Donald Trump and maga Republicans are creating a fascist state with ICE as the 21st century Gestaopo

Gestapo was the official secret state police of Nazi Germany, founded in April 1933, by Hermann Göring, and later led by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. 👿

With ICE, America is becoming the country we created in Iraq
The tactics the United States used in Iraq are migrating home.

Opinion published in the Boston Globe:

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of two books about the Iraq War, “Fiasco” and “The Gamble.” His most recent work is “Big Money, Small Town,” a novel set in Maine.

Every time an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent kills a person in our streets, I think back to something that a Middle Easterner said just before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003: “You Americans think you are going to change us to be more like you,” he predicted, “but I think the Middle East is going to change you to be more like us.”

I didn’t really believe it at the time. Frankly, I thought America was too resilient for that, with a good track record of observing human rights and bolstering democracy. 

But that prescient observation still haunts me more than two decades later. Unfortunately, that passing voice was right.

Over the past two years, the way the US Army often mistreated Iraqis has come home to roost — ICE personnel have invaded our cities, acting just as reckless and lawless as our troops abroad once did. There are armed men in the streets, outfitted in goggles, masks, helmets, and body armor, ill-prepared for the tasks at hand but possessing an overwhelming arrogance about how to perform those tasks. They point their weapons at unarmed people and shout obscenities at them. They answer to no one that we can see, and they shroud their actions in an overarching excuse: They can shoot if they feel threatened.

In some ways, they behave worse than did the American troops who blundered around the streets of Baghdad. Those soldiers had little other ways to communicate than gestures, because very few of them spoke Arabic. By contrast, ICE agents often speak the same language as the people they victimize. 

But, having a common tongue is not always de-escalatory. In Minneapolis last January, after ICE agent

Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good with three shots, he called her a profane slur.

Another difference in Iraq is that when American troops acted brutally, they were investigated by their own superiors. In November 2005, for example, when Marines killed 25 unarmed civilians in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, one of them a baby, officers in the chain of command began to ask questions.

Those Marines were acquitted, but the Haditha incident came to mark a turning point in the war. It forced top American commanders in Iraq to reexamine their tactics and strategy and begin to focus on protecting the civilian population.

This in turn led to changes on the ground that eventually permitted the United States to withdraw from Iraq, not quite claiming a victory but neither leaving in a pell-mell retreat.

And that change in Iraq, overdue and difficult, may be the biggest difference between then and now. 

There is no evidence that Trump administration officials are going to step back, recalculate, and reform. 

Indeed, they show no impulse even to investigate why unarmed people are being killed in our streets by government agents.

Rather, the president and his subordinates seem quite satisfied with having masked men terrorize the population, especially in cities that don’t support him politically. In some cases, these men are the same veterans who served abroad: ICE agent Ross, the Minneapolis shooter, was a machine gunner in Iraq, while David Brouillette, the trigger puller in Biddeford, Maine, served in Afghanistan in a military intelligence unit. One can only wonder just what lessons those men brought home from their combat tours — and how many more ICE agents are like them.

This bleak conclusion leads me to one more parallel with the Iraq war: It is indeed time for regime change here. Just as Iraq needed to move on from living under an authoritarian, law-breaking ruler and his corrupt circle, so do we.

A final thought: Every war, even bad ones, has its heroes. The people who stand out to me now are the volunteers who monitor the actions of ICE agents and sometimes have guns and tasers brandished at them in return. These are the people who truly are fighting for our freedoms. We are in their debt.

Senator Susan Collins supported a $70 billion allocation to fund evil ICE through 2028 so Americans can expect more killing

Card campaign for democracy:  Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted to approve a 💲70 billion allocation to support the evil ICE Gestapo through 2028, Innocent people are now murdered and at risk for being gunned down without cause as a result of her horrible vote. 

