Americans must express anger against Donald Trump's maga evil racist rants and hideous social media messages

Letter to the Editor: Racist Imagery Threatens the Moral Core of Our Democracy published in Door County Pulse,  in Wisconsin, on February 11th, 2026.

Donald Trump posted a racially obscene image on his (fake social❗) social media platform depicting former President Barack Obama and former beautiful First Lady Michelle Obama with their faces placed on the bodies of primates. 

I am appalled and deeply disturbed that such an evil racist image was posted and that when questioned, Trump reportedly indicated he had done nothing wrong.

This is one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racial attacks in our history. When someone entrusted with immense authority amplifies such imagery, it does more than offend – it signals to the world that the erosion of human dignity is permissible.

We must ask ourselves: Who are we, as a people❓ What vision of humanity do we uphold❓ We must call Mr. Trump out. We must vote him and those who support this behavior out of office. Even more importantly, we must reclaim the moral ground on which our civic life depends. Let your friends, colleagues, and neighbors know that you stand for the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, not because it is politically convenient, but because it is ethically necessary. 

Our Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men [people] are created equal,” offers not simply a historical phrase, but rather a philosophical claim about the nature of human existence. It asserts that dignity is not granted by power, wealth, or status – it is intrinsic. It belongs to all of us or it belongs to none of us. To abandon this belief is to abandon the moral architecture of our democracy.

Let your friends and neighbors know ❗ This hideous racist (evil) behavior from Trump, about our beloved nation is simply and totally unacceptable. We must all hold fast to the values that make us human and to the ideals that make this nation worth striving for.

From Trish Black in  Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Maine high school students protest ICE on the Sagadahoc Bridge in Bath

Topsham Maine - Mt. Ararat Students Protest ICE. Maine Senator Susan Collins alert❗ She voted to fully 💲fund evil ICE. 😕😞

Reported "Local Scoop", in Topsham Dems News: 

On Monday, February 2nd, 2026, students from the Midcoast area, organized by Midcoast Youth Activists, including Morse High School, Lincoln Academy, Brunswick High School and Mt Ararat descended upon the Sagadahoc Bridge to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in Maine that has so frightened the entire immigrant community, most of whom are already citizens, legal residents, or have work authorization and live here legally.

Mt. Ararat Senior, Ashby Hayward, as a three-season athlete and Theater participant, is an all-around ride-giver at Mt. Ararat. He coordinated rides to the event, reaching out to other friends with cars and connecting them to students who needed rides. He figures he coordinated about 50 to 60 rides to the protest, only to see initial plans fall through when they could not meet at the school due to the bomb threat that day. But, not to be defeated, Mt Ararat showed up! There were many Topsham students scattered on the bridge who found a way there.

I asked Ashby what drew him to the event. He said “It’s more important than it ever has been that young people use their voice - especially with social media.”

I confessed to him that his generation is surely more literate and effective online than mine. He responded, thinking in part about the videos of ICE’s brutality, “My generation was raised with this technology. The videos make it personal. Friends will switch their beliefs.” He says his generation can see right through propaganda, and finds Trump Administration propaganda incompetent. Though, he says, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish fake videos with the advent of AI technology.  #ICEoutNOW ❗

What was Ashby’s message on the bridge? “It’s so easy nowadays to disconnect and say I don’t need to do anything. None of these problems hit them in the face. But, for others the problems really do hit them in the face. 

We need to care now and not wait until it's in our backyard. We need to love each other and not hate each other. Unlike the Trump Administration.”

On the bridge, I also found Lia, a Mt Ararat Junior. Lia’s message was clear in two words: “ICE OUT❗” Lia said, “This is about protecting our communities. It’s about letting immigrants in this country know that they are safe and that we are willing to stand up and fight for their communities and them. We desperately need to recognize the indigenous and immigrant populations. We have never, ever, been a country that is just white or English-speaking. Diversity is our greatest strength.”

What does Lia hope for the future of this country❓ “We need to change the system to keep the billionaires out of politics and keep a fair distribution of income.”

There were many, many more Mt Ararat students on that bridge,T along with several hundred students from other schools. 

If they are as sharp and centered as Ashby and Lia, there is hope for us all. Their energy and passion were tangible to all who were  there.

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. .

Republicans and Democrats and Independents must call for Donald Trump to be impeached after evil racist social media pictures

The Los Angeles Times echo to the editor: Enough❗💢 Last week, the Donald Trump shared the most disgraceful, racist post possible (“Trump refuses to apologize after sharing racist image of the Obamas: ‘I didn’t make a mistake,’” 🤥😔Feb. 6). It was not a misunderstood joke. It was overt, ugly and rooted in the same kind of dehumanization that has fueled violence and division in this country for generations.

