Secret police and murder in the streets: year one of Trump’s deportation regime

Renee Good, a legal observer in Minneapolis, was murdered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross in the first week of January. After dropping off her child at school, she and a small group of others felt a moral compulsion to protect their neighbours. So they documented the military-style raid of Gestapo-like masked goons in a residential community.

ICE met them with brutal force. Multiple agents shouted contradictory commands while attempting to rip Good out of the car. She tried to drive away, but Ross shot her in the face. Bystanders pleaded for them to give her medical attention, but they refused. She was untreated for precious minutes until paramedics arrived.

Almost immediately, US President Donald Trump falsely claimed she ran over an officer. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem smeared her as a domestic terrorist. Vice President J.D. Vance promised “absolute immunity” for the murderous ICE agent, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept state and local officials out of the investigation

There have been at least thirteen instances of federal agents firing into civilian vehicles since July, but this episode of someone being murdered in broad daylight sparked a big response. A video of the shooting went viral that day and people came out to protest at the site of her killing as well as around the country. These protests have been broad and bitter, at the centre of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. There was enough pressure from below for Mayor Jacob Frey to tell ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” the day the shooting happened.

Immigration agents are still there, asking protesters if they have not learned what happens when they watch them, and implying that they might end up dead like Renee Good. The Justice Department has opted not to conduct a criminal investigation of the shooting but instead investigate Good’s widow for her activism.

This is the new normal one year into Trump’s second administration. Paramilitary police forces descend on migrant communities, brutalising targeted minorities, protesters and bystanders.

Shock and awe

The murder in Minneapolis came during the largest raid yet, targeting Somalis and Somali Americans in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”, the attack brought more than 2,000 agents into the area, and in the wake of recent protests, the Trump administration then sent hundreds more. There are now more immigration agents than regular police in the Twin Cities.

Last June, the template for this onslaught was set in Los Angeles. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tactical commander Gregory Bovino led mass raids using highly confrontational tactics against migrants and protesters. It marked a switch from investigating individuals with known immigration issues to conducting rapid raids in migrant neighbourhoods to racially profile people for quick interrogation and arrest before “turning and burning” to the next target. The questionable legality of the assault did not hide a clear strategy: use overwhelming force, arrest at will, and create a political crisis for city administrators.

Border Patrol took control over this operation, bringing its distinctive brand of violence to a major Democratic-run city. Every opportunity was used to stoke confrontation, extending to shows of force at the governor’s press conference. This launched Bovino’s career to new heights, and he expanded operations to more cities.

The crescendo of “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago came when hundreds of militarised federal agents raided an apartment complex. They busted in, rappelling from helicopters and dropping stun grenades. They arrested citizens and non-citizens alike. More than just shock and awe, the operation was planned to produce an action-movie-style trailer of the raid to promote their work.

“Operation Patriot 2.0” ripped through Massachusetts. “Operation Charlotte’s Web” hit North Carolina. The brutal “Swamp Sweep” terrorised New Orleans. People with no criminal background were the biggest victims of these urban raids. This distinct mix of terror and spectacle became the hallmark of the regime. Washington, D.C., became a testing ground for combining objectives. They fabricated a crime crisis to allow a federal government takeover of the city and leveraged this manufactured crisis to force local police into immigration duty.

One day after the murder of Renee Good, Kristi Noem announced “Operation Salvo” targeting Dominicans in New York City, and we have yet to see its scale.

An increasing number of raids.

Early in Trump’s second term, racial profiling became openly accepted, and watchdog organisations were shut down. Immigration courts are now open hunting grounds to arrest migrants, leaving people in a double bind of weighing up if it is more dangerous to make or miss an appointment. Small armies in full military gear descend on motorists in petrol stations, day labourers waiting in Home Depot parking lots, workers at construction sites and anywhere else migrants might be.

These arrests are getting shockingly violent. It is common for masked agents to smash car windows and body slam people. Protesters are routinely brutalised and even targeted later. In one instance, agents caused a car crash near the site of raids and protests. They let the other driver go but later decided to label him a dangerous activist who impeded their work. A Border Patrol SWAT team used explosives to raid his house and terrorise his family while searching for him. All charges against him were dropped, but the agency used the raid as an opportunity to film a promotional video to threaten protesters. Immigration agents even arrest politicians who question their actions.

The administration has looked for every opportunity to expand its definition of criminality. Federal agents targeted Palestine solidarity activists for arrest and deportation, using their political solidarity as grounds to threaten legal status. One activist, Leqaa Kordia, remains detained almost a year after her arrest.

The regime stripped the legal status of more than 1.6 million people, mostly Venezuelans and Haitians, criminalising them overnight. Travel bans were implemented for a wide range of countries, followed by pausing all citizenship, residency and benefits applications for people from these countries. The only group with increased access appears to be white South Africans, in a nod to white supremacists.