As we remember Renee, Alex, Lorenzo, and Johan, let's come together and plan how we can persuade two-thirds of Congress to defund and abolish ICE. It may seem impossible, but remember—nothing is impossible. Difficult tasks are ours to face, and you know what? We can do hard things. Everyone of us committed to this fight for our country's soul has the strength to do hard things and make a difference.

Although I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly how we can do this, but I believe we can. I don’t know where to start, but I do want to begin gathering your thoughts and ideas and organize them into a document of potential starting points. And who knows what ideas could grow from this. What we might accomplish after the midterms and beyond.

Two-thirds of Congress could do remarkable things to bring an end to fear and to improve safety for all people.  Is Senator Susan Collins listening ❓

Americn media must not normalize Donald Trump and maga Fascist behavior! Use real words to describe the actual crimes!

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/26/the-crime-of-witness-fintan-otoole/

The Crime of Witness Fintan O’Toole

Published in The New York Review of Books:

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence. February 26, 2026 issue
This article was originally published online January 29, 2026, in slightly modified form. —The Editors

Renee Good and Alex Pretti murdered by ICE in Minneapolis

Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.

It is striking that the capital offense for which both Mr. Pretti and Ms, Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness.  Ms. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. 

Habit, as Samuel Beckett said, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.

First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis,❗ the (illegal) 💢 Trump regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied.

I know, by the way, that this is quite possible. For thirty years, in parts of my native island of Ireland, troops with machine guns crouching in shop doorways or skulking in the back gardens of ordinary houses were so taken for granted that one saw them, if at all, out of the corner of one’s eye. What is always there becomes barely there at all.

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax.

The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Ms. Renee Good on January 7, 2026, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But, in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Ms. Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

This does not mean that Pretti’s killing was specifically ordered. But the template for it was certainly prepared in advance. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Here it is a case of justification first, execution afterwards. The license to kill Pretti was issued when Good was redefined as a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an officer.

Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.

The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Ms. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped  into the plural, making Mr. Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences.

It does not matter that this hyped-up story is harder to make credible than the usual kind of official lying that characterizes such killings merely as unfortunate accidents whose true cause is impossible to determine. Getting people to accept a vaguely credible account is a lesser manifestation of absolute power than getting them to accept—or even better, to just shrug their shoulders at—a wildly incredible one.

There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Mr. Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.

Thus, even while The New York Times did excellent work in analyzing the video footage of Mr. Pretti’s execution, it initially resorted to the bland conclusion that “videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting.” Appear? As the paper implicitly acknowledged later, the truth is that “videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.” It is good that the instinctive resort to fuzzy circumlocution was eventually overcome, but surely, once the paper’s analysis showed definitively that the administration was brazenly lying about an official murder, that ought to have been the starkest of headlines.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal declared that although he did not deserve to be shot dead, “Mr. Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents.” His error was that he “attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents.” It is clear from the rest of the article that the Journal believes the Trump administration to be lying about its unjustified killing of an American citizen, but the import of this otherwise astounding truth is diluted by the suggestion that he was, after all, a fool. In an authoritarian state, who but a fool would try to help a woman who has been pepper-sprayed by the great leader’s shock troops?

The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Mr. Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.

The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Mr. Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Mr. Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books. .

Donald Trump and maga Republicans use Americn tax money to fund evil ICE operations to punish American citizens

Why the Department of Homeland Security Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable.

Donald Trump has created his own personal Gestapo*❗

For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies.

By Jonathan Blitzer published in The New Yorker.

When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” 

At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it. Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics. With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.

The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Ms. Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was 🤥“an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

These lies 🤥were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump. Shortly after Mr. Pretti’s killing (murder❗😢), Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers.

In the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Mr. Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.

The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from 🤢Operation Metro Surge💢 is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. 

Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But, more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.

No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born. A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But, this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.

On Wednesday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”

Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.

Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. 

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with Donald Trump to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. ♦

Published in the print edition with the headline “Out of Control.”