Beautiful President Obama and his wife Michelle

When someone with national power displays this kind of racism, it does real harm. It signals permission to demean, exclude and scapegoat entire communities. It tells people of color that their dignity is conditional and their safety negotiable.

Leadership requires judgment, restraint and a basic respect for humanity. Anyone who chooses to post racist rhetoric has demonstrated that they lack those qualities. That alone should disqualify them from holding public office or wielding authority over others. If he were the CEO of a major corporation, he would have been fired.

I am calling on everyone — Republicans, independents and Democrats — to denounce this immediately and call for President Trump’s resignation or impeachment and removal. This behavior should not be normalized or tolerated.

Silence is complicity. This moment demands clarity.

From Marilyn J. Green, in Malibu, California

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must support equal justice under the law for legal an innocent immigrants

Boston Globe Editorial Board echo:

Massachusetts can’t stop (evil❗) ICE. But it can help its vulnerable immigrant population. The horror of Minneapolis can happen here.

Some 1.2 million immigrants call Massachusetts their home. They are, as Governor Maura Healey put it, “workers, parents, caregivers, business owners, and essential contributors to the Commonwealth’s economy and civic life.” And, sadly, they are, at this moment, extremely vulnerable.

The nation has watched day after day the countless affronts to human dignity in Minneapolis as a Trump administration-ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement “surge” separates families and devastates a community. And, yes, it can happen here.

The unfortunate reality is that immigration enforcement is the federal government’s prerogative. There’s not much that the state can do about it if the federal government seeks to deport Massachusetts residents who are in the country illegally or revoke the legal status of those who are here legally.

But, given the terrible impact such indiscriminate actions would have on Massachusetts communities and on the economy, Healey and lawmakers are right to look for ways to at least reduce the harm (evil❗) ICE could do in the Commonwealth.

ICE is Ku Klux Klan with different color face masks.

And, so Healey issued a raft of measures last week, including new proposed legislation designed to codify immigrant protections. 

Some Democrats wish she’d gone further. But she is attempting to walk a fine line, protecting immigrants without overstepping the state’s authority and without taking actions that could boomerang on state residents.

Take the controversial agreements that some public agencies strike with ICE called 287(g) agreements. Some immigration advocates want to ban them altogether.

Healey doesn’t go quite that far — but for good reasons. Under her executive order, no executive branch office or agency may enter into a new 287(g) agreement to partner with ICE unless approved in writing by the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which must certify it is based on “a specific, articulable public safety risk or need.”

Currently, only the state Department of Correction has such an agreement. But that agreement serves a legitimate public safety purpose, allowing the state to turn over convicted criminals to ICE for deportation.

The Plymouth County House of Correction, which does house criminally charged detainees, currently operates under a separate, narrower agreement that would not be impacted by Healey’s order. The latter agreement is actually supported by many members of the immigrant community as a way to keep detained family members nearby.

Healey’s proposals would also bolster the protections for immigrants at state courthouses and in certain other spaces.

Under the so-called Lunn decision, handed down by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2017, Massachusetts court officers have no power to hold a prisoner on a civil immigration detainer — unless a warrant has been issued for their arrest.

But, ICE agents often hang around at courthouses — which impedes the justice system by scaring away immigrants who are witnesses or participants in cases.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said in a statement that he has had “productive conversations” with caucus members, adding, “At the same time, we understand the deep nuance on this issue and the limitations of what the Commonwealth can do on immigration policy.”

The Legislature’s goal should be to lay out a clear policy that would withstand judicial scrutiny. The state may not be able to stop ICE, but it can guide state actors and state facilities in order to protect those who are indeed a critical part of our community.

In doing so the state would be standing up for Massachusetts values and the protections long offered by our own constitution, which guarantees “equality under the law” to all regardless of national origin. There is nothing ambiguous about that.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.

“Access to justice cannot coexist with a threat of civil arrest looming over those who enter a courthouse to assert their right to defend themselves or to fulfill their civic obligations,” Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker said, appearing with Healey last week.

Tucker said recent ICE activity has deterred people from vulnerable populations from appearing as witnesses or as victims of crimes in the state’s courts. Healey’s bill, he said, “will help to relieve that fear and enhance public safety.”

The bill would also add the nonpublic areas of schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and child-care programs to the list of protected spaces that ICE is prohibited from accessing without a warrant.

