The Trump Administration Is Eroding The Case For Keeping Protests Nonviolent

This is new

It was distressing, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, to watch a significant number of progressive journalists, intellectuals, and others downplay the very real destruction that was going on alongside the peaceful protests. The rioting and looting that scarred a number of major cities amounted to billions of dollars in damage (by one estimate) — translating, of course, to real hardship experienced by real humans — and killed a handful of people as well.

Some outright argued that this wave of destruction was righteous. Others walked a slightly trickier path, not quite arguing that it was righteous but instead yelling at anyone who criticized it — they basically argued that it was uncouth to talk about. The arguments of those in the anti-anti-rioting camp generally centered on the idea that the system was so broken that rioting was the only meaningful choice available to protesters. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote about riots being “the language of the unheard” was referenced, selectively, its broader context ignored. If they can kill black people with impunity, the thinking went, then what choice did protesters have but to respond in a less than “respectable” way?

This wasn’t, and isn’t, a compelling argument. First, it doesn’t come close to addressing why the response to a failed system would be to burn down random city blocks rather than to direct destructive energy against the system’s own instruments. Second, as much as certain commentators raced to one-up themselves in describing America’s rottenness, it just isn’t the case, by any reasonable historical standard, that 2020 America was so broken that nonviolent protest and other normal political actions should have been seen as obsolete.

To take the most salient example: What happened after Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine horrific minutes, killing him? There was a wave of outrage and protest, which was, in the vast majority of cases, allowed by the authorities to proceed (in some cases, the authorities pulled back rather than respond harshly to actual rioting). Chauvin was arrested and taken into custody and tried and convicted. In other words, the killing of George Floyd itself was horrible but it would be hard to look at the response and conclude that the U.S. was now some sort of fascist dictatorship unwilling to punish police abuses. That’s obviously not to deny the existence of both abusive policing and instances in which cops get away with terrible behavior — of course there are plenty of examples of both. Rather, my point here is that the stronger argument that all peaceful methods had failed and protesters somehow had no other choice just didn’t map well onto reality.

Is that still the case? Is there still a path to justice for protesters within the system? In light of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis, I’m worried that it’s getting harder and harder to make the standard anti-violence argument in good faith.

***

Why, in the first place, is ICE in Minneapolis in such force? This is the “largest DHS operation ever,” according to the Department of Homeland Security itself.

As I mentioned recently on Blocked and Reported (and The Daily just made a similar point), if the goal is to rack up the millions of deportations Donald Trump has promised his base, it’s an odd choice of city. There simply aren’t that many illegal immigrants there: The city’s largest ethnic minority is its roughly 80,000 Somalis, but the entire state only has about 5,000 Somalis who are not U.S. citizens, according to one estimate. And that 5,000 figure includes “people here through other legal means, such as permanent residents, green card holders, and the couple hundred covered by Temporary Protected Status,” though the Trump administration just stripped TPS protections from the small number of Somalis in America who have it.

Administration officials have offered different justifications at different times. Some of them center on the very real and very big fraud that has devastated Minnesota’s welfare system, whose perpetrators are mostly Somalis. This has, of course, supercharged Trump’s (and Stephen Miller’s) anti-immigrant views and put Minneapolis in their crosshairs, and can explain why Trump has described Somalis as “garbage.” But as a logical matter, given the ratio of Somalis with legal status to undocumented Somalis, it really doesn’t make sense, as a response of the fraud, to flood the city with federal officials tasked with carrying out deportations. This is obviously a matter for further investigations and prosecutions, not a deportation blitzkrieg. There’s no clear connection between the fraud investigation itself and the idea that there is a sudden need to deport massive numbers of people from Minneapolis.

A much more credible answer has to do with President Trump’s conspiratorial views and personal grievances. That is, he is using ICE as an armed branch of. . . well, of himself. He is using ICE to punish a city he doesn’t like for delusional reasons.

It doesn’t take any real detective work to see that this is true. In June, Trump posted to Truth Social that “nothing will stop us from executing our mission and fulfilling our mandate to the American people. ICE officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this Truth, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest mass deportation program in history.”