*Gestapo:  

The secret police of Nazi Germany, formed in 1933, and operating until 1945, that enforced government rule through terror and repression, with the authority to arrest individuals and organizations suspected of opposing the Nazi regime without judicial oversight. The organization's primary function was to identify and suppress threats to the state, a mission that included significant involvement in the Holocaust.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end the ICE Gestapo "Army of Occupation" terrorizing all Americans

Echo opinion letters published in The New York Times:

#ICEOut❗

A Backlash Against ICE’s ‘Army of Occupation’

The move by the Trump administration to remove the Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino from the anti-immigrant operation in Minnesota and replace him with Tom Homan, the Donald Trump border czar, feels like a way to take Bovino out of the line of fire and divert attention from the real issue.

The real issue is how Donald Trump is using an agency to enforce a draconian and violent program directed at nonwhite immigrants and their American citizen supporters. The program violates laws and the Constitution in multiple ways, and has resulted in the killing of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Whatever ICE was set up to do, it has become an army of occupation directed at Democratic cities. Violating laws violently for political purposes seems like the essence of domestic terrorism. In this case, it is directed by the Donald Trump administration with the apparent support of the Republican Party.

At this point, ICE should be defunded and disbanded. Congress (including leadership by Maine's Senator Susan Collins)  should act in an adult manner to hold accountable those who killed Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, and violated the rights of many more.

A new agency must be designed from the ground up for the stated purposes of immigration enforcement, one that operates according to the Constitution, the law and not the whim of a self-proclaimed dictator.

From Simon Cohen in Queens, New York

The New York Times editorial board rightly emphasizes that Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, and Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, “are lying in defiance of obvious truths.” 

Just because Bovino is removed from the anti-immigrant operation in Minnesota doesn’t change that.

Last week, in a speech to the British Parliament commemorating the coming 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, the U.S. House speaker, Mike Johnson, quoting the British writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, said that “every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.” One of those things, he noted, is the “indispensable relationship between freedom and virtue.”

Truth is the precondition for accountability. It is also virtuous, making it indispensable to our freedom as Americans. Our democracy will decay if we forget this.

It is therefore incumbent upon Johnson and his congressional colleagues to investigate the killings of Mr. Alex Pretti and Ms. Renee Good to establish the truth. His duty as House speaker — and as a member of our “high civilization” — demands it.

From T. Michael Spencer in Washington

To the Editor: Yes, the Trump administration is lying to our faces. This editorial encapsulates our current national situation.

I am a lifelong resident of Minnesota, 86 years of age. Our state is known as a liberal state and mostly votes Democratic. That apparently does not sit well with the current administration.

We are besieged by federal government forces flooding our streets, terrorizing our residents, scaring our kids. They have brutally and unjustly killed two citizens here since they arrived.

Where is this going❓ When will it end❓ Who is safe now❓

😡😞😟

From Judith Koll Healey in  Minneapolis

Donald Trump and his maga Republican cabinet live in a culture of lies

Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself New York Times opinion by Ezra

Last February, a year ago, I wrote an essay about the Trump administration’s strategy of “muzzle velocity.” Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun. The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Trump world has an affection for analogies that🤢 glorify the combination of violence and speed. 

After Trump’s second Inaugural Address, Taylor Budowich, then one of the White House’s deputy chiefs of staff, tweeted, “Now, comes SHOCK AND AWE.” “Shock and awe” refers to the bombing campaign that launched America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was an awesome demonstration of initial force that belied a catastrophic absence of information, planning and wisdom. It was the belief that an immediate show of dominance would lead to a society’s submission rather than its revolt. Both Bannon and Budowich’s metaphors have proved more grimly apt than they intended.


The strategy of the Trump administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing. This was Bannon’s insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate — they can only focus on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose.

But what you are doing to the opposition you are also doing to yourself. “It is a strategy that forces you into overreach,” I wrote last year. “To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself.” And that is what happened. Clearly, the Trump administration is overwhelmed — by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos.