And the bill would allow parents to prearrange guardianship in the event of detention or deportation.

“I’m really sorry to even have to utter those words,” Healey said, “but at the end of the day, we’ve seen here in Massachusetts and around this country, little kids taken away from their parents, left alone or in the care of maybe a neighbor, maybe the state. It’s wrong.”

The protections offered in Healey’s bill are attached to a supplementary budget, which provides both a certain urgency to its passage and requires — because it is a money bill — that it is first passed by the House, which is scheduled to caucus twice this week to consider Healey’s version and a bill, the PROTECT Act, offered by the Legislature’s Black and Latino caucus.

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 all maga Republicans have immigrant histories but many Americans do not have passports to prove ethnicity except their skin color

An American citizen who might be unable to show a passport❓

A family history essay published in the MinnPost non-orofit newspaper: Americans do not need passports to prove their immigrant history. Too many are wrongly profiled based on the color of their skin. 

My passport is in storage, but my family’s immigration story is top of mind:  During these Donald Trump troubling times, it’s worth remembering those who came before us in Minnesota.

During this "Trumpzi-istic" scary time of unprecedented anger, sorrow and disbelief, those of us not being pulled out of cars, afraid to go to work or school or much worse may struggle to better understand and more fully relate to what’s going on. 

My passport is in my bank safety box. My summer tan faded to “lily white.” I’m accused of having a “Minnesota accent” only when I visit my younger daughter, a public school teacher in Boston.

So, as an admitted “policy wonk” wanting to better understand and more fully relate, I’ve asked myself, “What’s the relevance of the violence currently being imposed on ‘New Minnesotans’ to current policy and political debates on ‘birthright citizenship,’ how we define an ‘American’ and the importance and relevance of ‘assimilation?’”

Also, being an avid family historian, I‘ve asked myself, “While learning to speak English and like eating hot dogs, is it also OK to preserve ancestral culture and non-English language use and proficiency❓Could any of the branches on my family tree help me better understand what’s now being felt by, done to and said about today’s ‘New Minnesotans?’”

Here’s some of what has partially answered my questions, but has still left me angry, sorrowful and in a state of disbelief:

In 1871, my maternal grandfather, Carl Johnson, was born in Sweden and then, at age 5, came to America with his mother, Anna Johns daughter. I don’t know if either of them ever became “legal” or who Carl’s father was. But there must have been an out-of-wedlock birth or divorce before they arrived. Records of the Swedish Lutheran Church in my West Central Minnesota hometown, Elbow Lake, document that my great grandmother’s marriage in 1883 to a fellow Swedish immigrant farmer, Mons Olson, took place not at the church, but before a judge in nearby Alexandria.

By 1910, my grandfather was manager of the Elbow Lake telephone exchange when he married my grandmother, Helen Gunderson. Helen was the oldest daughter of a Norwegian immigrant farmer and Grant County pioneer, Henry Gunderson. 

In 1923, my immigrant grandparents became owners of the telephone exchange in tiny nearby Wendell — rescuing it from bad service, obsolete equipment, high rates and near-bankruptcy. And, not unlike the (Roosevelt-era) Rural Electrification Act (REA), Carl and Helen (to quote a subscriber) “fixed what was wrong and brought telephone service to farm families in the surrounding countryside.”

I also know that my grandparents’ son, Harlan Johnson, subsidized his parents’ paltry income by serving in the (again, Roosevelt-era) Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). My uncle Harlan, a first-generation immigrant, then served in the U.S. Army, helping rescue North Africa, Italy and Western Europe from the evils of fascism and Nazi tyranny during World War II.

On the other side of my family tree, I know (because I have the certificate) that my paternal great grandfather, Heinrich Schröder, became a naturalized U.S. citizen after he and his brother, Herman, came to America in the early 1870s, from the Hanover principality of Germany. First in Scott County and then in rural Long Prairie, Heinrich was a successful immigrant farmer and brickmaker.

I also know Heinrich’s youngest son, my grandfather, Henry W. Schroeder Sr., became a successful community banker in Long Prairie. This first-generation immigrant’s success resulted, in part, because he forgave or delayed payments (sometimes making them out of his own pocket) on loans to Depression-era farmers and small-business owners on the verge of bankruptcy. He also attracted loyal customers by making his bank a kind of “community cooperative” — retaining ownership of 50-plus percent of the bank’s stock, but selling the rest to dozens of people in the local community.