He continued:

In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport illegal aliens in America’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where millions upon millions of illegal aliens reside. These and other such cities are the core of the Democrat power center, where they use illegal aliens to expand their voter base, cheat in elections, and grow the welfare state, robbing good paying jobs and benefits from hard-working American citizens. These radical-left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our country, and actually want to destroy our inner cities—and they are doing a good job of it. There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in open borders, transgender for everybody, and men playing in women’s sports— and that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our great and patriotic law enforcement officers to focus on our crime ridden and deadly inner cities and those places where “sanctuary cities” play such a big role. You don’t hear about sanctuary cities in our Heartland.

This is an American version of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Our president believes that Democrats have used illegal immigrants to steal elections from him. There is perhaps no allegation in American politics that has received more journalistic scrutiny and produced less evidence than the theory that illegal immigrants vote in large numbers. It is, at this date and in light of the (lack of) evidence uncovered, an idiotic thing to continue to believe. And yet, unfortunately for us, the most powerful man in the world believes it and is using armed agents of the state to “address” this “problem.”

This is also personal for our president, just part of his broader, also delusional belief that he has had various electoral victories “stolen” from him as a result of fraud. He does seem particularly irked by Minnesota; on January 9 he said of the state government, “[T]hey’re crooked officials. . . . I feel that I won Minnesota all three times. I think I won it all three times. . . I won it all three times in my opinion. . . It’s a corrupt voter state. . . I won Minnesota three times and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.”

The relationship between Trump’s conspiracy theories and his use of ICE in Minneapolis simply shouldn’t be in dispute: Trump explicitly said that he thinks illegal immigrants are used by Democrats to steal elections, he explicitly said he thinks he won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and he has sent ICE to Minnesota in numbers that make little sense given the city’s size and immigrant population. You don’t really need to put the puzzle pieces together because Trump has done so for you, on social media and on TV. (It’s also likely that the enmity between Trump and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, is a factor as well.)

This brings us into strange territory when it comes to the political legitimacy of ICE’s actions in Minnesota. Of course “political legitimacy” is one of those terms that sounds grave and official and serious but which is fiendishly subjective. In theory, Trump has the power to direct ICE where he wants to direct ICE, and ICE in turn has certain powers to detain and remove people without immigration status (powers ICE appears to abuse regularly, perhaps because of a reduced training schedule). But if a large part of the reason why ICE is in Minnesota is because of the conspiracy theories held by a deluded president who is genuinely detached from reality — at least on matters concerning his pride and ego — it’s very hard to view any of this as a remotely “normal” or “legitimate” manifestation of conservative immigration policies.

***

Stranger and even more menacing is how Trump and his allies at the highest levels of the federal government have reacted in the wake of both shootings: by immediately slandering the dead. This happened, pardon the expression, before their bodies were cold. “[Renee Good] didn’t try to run him over,” Trump said the day of the shooting, according to The New York Times. “She ran him over.” Kristi Noem and her Department of Homeland Security likewise called Good a domestic terrorist who attempted to run over the officer who shot her.

While the Good case is the more complicated of the two given that she did start to drive away in very close proximity to the officer who shot her, it doesn’t appear that she even made contact with him, which obviously makes it much more likely that she was trying to get away than that she was trying to hit him, and which obviously debunks the idea that she “ran him over” (though it was clear from all the videos she didn’t do that, anyway). It’s remarkably irresponsible for the government to immediately make such claims before even conducting a thorough investigation of the video evidence.

We’ve seen a similar playbook in the wake of Alex Pretti’s killing. This one is not a close call. There’s now indisputable video evidence that at the time the first shot was fired by an ICE agent, Pretti had already been disarmed — an officer was literally walking away with his firearm. There are also no videos that show him holding or brandishing his gun, and the available audio makes it sound like officers had no idea he was armed until they found the gun while grappling with him.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration began making the deranged claim that Pretti was an attempted assassin. Yesterday, before anyone knew much of anything, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino (a.k.a. Steven J. Lockjaw from One Battle After Another) said that “an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun,” and that “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Noem repeated those claims, adding that one of the officers was “fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers.” This is unbelievably crazy. Bovino, Noem, and Trump’s other toadies are constructing an entirely fictitious narrative that is plainly contrary to video evidence. It’s a level of outright lying that goes well beyond what politicians normally do.