There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump administration is that it has created those crises itself. The Trump administration chose to create a regime of ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies, leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And that’s just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of the last few weeks and months.
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Muzzle velocity was built on the idea that the Trump administration had reserves of attention and focus that the rest of us did not. The reality is just the opposite. The White House has demands on its attention and focus that the rest of us do not. We are not responsible for managing or controlling everything from the labor market to A.I. policy to immigration enforcement and vaccine approvals. We will not be blamed for a measles outbreak or a recession. But the president will.

That is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention of the president and his top aides. Well-managed White Houses — and personally disciplined presidents — are ruthless in their pursuit of prioritization. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Vanity Fair in 2012. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

But this White House — and this president — have treated freneticism as a virtue and discipline as a vice. Instead of seeking to limit the number of crises and conflicts that they need to remain on top of, members of the Trump administration, from their first day, sought to multiply them. They spent their initial months in office ripping the wiring out of the federal government, including gutting internal teams, like the National Security Council, that are meant to help process information on behalf of the president. They have treated caution and restraint as an admission of weakness.

In January Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who, in practice, acts as Trump’s prime minister, delivered a message to ICE agents: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said. That message was part of a broader effort to change the culture at ICE and the Border Patrol, Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic who covers immigration, told me:

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and dangerous one. 

Usually, the (reasonable) concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun, because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to.

And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. We’ve seen in ICE people losing their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations, they’re not being aggressive enough. I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.

It is hard not to see a straight line from that change in culture to the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis.

Every organization comes to resemble its leader. Trump himself is easily distracted, desirous of flattery rather than counsel, impressed by crude displays of dominance and violence and obsessed with social media and cable news — and so too is his White House. The sycophancy among Trump’s aides is so crude as to be indistinguishable from mockery. 

(Evil Nazi) Stephen Miller, speaking to a New York magazine reporter about Trump’s health, said, “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’” When Miller says this, does he realize he is making his boss look ridiculous❓ Does he intend it❓

But it’s not just (evil Nazi) Miller. Trump’s cabinet meetings take the form of totalitarian kitsch. Here is Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrapping up remarks in December:  (My personal observation about Donald Trump's farcical cabinet meetings is to call them seances.) If you were to ask me what I’m grateful for, whether it’s a Thanksgiving, it’s a Christmas, a Hanukkah, a New Year’s, anytime of year the fact that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have just left it in the rearview mirror and went on to really enjoy retirement, but he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in at home, because he believes in his flag, our freedom, our liberties and to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So I’m grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President. 🤢

The joke of Trump’s cabinet meetings is that no one is joking. These meetings are not just a performance; they are a culture. Trump’s favor is won through demonstrations of loyalty rather than competence. The president wants parades, not process, and that is what he gets.

The irony of Trump’s second term is that he was much better served by the advisers in his first term, who understood that part of their job was to protect him — and the rest of us — from his worst impulses. In 2020, when Trump reportedly responded to the George Floyd protesters by asking the military to “just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something,” his advisers weren’t protecting only us when they refused. They were also protecting him.

Trump’s second White House was built to ensure that no one would ever tell Trump no again. He wanted a culture of lies and sycophancy, and he got one. “I hear stories from my predecessors,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in December, “about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or cost lives. I don’t have that.”

Trump’s aides flatter him and lie to us. They indulge his constant distraction and so they too are constantly distracted. They are dominated by him and so they seek to dominate us. What they believe to be their strengths are their weaknesses. You can see it in their metaphors. The shock and awe bombing campaign was the prelude to catastrophe, not to victory. And so it is here.