Mass surveillance is playing an increasingly important role in fabricating new criminals. Facial recognition and licence plate tracking systems are used to identify patterns immigration authorities deem suspicious, creating an ever expanding list of targets.

A domestic army

The already bloated border enforcement regime has exploded to catastrophic proportions. This year, the administration fused a key pillar of the repressive state into a secret police force under opaque leadership. A slew of executive orders created a unified military force with wide parameters on who it could target.

The scope stretches beyond the vast Department of Homeland Security. The conservative Cato Institute has documented how tens of thousands of officers from other agencies get diverted for immigration blitzes. This is in addition to 900 local law enforcement agencies that deputised their officers to act as immigration agents this year

Soon after, they directed this force internally to terrorise major cities. The attack on Los Angeles served as a prelude to the funding expansion for the deportation machine. It is set to be one of the biggest armies in the world. The budget was tripled for ICE, bolstered with 10,000 new agents. It adds 10 percent to the already massive CBP budget for an additional 3,000 agents.

As the Trump administration rushes to make use of these funds, successful applicants are offered US$50,000 sign-on bonuses and student loan relief. The nature of these recruits is predictably disgusting. ICE uses openly racist and xenophobic advertising strategies, which it plans to expand through a US$100 million “wartime recruitment” advertising blitz this year. And during the rush to hire as many as possible, vetting and training standards are dropped to get enough warm bodies armed and ready to terrorise communities. The wartime recruitment is paired with wartime wares—ICE weapons spending increased by more than 600 percent this year.

The damage

Trump set a goal of deporting 1 million immigrants in a year. DHS is claiming 600,000 victims, with another 1.9 million “self-deported”. The official figures on self-deportations are unreliable, but the government wants big deportation numbers. The architect of the immigration regime, Stephen Miller, cracked heads at local ICE offices for missed quotas, and Border Patrol officers were put in charge of more ICE offices to encourage more aggressive tactics.

However, it is wrong to see this as a failure for the administration. There has been a 60 percent increase in total arrests since the June offensive in Los Angeles. ICE now arrests four times as many people outside of jails as it did during Trump’s first term.

A record number of migrants are jailed in shoddy, overcrowded detention centres, creating the deadliest year for immigrant prisons in decades. The array of detention centres has expanded to some of the least habitable sites imaginable, such as an abandoned airport in the Florida Everglades. They aim to double bed capacity, but this will not improve conditions in the labyrinth of for-profit immigrant detention centres, where cutting corners is the business model.

Beyond the border

Ending mass migration is the first priority listed in Trump’s National Security Strategy document, and it ties this into its broader objective to dominate the Western Hemisphere. The US aims to “enlist” regional allies and to “expand” US influence to dominate less compliant countries.

Trump readily enlisted El Salvador by outsourcing some of his most grotesque imprisonment work to the hard-right regime. The black zones of CECOT are even harder to see into than the worst onshore for-profit prisons within the US. Threats to turn financial aid on and off based on election results help keep other allies in the hemisphere, from Argentina to Honduras, deeply in the fold of US interests.

Every opportunity is being used to increase pressure on regional players. Even though Mexico aided Trump’s efforts by sending massive troop deployments to both of its borders, the US regime thinks Mexico could always do more.

Demonising migrants as dangerous members of terrorist drug cartels served as a rhetorical battering ram to justify further destabilising the Venezuelan regime. Kidnapping migrants and shipping them to gulags preceded the bombing and hijacking of boats in international waters and the eventual kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro.

Harkening to racist tropes about Europe “being ruined” by migrants, Trump demands they follow his path towards even more draconian border regimes. It seems to be working as it aligns with insurgent right-wing forces across the continent: 27 countries signed a statement supporting suspending human rights and deporting migrants to third countries. They are looking to emulate a system long admired by Trump, Australia’s horrific Pacific solution.

The fightback

Protests erupted almost immediately after the killing of Renee Good and have not yet stopped. They keep pushing immigration agents out of the neighbourhood where she was killed. They respond to pepper spray by pelting agents with snowballs. Minnesotans continue to mobilise mass demonstrations, disrupt hotels where ICE agents sleep, organise school walkouts and build networks of rapid responders against the onslaught of the deportation machine.

On the weekend after her death, more than a thousand protests exploded across the country. In the face of rampant brutality and escalating repression, heroic people keep fighting. Los Angeles showed what a rebellion against ICE can look like. Chicago continues to provide a model for sustained resistance.

Maybe this moment in Minneapolis is the beginning of a turn towards deeper struggle. Unions and community organisations are calling for a city-wide strike against ICE on 23 January. This will be an opportunity and a test of momentum.