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ICE’s growing lawlessness, briefly explained
Trump’s nascent police state is coming into focus.
Cameron Peters is a staff editor at Vox.
Welcome to The Logoff: Over the past few weeks, ICE’s actions have gotten a lot of attention — and if you step back, a disturbing picture is starting to emerge.
What’s happening? In the just over two weeks since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, we have seen the Trump administration:
- Wrongly arrest a US citizen at gunpoint and without a warrant, and parade him out of his house in his underwear in freezing weather.
- Take a 5-year-old child into custody and, according to a Minneapolis-area school district, attempt to use him as “bait” to detain others.
- Pepper-spray a man already detained by federal agents in the face at close range.
- And bring federal criminal charges against three Minneapolis-area activists after they interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, over the weekend (in addition to digitally manipulating an arrest photo).
This week, ICE also launched a new immigration operation in Maine — disturbingly named “Catch of the Day” — that is targeting Somali communities in Portland and Lewiston for no clear reason (other than, perhaps, President Donald Trump’s oft-expressed hatred for Somali people).
Why does this matter? There’s a pattern to the many, many individual outrages perpetrated by ICE and other federal immigration agents. As we wrote last week, what ICE is doing in Minneapolis already doesn’t look like immigration enforcement so much as a military occupation. But as it expands, and as the Justice Department is used to target peaceful protesters — and even Good’s widow — while refusing to investigate her killer, the more apt comparison may be a lawless security state that is feeling increasingly emboldened.
A memo shared with the AP by a whistleblower this week, instructing ICE agents that they are allowed to enter homes without a judicial warrant to carry out immigration arrests — seemingly in defiance of the Constitution — gives further credence to that image.
What’s the big picture? We’re not there yet, but in the unchecked federal power on display in Minneapolis, the outlines of Trump’s nascent MAGA police state are coming into focus.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
It’s almost time for the Winter Olympics — and if you’re like me, that means it’s time to start getting up to speed on sports and storylines that you might not follow outside of a four-year cycle. I’ve really enjoyed Kathryn Xu’s figure skating coverage over at Defector, including these great pieces on Amber Glenn and the “Quad God” Ilia Malinin.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
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