This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing. Trump is unpopular; his brutality and his tariffs have turned immigration and affordability, once among of his strongest issues, into liabilities. Trump’s opposition is increasingly united and mobilized; Democrats are besting Republicans in elections all across the country and disciplined, brave, beautiful protest movements have emerged in the cities ICE has sought to occupy. I cannot do better here than to quote Adam Serwer’s dispatch from Minnesota:


Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

We are watching an administration that is not only retreating in key areas — dropping its demand for all of Greenland, sending Greg Bovino back to Border Patrol’s El Centro region, meekly backing off its trade war with China — but finding itself cornered by its own cruelty and lies. Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” could not stand even the barest contact with the video of Pretti trying to protect a nearby woman or the quiet heroism of his daily life.

Trump appears to be trying to course correct, but he has neither the discipline nor the personnel to truly change his presidency’s direction. This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he wants. This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the crisis.

Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are now enabling the cover up of two ICE murders after shooting two American citizens

Congress must intervene following shooting of  Alex Jeffrey Pretti, R.N., an ICU nurse who was shot and killed by ICE agents on January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis. On January 7, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good. 

Echo editorial published by The Virginian-Pilot, in Norfolk, VA.

Although several witnesses who saw these two murders also have video taken at the incident, the fact is the Trump administration is preventing the Minneapolis law enforcement to investigate the killings. 

Federal ICE agents fatally shot another American in Minneapolis on Saturday: 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minnesota VA hospital. Pretti was observing immigration operations and stepped in when an agent threw a woman to the ground. He was tackled by several U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who repeatedly struck him before they fired as many as 10 shots, killing him.

Mr. Pretti’s killing follows the shooting death of Renee Good, a poet, wife, mother and Old Dominion University graduate, on January 7. Ms. Good was given conflicting orders by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — who told her to move her car and to stop and exit her vehicle — before she was fatally shot attempting to move her car as ordered.

Bystanders filmed both incidents as they unfolded, providing the public with unvarnished evidence of what transpired from multiple angles. But, after both, Trump administration officials have insisted that agents acted properly and halted efforts to conduct thorough, transparent investigations.

To adopt the administration’s line of defense requires one to ignore their eyes and ears — to dismiss clear and overwhelming evidence of federal agents using excessive force against people who are not a threat to them.

It also requires believing that those killed were “domestic terrorists,” as administration officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have alleged, rather than Americans standing up for their neighbors, exercising their constitutional rights and opposing the increasingly brutal and arbitrary immigration campaign directed by Donald Trump.

Americans have long recognized the value of immigration enforcement, and would probably still support the administration’s efforts to remove dangerous criminals from our streets had this campaign adhered to that goal. But it has not. It has become a quasi NAZI Gestapo style operation targeting Americans. 

Instead the nation has witnessed federal agents act in increasingly unrestrained and dangerous ways — brutalizing suspects, acting aggressively toward protesters, entering homes without warrants, arresting and even killing American citizens — and public support has plummeted. Americans by growing margins want officials to stop the lawlessness — and to do so now❗

The reaction to Pretti’s shooting suggests they will not.

On Saturday January 24, 2026,  Pretti was helping to direct traffic around federal operations when agents initiated a dispute with two observers by aggressively pushing them to the ground. When Pretti intervened, he was swarmed by seven agents who tackled and beat him in the street.

He was a legal, permitted gun owner and video of the scene shows an agent disarmed him as he was restrained. Then, unarmed and no threat to the agents, the ICU nurse who devoted his life to helping the nation’s veterans was shot multiple times and died.

Noem then followed the same playbook as after the Good shooting: smearing the victim as a radical, claiming without evidence that he was intent on shooting agents, and attempting to create the false belief that peaceful protesters are a threat to law and order.

In fact, the greater danger is federal agents violating constitutional rights, laying siege to an American city and putting the public at risk. Anger is growing, as is support for abolishing ICE and building a new immigration enforcement system from the ground up.

Not that this is all about immigration, as the Trump administration admitted over the weekend. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday saying the White House would withdraw ICE and CBP forces if given access to the state’s voter rolls, among other requirements.

Americans cannot accept a federal government that threatens a state with further brutality for its refusal to submit to the president’s demands for voting information. They cannot stand idle as ICE and CBP routinely ignore rights guaranteed by the Constitution. They must not allow those who kill people in the street without cause to go unpunished by the justice system.