Nearly a century later, what is now American Heritage National Bank is in its fourth-generation of Schroeder family management and fifth-generation of Schroeder family ownership. 

One of Minnesota’s largest family-owned banks, American Heritage has seven branches — from Browerville and Long Prairie through St. Cloud to the Twin Cities.

Finally, I know my grandfather’s youngest son (and my father), Henry W. Schroeder Jr., left home with his cousin the day after their high school graduation in 1941, to work in a Los Angeles aircraft plant. A year later, this second-generation immigrant enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was a mechanic on air bases in World War II’s India-China-Burma Theater. 

Later, he also served in China during its transition from Japanese occupation. And, he was a successful small-business owner and dedicated community leader in Elbow Lake for over 60 years.

Many Minnesotans can tell similar stories. But, during these very troubling Trumpzi times, my inquiry reminded me that my great grandparents and grandparents were immigrants who didn’t speak English and attended “immigrant churches.” Until my grandmother, Helen Gunderson Johnson, died in 1967, our family had lutefisk (Scandanivian dried white fish) every Christmas Eve. 

And, every Good Friday, “Grandma Helen” attended a Norwegian-language service at Elbow Lake’s St. John’s Lutheran Church.

To this day, on Christmas Eve, I insist that our (now Norwegian, Swedish, Irish, German, English, Japanese) family eat Swedish meatballs that I make and Norwegian-inspired lefse that I butter. In 1979, while publishing the local weekly newspaper, my wife, Dana, and I helped create “Flekkefest,“ an annual celebration of Elbow Lake’s Sister City relationship with Flekkefjord, Norway.

I’ve also twice traveled to Norway, connected with distant cousins there and am a member of Sons of Norway and the Norwegian-American Historical Association. 

On July 4th (and other official holidays), our family flies the American flag. But, on Syttende Mai (Norwegian Independence Day), anyone driving by our home in Southwest Minneapolis will see a Norwegian flag – also red, white and blue – waving proudly in the mid-May breeze.

So, though I’ve made some progress on my original struggle to better understand and better relate, serious questions remain. Has the Johnson-Gunderson-Schroeder-Olson-Maron family adequately “assimilated❓” Should my grandfather and great grandmother have been sent back to Sweden because they were “illegals❓” Is it “un-American” to attend an annual Norwegian language church service❓ To maintain food or other “un-American” traditions❓ To celebrate a small rural community’s ethnic heritage or, once a year, fly a “foreign flag❓”

What about second- and third-generation immigrants who helped defeat fascists, Nazis and imperialists in Europe and Asia during World War II❓ What about their decades of support for small business owners, working people and family farmers in small rural communities like Long Prairie, Elbow Lake and Wendell❓ And, decades from now, will these and similar questions still be used to hunt down and impose deadly violence on current and future generations of “New Minnesotans”❓ I sure hope not.

Jon Schroeder, now retired, is a senior fellow for the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Education Evolving. A Macalester College graduate, Schroeder was previously a Citizens League research associate, co-publisher and editor of a rural weekly newspaper, a senior communications, policy and management staff member for U.S. Senator Dave Durenberger, and a leader in state and national initiatives to design and promote education policy reform under a joint venture of Hamline University and the St. Paul-based nonprofit, Center for Policy Design.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans lied about the purpose of deportations. Instead of "worst of the worst", it is about racism.

Opinion letter to the editor published in the Press Democrat newspaper, Santa Rosa California.

ICE activities don’t square with ‘worst of the worst’.

Dear Editor: So among the extraordinary litany of Trumpzi-ism's lies, 🤥we were told (and Republican voters believed❗) that the deportations of immigrants was going after the worst of the worst, — real criminals that were in the U.S. illegally. We were told the enforcement was targeted and warrants were issued. That doesn’t square with immigrants being picked up at scheduled immigration hearings. That doesn’t square with people being randomly accosted at gas stations or store parking lots. That doesn’t square with random traffic stops based only on the driver’s skin color. That doesn’t square when off-duty Minneapolis police officers are being stopped by ICE.

I think when they say targeted, they are using a racial profile meaning anyone who looks brown. Anyone with an accent. Even if they are here legally waiting for an asylum or citizenship hearing. 

Kristi Noem, Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino and ICE. 💢 

I suggest anyone in Minnesota might find it necessary to carry proof of citizenship and even then might be at risk of detention.

From Lew Larson, in Sebastopol, California

Donald Trump and maga Republicans causing Americans to move to beautiful Canada

God bless Americans❗ Thank you Canadians🍁. 
Echo opinion letters published in The Globe and Mail, , in  Ontario Canada. 

