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.
Labels: Department of Homeland Security, Fourth Amendment, ICE, Jonathan Blitzer, Minneapolis, Mr. Alex Pretti, Nazi, Renee Good, The New Yorker