Congress repeatedly refused to exert its power to act as a check on the executive branch, but the time for dithering is over. Federal agents killed another American on Saturday January 24, two innocent American citizens in just one month. How many more will it take before lawmakers do their duty❓

Maine Writer post script- #WhereIsSenatorSusanCollins ❓👀

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are in denial about how dangerous ICE is causing harm to innocent American people

Just when it seems as if Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown can’t get any worse, it does. Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Abdallah Fayyad.

Over the span of less than three weeks in January, federal officers shot and killed two US citizens in Minnesota.

In normal times, it should be easy to say that Renee Good and Alex Pretti — who were standing up for their neighbors and against the aggressive and violent operation to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants — should still be alive. But top government officials have justified the killings by accusing both Good and Pretti of being “domestic terrorists.”

That this cruel and callous rhetoric seems almost reflexive for top officials underscores the most disturbing fact about the Trump administration’s overall strategy on immigration: This crackdown is neither coherent nor methodical. It’s random. Students have been detained for merely participating in protests, certain cities and states have been targeted for no apparent reason, and homes have been raided without judicial warrants.

It’s that arbitrary nature of the crackdown — and the Trump administration’s vociferous defense of its worst evil excesses — that make it nothing short of state terror. Specifically, the US government is wielding state violence arbitrarily to instill fear in and ultimately subdue the population. Immigration officers can strike, it seems, anyone, anywhere, anytime. And now, as the Good and Pretti killings show, it’s gotten to the point where no one can take their freedom or safety for granted, citizen or not.

What we’re witnessing on the streets of Minneapolis and elsewhere, in other words, is not “law and order” but full-on, unadulterated, state-sanctioned chaos.

The problem is that there’s no clear remedy for this kind of reckless and hate filled governance. Congress has proved itself to be spineless❗ and unwilling to exercise its core duty to be a check on the executive branch. 

Meanwhile, the legal system has shown that it’s not up to the task of meaningfully restraining a rogue president; in some cases, the courts have even emboldened Trump.

So with institutions failing to protect Americans from government abuse, how can we put a stop to the chaos❓ The answer is to unleash more chaos — not from the top down but from the bottom up.

But another way, Americans have to respond to state-sanctioned violent chaos with people-powered nonviolent chaos until the Trump administration is forced to retreat from the streets.

That means nonstop mass protests that attract people across ideological divides, akin to what Americans did in record numbers after a police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020.

It means targeted and sustained boycotts that make cooperating with Trump’s immigration crackdown financially unfeasible for businesses.

It means disrupting commerce to the point where a general strike is not a fanciful idea but an achievable tactic that labor unions can employ.

Everyone has the ability to create this kind of disruption so long as they do it together: Teachers have that power, doctors and nurses have that power, civil servants have that power. The point that Americans have to make to the Trump administration is that there is no going back to business as usual until people can sleep at night knowing that their rights are intact and that the sheer cruelty of immigration crackdowns will end.

Admittedly, it can feel futile to engage in protest against a government that’s so deeply out of touch and drunk with power. But that’s also precisely the time to participate in a mass movement.

Americans have to remember that even the most repressive, authoritarian regimes in the world aren’t immune to public backlash, and neither is the Trump administration. If movements around the world have toppled kings, then it’s not so far-fetched to believe that ordinary people can come together to stop agencies like the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from intimidating, harassing, and abusing immigrants and nonimmigrants alike.

That, of course, is no easy task. And it comes with serious risks. After all, Ms. Renee Good and Mr. Alex Pretti were engaging in this kind of resistance when officers shot and killed them. 

But at the end of the day, public perception still matters — that’s why Trump officials keep lying about the people they wrongfully detain or kill, essentially telling Americans not to believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes. And public perception is ultimately the last guardrail against tyranny. The only way for that guardrail to work is for people to continue expressing outrage and their dissatisfaction with the status quo, however uncomfortable that may be.