What does all of this tell us about ICE and the Trump administration? We know that if an ICE agent shoots and kills you, the government, at the highest levels, will immediately take to the airwaves and to social media to lie about you and the circumstances of your death. That’s grotesque enough. What’s worse is that the Trump administration appears to be doing everything it can to actively impede any independent investigation of these shootings.

This should frighten you, whatever you think of the shootings themselves. The question here isn’t whether they were justified, but whether they warrant a thorough investigation and potential criminal charges. I firmly believe that if you showed all the available video to 100 dispassionate use-of-force experts, all 100 would quickly conclude that yes, these questions warrant serious, thorough investigations. It is plainly obvious from the videos that they are investigation-worthy.

The Trump administration’s FBI quickly “determined” — I don’t want to break the formatting of this article by giving those scare quotes the 150-point font size they deserve — that there was no reason to launch a criminal civil-rights investigation into the shooting of Good, sparking a number of resignations of prosecutors. Instead, the feds appear to be “investigating” — same deal with the font size — Good and her surviving wife’s ties to left-wing activism. In theory this extremely Trumpian bending of federal law-enforcement to his will wouldn’t preclude a state investigation, but Minnesota investigators said that “the U.S. attorney’s office has prevented it from taking part in the investigation,” according to PBS. While things are in a state of flux, it appears that at the moment there is no active investigation underway concerned with determining whether the shooting of Good was justified.

The same thing, again, appears to be happening in the wake of Pretti’s shooting: Almost immediately, according to a complaint filed by the state, the feds began blocking state law enforcement from access to evidence at the scene, leading a judge to issue a remarkable order that the feds not destroy or alter evidence.

These are the sorts of things you’d expect from some dictatorship, or a country whose military and law enforcement had been thoroughly compromised by organized crime. In developed democracies, the government is not supposed to kill people and then immediately try to stifle investigations.

***

To be clear, my own views on political violence have not shifted. It would be suicidally stupid for activists to respond to ICE’s consistent violence with violence of their own. It’s not a fight they can win, and the authoritarians who presently run the country — Trump, Miller, Noem, and all their morally shriveled ilk — want nothing more than to justify more “immigration crackdowns” as a response to activist violence.

But it’s getting much harder to argue that we live in a normal democracy in which there are robust checks on the state monopoly on legalized violence. There are still ways a semblance of balance and sanity could return. The Democrats are now refusing to fund ICE (for obviously justifiable reasons), putting us on a path to another government showdown. The GOP, meanwhile, might be getting increasingly queasy — not over the general monstrousness of the Trump administration, I don’t think, which it has enabled every step of the way, but rather over the political consequences of the American people starting to understand exactly what the Trump 2.0 approach to immigration looks like. The polling suggests that a subset of voters who don’t follow politics closely thought they were voting for a secure border, among other things, not the crackdown presently going on (I hope next election they pay closer attention — Trump telegraphed his desires quite clearly during the last campaign).

Whatever their reasons, it would not take a lot of GOP defectors for Congress to spring into action and exert some influence over ICE. As dark as things are, there are some relatively straightforward routes out of the dangerous territory. It’s not yet the case that agents of the U.S. government can kill people with complete and total impunity — without even an investigation. There could still be investigations and accountability. But the Trump administration is obviously pushing toward exactly this system: ICE can kill anyone it wants, and the administration will simply lie and obstruct afterward.

So we are well on our way toward a situation in which the average person has no legitimate recourse if someone they care about is killed by the federal government. This is a whole different level of Trumpism. It was probably always where this project was headed if it gained enough steam and if Trump learned he couldn’t rely on anyone with an iota of capacity for independent thinking. Unfortunately it did, and he did, and here we are. We’ll know more, but today, could you tell an anguished Minneapolis activist that they have a path toward justice within the system? Could you tell them that honestly, with a straight face?

---

Questions? Comments? Predictions for how many more people ICE will kill in the next month or so? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - JANUARY 25: People pay their respects at a memorial site for Alex Pretti on January 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents amid a scuffle to arrest him on January 24. The Trump administration has sent a reported 3,000 federal agents into the area, with more on the way, as they make a push to arrest undocumented immigrants in the region. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)