Re “Don’t lose sight of the Americans trapped in the Donald Trump nightmare” (Opinion, Jan. 24): My wife (80) and I (81) were born in the United States and have experienced 14 and 15 presidencies respectively. Some were good, others, not so much. However, we have now clearly reached a historic low. 

Therefore, we want to express our profound apologies to our Canadian neighbors. We love our country, but have never been so ashamed of the behavior engendered by Donald Trump and his cult enablers. There seems little we can do to change the brutish, bullying, immoral behavior of the U.S. government led by Mr. Trump other than to protest and hold our breath until the midterm elections in November.

In the meantime, we will visit Canada frequently (if you’ll have us), and spend as much as we can afford. We also encourage our Canadian friends to boycott all things U.S. and hold off visiting us until the stench clears. And kudos to Prime Minister Mark Carney for standing up to the neighborhood bully.

From Bill and Jane Gehring Upstate New York

We in Vermont are requesting that Canada seriously consider buying our state. It is a good deal. For only $647,464, a dollar for each of our citizens, Vermont would become the 11th province of Canada.

In return, Canadians would get unfettered access to great skiing, hiking and boating, a thriving maple syrup industry, Bernie Sanders as an addition to your Parliament, and a population within the only state to defeat Donald Trump in the 2024, Republican presidential primaries.

And, you might ask, what’s in it for Vermonters? That would be the freedom from tyranny and oppression, and a return to the rule of law that no longer exists here.

Oh, Canada❗ Please give this consideration.🙏

From William Gay in Montpelier, Vermont

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end racism and demonstrate respect for American citizens and all human beings

Trump keeps reminding us why people in his evil cult support him. It’s the racism❗😡 Opinion published by Liz Granderson, a columnist, in the Los Angeles Times:

Donald Trump posted an evil racist video on Thursday night depicting President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama, as apes. 💢

Donald Trump is an evil racist❗

On Friday, February 6, the White House dismissed the outpouring of criticism — but Trump  deleted the post. Was this episode disappointing❓Yes. Surprising❓ Not anymore.

Last spring, after Pope Francis died, Donald Trump posted an AI image of himself as the pope just days before cardinals convened to elect a successor.

So, no — it is not surprising that Donald Trup would choose to post virulent anti-Black imagery during Black History Month.

But it is disappointing here in 2026, that the occupant of the Oval Office is still thinking like that.

Back in 1971, the president of the United States laughed when the governor of California referred to the African delegates at the United Nations as monkeys. Less than 10 years later, that governor became the president of the United States. 

And here we are, half a century later, and yet another president has amplified that racist trope.

Meaning white supremacy is still on the ballot.

That Nixon-Reagan-Trump throughline isn’t tightly wound around policy or principle, but simply that shared worldview. After all, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and Reagan offered amnesty to immigrants — highly un-Trump-like moves. No, their commonality is best revealed in the delight each man took in an old racist attack against Black people.

For Americans who are 50 and older — roughly a third of the nation — this worldview has been the architect responsible for White House policy for most of our lives. And yet, when Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, the forensic investigation focused on grocery prices and her absence from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Some — in trying to explain why Harris lost — mischaracterized her role at the border or inflated her influence on the war in Gaza.

For some reason, race did not seem to receive the same level of scrutiny.

This factor was slighted despite decades of data, such as the wave of white nationalists endorsing Harris’ opponent and the birther movement questioning President Obama’s citizenship. The trio of presidents who are on the record as enjoying depictions of Black people as monkeys — Nixon, Reagan and Trump — all used racist dog whistles in their combined 10 presidential campaigns. Their administrations have tended to be more anti-civil-rights movement than post-civil-rights movement.

Our nation’s attempts at understanding ourselves are continuously undercut by the denial that for some single-issue voters, race is their single issue. Not the price of bacon or their religious convictions. Not Gaza. Just the promise of having a safe space for prejudice. And when the president of the United States entertains racist jokes as Nixon did in the 1970s or shares racist videos as Trump continues to do, undoubtedly there is a sense among the electorate that such prejudice has a home in the White House.

Before Donald Trump used social media to push yesteryear’s 🤢 ugliness, earlier in the week Harris relaunched her 2024, social media campaign account, calling it a place where Gen Z can “meet and revisit with some of our great courageous leaders, be they elected leaders, community leaders, civic leaders, faith leaders, young leaders.” She exhorted: “Stay engaged. I’ll see you out there.”