Minnesotans have set an example for the rest of America to follow. “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone,” writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. “In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it.”

Indeed, we can already see hints that the relentless pushback from Minnesotans has, at least for the time being, caused the Trump administration to reassess its tactics. 

Since Mr. Pretti’s killing, Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol’s so-called commander-at-large, who has been one of the leading officials behind Trump’s immigration crackdown, has reportedly been demoted and is expected to retire soon. Even some Republican lawmakers have now called for the ouster of Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security.

The key 🔐🗝️ in this defining moment is for Americans to create chaos while ensuring that they stick to nonviolence. The last thing that the most vulnerable among us need is any pretext that the Trump administration can use to expand its operations or that the president can use to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to send troops to American cities.

So no matter your political background — whether you’re a leftist or a Trump voter who believes this has gone too far — if you want things to change, you have to exercise your rights. If there’s a demonstration in your neighborhood, for example, consider joining the crowd. If your elected representative is holding a town hall, show up, speak out, and make them uncomfortable (especially if they’re defending the administration). If you belong to a labor union, you can also help organize a strike, and all of us can boycott companies that collaborate with ICE.

And if ICE ultimately shows up in your neighborhood, take a note from Minneapolis residents and protect your neighbors in whatever way you can: Demand that officers follow the law, protest their raids, and record their transgressions for the world to see.

It might feel chaotic at times, but that’s exactly what the country needs: good chaos.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must eliminate Immigration and Customs ICE evil operations

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski says
Homeland Security secretary should resign amid rising calls for her firing or impeachment by Lisa Mascaro for AP published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska.

WASHINGTON, DC— A groundswell of voices have come to the same conclusion: Kristi Noem must go.

From Democratic Party leaders to the nation’s leading advocacy organizations to even the most centrist lawmakers in Congress, the calls are mounting for the Homeland Security secretary to step aside after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two people who protested deportation policy.

At a defining moment in her tenure, few Republicans are rising to Noem’s defense.

Noem “has, through her words, and I think in her actions — she’s taken a direction that has not been helpful to the situation, and I don’t think that it helps the country," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

“I think you have a secretary right now that needs to be accountable to the chaos and in some of the tragedy that we have seen,” Murkowski added. “... I voted for her. I think the president needs to look at who he has in place as a secretary of Homeland Security. I would not support her again and I think it probably is time for her to step down.”

Top House Democratic Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California said in a joint statement that “the country is disgusted by what the Department of Homeland Security has done.”

“Kristi Noem should be fired immediately,” the Democrats said, “or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.”

Republicans and Democrats call for Noem to step down❗

What started as sharp criticism of the Homeland Security secretary, and a longshot move by Democratic lawmakers signing onto impeachment legislation in the Republican-controlled House, has morphed into an inflection point for Noem, who has been the high-profile face of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement regime.

Noem’s brash leadership style and remarks in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti, R.N., and Renee Good — in which she suggested Pretti “attacked” officers and portrayed the events leading up to Good’s shooting an “act of domestic terrorism” — have been seen as doing irreparable damage, as events on the ground disputed her account.

Her alliance with Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who was recalled from the Minnesota operation Monday as border czar Tom Homan took the lead, has left her isolated on Capitol Hill.

“What she’s done in Minnesota should be disqualifying. She should be out of a job,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

But Donald Trump stands by Noem and praises her work

President Donald Trump defended Noem at multiple junctures, strongly indicating her job does not appear to be in immediate jeopardy.

Asked by reporters as he left the White House on Tuesday for a trip to Iowa whether Noem is going to step down, Trump had a one-word answer: “No.”

Pressed later during an interview on Fox (Fake❗) News if he had confidence in Noem, the president said, “I do.”🙄

“Who closed up the border? She did,” Trump said, “with Tom Homan, with the whole group. I mean, they’ve closed up the border. The border is a tremendous success.”

