Excerpt: Over five days in Minneapolis, I witnessed a city on the edge of a nervous breakdown. It genuinely felt like an invasion — a hostile national force confronting furious locals equipped mostly with whistles, snowballs and funny signs.

In parts of the city, normal life continues undisturbed. Coffee shops are open. The bars were busy Friday night. In others, signs of the siege are everywhere: immigrant businesses are closed; schools are half full; convoys packed with ICE agents haunt the streets.

“What’s happening in Minnesota defies belief,” Gov. Tim Walz said in a televised address Wednesday night. “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos, disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down.”

Beginning in December, the Trump administration sent thousands of heavily armed and poorly trained ICE and border patrol agents to Minnesota ostensibly to investigate fraud and sweep up illegal immigrants. But up close, what they’re doing looks more like mass racial profiling and violent counter-insurgency than it does policing.

“If you want to investigate fraud, bring an accountant,” [Will] Stancil, a Democratic activist and education policy adviser told me as we drove around his neighborhood Monday. The ICE agents in Minnesota don’t look like accountants. They look like soldiers. And you don’t bring soldiers unless you want to fight a war.

Excerpt: Why does the mainstream Democratic response to authoritarian violence always have to be abstracted like this? What would it take for these freaks to voice objection to the actual fact of state terror happening right in front of their faces, rather than raising limp procedural qualms over Trump not having filed the proper paperwork to inflict it with sufficient bipartisanship? What conceivable abuse by the Trump administration would give [Senator Amy] Klobuchar an easier opportunity to simply believe in right and wrong—or even to mount a cynical performance of believing in right and wrong—than a masked goon whipping out a pistol and murdering one of her own constituents, on video, over nothing? Would Renee Good’s summary slaughter at the hands of the American gestapo have been tolerable with buy-in from the Minneapolis Police Department?

How fucking hard is it to simply and absolutely oppose the murder of innocent people by federal agents? How hard is it to respond—as Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar did, and reliably does, despite being a constant target of racist malice from the president himself—like an actual human being?

Excerpt: Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Excerpt: The Trump administration has provided almost no information to back up its statements about rising assaults [on ICE agents], which makes its claims hard to assess. But details about ICE officers who’ve died on the job are readily available on the agency’s website.

Those records show that none of ICE’s agents have ever been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s more than two-decade history. Instead, the leading cause of death by far among ICE officers is COVID-19. According to ICE’s data, the second leading cause of death is cancer linked to 9/11. (The pandemic and cancers connected to the September 11 terrorist attacks account for 75 percent of the deaths in ICE’s history.)

Data show that the most recent ICE officer death attributed to something other than cancer or COVID-19 occurred in 2021. But that incident did not involve an immigrant, either. It occurred when a special agent died after his service weapon was accidentally discharged in a parking lot.

Excerpt: First of all, the ones ramping up the “hateful rhetoric” have been the MAGA faithful. They’re the ones spreading baseless conspiracy theories, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” or a “paid agitator.” This is the same thing Homan, Gregory Bongino, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have been doing for months, encouraging ICE to see the public as enemies to be fought, not a public they are supposed to be protecting.

Second, if federal agents are so fragile that people calling them names means they’re going to murder people, they shouldn’t be federal agents at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to handle firearms, frankly.

This is textbook authoritarian blame-shifting: create the conditions for violence through dehumanizing rhetoric, then blame the victims when violence inevitably occurs. And it’s not just Homan. The entire MAGA ecosystem is working overtime to justify this murder and preemptively excuse the next one.

Excerpt: The man with the microphone was Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang, who spent four years in federal prison for attacking Capitol police with a baseball bat and a stolen riot shield during the January 6 insurrection. Despite those offenses, Lang was one of many violent offenders from that day who received full pardons from Trump on his first day back in office.

Since his release, Lang has been on a rampage across the country, sparking violent encounters through racist and Islamophobic rallies. Minneapolis has been in his sights at least since he appeared in Dearborn, Michigan, and since arriving he has wasted no time in making enemies. On Jan. 17, he is scheduled to bring his anti-Islam campaign to Minneapolis’ City Hall, an appearance counter-protesters are already preparing for.