Whether Ms. Harris plans to run again in 2028, is unclear. What we do know is this:

• Ms. Haarris would never have posted an AI picture of herself as the new pope while Catholics were mourning Francis (or any other time). 
• We know she would not have advocated for immigration officers to racially profile Black and brown Americans or disregard the 14th Amendment to detain children. 

Although we do not know how many of her policy proposals she would have been able to get across the finish line in Congress, what we do know isis  her record of public service to the American people, in contrast with Donald Trump who is suing the American people for $10 billion.

There is nothing wrong with revisiting Harris’ missteps on the campaign trail or debating her electability as she reemerges in the public spotlight. But, now that Trump has resorted to posting monkey jokes about Black people, perhaps updated forensics will consider our well established history of racism among the factors in the 2024, election.😢

It is not a shock that Donald Trump thinks poorly of Black people. Not when you know that more than 25% of those who have held the office were themselves enslavers. Nevertheless, it is deeply disappointing that 250 years into our nation’s story, some of us still deny the role that racism plays in shaping our politics and, thus, all of our lives.

A New York Times Editorial must read and that means YOU Ms. Karoline Leavitt!

Trump’s Stifling of Dissent Reaches a New Level- Read the autocracy measures at the end of this opinion.

Editorial opinion published in The New York Times:

(Maine Writer:  Seems to me this editorial should be a cc directed to Trump's 3D Copier Barbie Karoline Leavitt, JMO❗) 

The crackdown on dissent and speech in Minnesota this winter follows a pattern that is common in countries that slide from democracy to autocracy: A leader enacts a legally dubious policy. Citizens protest that policy. The government responds with intimidation and force. 😧😟💢😓When people are hurt, the government blames them and lies about what happened.

The New York Times editorial board published an index in October tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. 

Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before Donald Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but one of the world’s healthiest democracies.

Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran or Russia.

Based on recent events, we (the NYT Editorial Board) moved our assessment of one of the categories — stifling speech and dissent — up one notch, to level four:

The wide-ranging abuses in Minnesota are the main reason for the change. The Trump administration is conducting a military-style operation in an American city under dubious pretenses. The stated goal is immigration enforcement, even though the state is home to relatively few undocumented immigrants. The true goal seems to be instilling fear in people who oppose Donald Trump’s agenda. Federal agents have killed two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and assaulted and menaced others. The administration has made clear that the abusers will face no accountability.😡

The acceleration in the stifling of dissent and speech is broader than what’s happening in Minnesota. Since late last year, the administration also widened its campaign for investigating perceived enemies, such as Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security used subpoenas that no judge approved to demand information on critics. The F.B.I. searched the home of a journalist who had exposed problems with the administration’s policies.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy. Many forms of speech and dissent remain vibrant in the United States, in courts, in Congress, the media and the streets (and in blogs, 😊too❗). But, Donald Trump and his allies have restricted dissent in fundamental ways. It is a violation of basic American values.

Background and methodology: The clearest sign that a democracy has died is that a leader and his party make it impossible for their opponents to win an election and hold power. Once that stage is reached, however, the change is extremely difficult to reverse.

The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand how much Donald Trump is eroding American democracy. The categories are based on interviews with legal scholars, political scientists, historians and other democracy experts. The ratings come from the New York Times editorial board. In our 0-to-10 scales, zero represents roughly where the United States, flawed though it was, had been under presidents of both parties prior to Mr. Trump. Ten represents the condition in a true authoritarian state. Moving even one notch toward autocracy is a worrisome sign.

We first published the index in October 2025. This version is the first update. We plan to publish future updates as events warrant.

Here is the autocracy measurement tool: 

The Autocracy Index: 12 markers of democratic erosion

• Stifling speech and dissent
• Persecuting political opponents
• Bypassing the legislature
• Defying the courts
• Declaring false emergencies
• Using the military at home
• Vilifying marginalized groups
• Controlling information
• Taking over universities
• Creating a cult of personality
• Using power for personal profit
• Manipulating the law to stay in power

💥💢

democracy














autocracy


Persecuting political opponents






democracy














autocracy


Bypassing the legislature






democracy














autocracy


Defying the courts






democracy














autocracy


Declaring false emergencies






democracy














autocracy


Using the military at home






democracy














autocracy


Vilifying marginalized groups






democracy














autocracy


Controlling information






democracy














autocracy


Trying to take over universities






democracy














autocracy


Creating a cult of personality






democracy














autocracy


Using power for personal profit






democracy














autocracy


Manipulating the law to stay in power






democracy














autocracy