at Camp East Montana, but made no mention of him being involved in an altercation with staff immediately before his death.

This is exactly why the framers of the Constitution and the signers of the Declaration were obsessed with Due Process. Everyone should have access to a trial, to lawyers, to a judge, to a jury of peers, and to laws that protect everyone from unjust prosecution and punishment.  This is at the absolute core of our American Way of Life and system of Government.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?