As Democrats in Congress threaten to shut down the government as they demand restrictions on Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Noem’s future at the department faces serious questions and concerns.

The Republican leadership of the House and Senate committees that oversee Homeland Security have demanded that department officials appear before their panels to answer for the operations that have stunned the nation with their sheer force — including images of children, including a 5-year-old, being plucked from families.

“Obviously this is an inflection point and an opportunity to evaluate and to really assess the policies and procedures and how they are being implemented and put into practice,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, where Noem had been the state’s House representative and governor before joining the administration.

Asked about his own confidence in Noem’s leadership, Thune said, “That’s the president’s judgment call to make.”

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Noem a “liar” and said she must be fired.

Fighting about DHS funding

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that DHS enforces the laws from Congress, and if lawmakers don’t like those laws, they should change them.

“Too many politicians would rather defend criminals and attack the men and women who are enforcing our laws,” McLaughlin said. “It’s time they focus on protecting the American people, the work this Department is doing every day under Secretary Noem’s leadership.”

The ability of Congress to restrict Homeland Security funding is limited, in large part because the GOP majority already essentially doubled department funding under Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts law.

Instead, Democrats are seeking to impose restraints on Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations as part of a routine annual funding package for Homeland, Defense, Health and other departments. Without action this week, those agencies would head toward a shutdown.

To be sure, Homeland Security still has strong defenders in the Congress.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus said Tuesday in a letter to Trump that he should invoke the Insurrection Act, if needed, to quell protests. The group said it would be “ready to take all steps necessary” to keep funds flowing for Trump’s immigration enforcement and removal operations.

On the job for a year, Noem has clashed at times with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, as Republicans and Democrats have sought greater oversight and accounting of the department’s spending and operations.

Noem has kept a low profile since the Saturday press conference following Pretti’s death, though she appeared Sunday on Fox (Fake❗) News.

She doubled down in that interview on criticism of Minnesota officials, but also expressed compassion for Pretti’s family.

“It grieves me to think about what his family is going through but it also grieves me what’s happening to these law enforcement officers every day out in the streets with the violence they face,” she said.
Once rare, impeachments now more common

Impeachment, once a far-flung tool brandished against administration officials, has become increasingly commonplace.

Two years ago, the Republican-led House impeached another Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, in protest over the then-Biden administration’s border security and immigration policies that allowed millions of immigrants and asylum seekers to enter the U.S. The Senate dismissed the charges.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said if the Republican chairman of the panel, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, does not launch an impeachment probe, he would.

Raskin said he would work with the top Democrats on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees to immediately launch an impeachment inquiry related to the Minnesota deaths and other “lawlessness and corruption that may involve treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

More than 160 House Democrats have signed on to an impeachment resolution from Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill.

Anchorage Daily News staff along with Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana, Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this story.

Donald Trump embarrassing America by threatening NATO he is crazy must be removed- Senator Collins where are you?

An echo opinion letter was published  in Lancaster Online:

😱😯😰

The awful (stupid-childish) text message from Donald Trump to the prime minister of Norway  can be described in one word: ❗ CRAZY😖😠

In more words, I believe that it is lunacy for a sitting U.S. president to threaten our NATO allies in yet another late-night temper tantrum from a toddler in chief because he didn’t get his participation trophy.

Does Trump have nothing better to do❓ Who in their right mind would look at that tirade and believe that this is the very picture of stability and mental fitness❓

Nothing about it makes sense to me, from Trump’s (fake❗) claim to “having stopped 8 Wars PLUS” to his assertion that the world would be secure only with Greenland in U.S. control.

The results have included the killing of the unarmed American citizen, Renee Good, in Minneapolis.

Is that how we make America great again❓ By waging war against the very foundations this country was built on❓ OMG❗ Come on now❗

This is not normal. It is weird and profoundly deplorable.

From Edgar Pantojas,  in Lancaster, Pennsylvania