After Twin Cities occupation, the path to defeating MAGA has become clearer
But it will require Democrats to accept that only a determined opposition to Trump and his allies can change minds, rally a majority, and clarify the stark conflicts and choices our nation faces
Border czar Tom Homan announced on February 12 that the federal surge of immigration agents into the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area was ending, indicating that “a significant drawdown has already been underway this week, and will continue to the next week.” Given that Homan had given a similar statement a full week prior to this, we can be forgiven for a sense of deja-vous and well-earned skepticism. A reversal of the federal surge obviously would be good and welcome news for the Twin Cities, which for months have been brutalized by upwards of 3,000 immigration agents: a wave of state violence that climaxed in the public execution of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but that also involved dozens of incidents of assault, kidnapping, gassing, and arrests of others. And this is to say nothing of the mistreatment, traumatization, and arrest of thousands of undocumented and documented immigrants without violent records.
Should the federal surge truly be reaching its end, we should certainly understand it as a victory for Twin Cities residents who literally risked their lives to document and defy ICE, and a model for future resistance strategies in other cities (and, again, extreme skepticism is merited here as to the status of federal operations; recent reporting by The Bulwark’s J.V. Last and others indicates that aggressive ICE operations still persist in the city). But we should bear in mind that the damage inflicted on the Twin Cities has been grievous, in human and economic terms; even a full withdrawal of federal agents would not mean that Minneapolis-St. Paul had suddenly returned to its pre-occupation reality. In a recent interview, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey noted the widespread human rights abuses that occurred during the occupation, and estimated that the economic costs to the city may run as high as $200 million. Meanwhile, the administration continues to seek to press illicit charges against Frey and Minnesota Governor Walz for obstructing federal agents, and has shut out local authorities from the Good and Pretti shootings, in defiance of precedent and of specific promises to involve them in the Pretti inquiry.
More decisively, we should remain vigilant to the fact that the administration’s mass deportation efforts are continuing throughout the rest of the country — efforts that will necessitate similar abuses in other American cities, even if not implemented in as dramatic a fashion. Indeed, even as the administration’s dispatch of Homan to Minnesota was intended to send a false message of moderation, Homan himself has reiterated that the White Houses’s mass deportation goals are not changing. Mass deportation is as central to this regime’s agenda as corruption and plunder from the public purse — and as others have written, there is simply no way to do a kinder, gentler mass deportation, given the enormous numbers that the administration is aiming for. When you add in the feral warrior ethos of the federal agents, the encouragement from leading administration officials that they have immunity in all that they do, and the obvious intent of the president to use immigration enforcement to provoke fights with blue state politicians and populations, it is difficult to imagine that anything major will change in the coming months — except for escalating administration efforts to trick the media and Democrats into thinking something has. (It’s also worth noting that ICE is in the midst of swelling its ranks (they have already increased from 10,000 to 20,000 in the last year), which will only increase the mayhem it will inflict across the nation.)
Alongside the further abuses we can expect to see in other cities, many observers are sounding the alarm about ongoing abuses of those detained by ICE, and plans to create what columnist Will Bunch calls an American gulag archipelago of immigrant carceral facilities. Over the past several months, we have already seen reporting of grotesque abuses in existing detention camps, from wrongful imprisonment, to denial of medical care, to the abuse of children. As Jamelle Bouie observes, “Immigration detention is not a criminal procedure. And yet the Trump administration is treating it as a criminal punishment. It is using detention to inflict pain on anyone — immigrant or citizen — caught in its grasp. It is subjecting detainees to horrific conditions of deprivation and abuse, meant to pressure people into leaving the country, even if they have valid asylum claims or even legal status.” Such abuses will only escalate as the administration builds out its warehousing system to contain tens of thousands more victims; ominously, some $38 billion has been budgeted for such camps.
Events in Minneapolis gave vivid, concrete expression to a fundamental political conflict in this country: the United States is experiencing a clash between two incompatible visions of what the country should be, not only on the matter of immigration, but of the structure of our society itself and who counts as a “real” American. On the one hand, a Christian nationalist, white supremacist movement seeks to remove non-white immigrants from the country while diminishing the rights of minority citizens; on the other, a majority that views immigrants as a benefit to the United States and diversity as a strength is slandered as un-American and deserving of punishment. Watching the struggle play out on the streets of Minneapolis-St. Paul between community-minded citizens and masked paramilitaries implementing a white supremacist dream of a whiter United States, Americans could see this conflict not as an abstract or intellectual question, but as a very real schism in American society with incredibly high stakes.
Before Minneapolis, the far-right MAGA movement was far more coherent and self aware than the American majority it seeks to subdue. But in the “neighborism” on display in Minnesota, in which white Americans banded together with their immigrant and non-white fellow residents to repel the administration’s vicious attempts at ethnic cleansing, Americans saw a countervailing idea of the U.S. in action. Though their state’s strong traditions of social solidarity surely played a role, Minnesotans demonstrated a commitment to egalitarian pluralism, basic rights, and mutual respect that is almost certainly latent across much of the United States —and which may be cultivated and activated by ordinary citizens and politicians alike.
But we can’t assume that everyone who opposes Trump will automatically grasp the stakes and the terms of the conflict even in light of events in Minnesota. And so the occupation reminds us how essential it is that defenders of American democracy and our free society provide a narrative framework for what is happening in our country. Such story-telling is a basic political necessity in the best of circumstances, but is non-negotiable given the incessant spew of propaganda with which the Trump regime seeks to pervert public understanding of its anti-immigrant jihad. As we saw in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the White House claimed to be going after “the worst of the worst” — hard-core criminal undocumented immigrants — while in reality the misbegotten “Operation Metro Surge” overwhelmingly swept up non-criminal immigrants, while also involving numerous incidences of racial profiling, mistaken identity, and assaults on American citizens. What was falsely presented as a necessary law enforcement action was in reality a lawless occupation of an American metropolis. And when the administration’s encouragement of ICE violence led to the murders of two Americans, Trump and his minions simply upped the volume of lies, labeling the victims “domestic terrorists” and blaming them for bringing on their own deaths.
Against this multi-layered disinformation onslaught, pro-democracy forces need to make clear that the war on immigrants is no less than an effort not only to ethnically cleanse the country of non-white immigrants, but to abuse and denigrate the citizenship of minority Americans routinely caught up in ICE and Border Patrol operations. And they need to make clear that the assaults on blue cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul are hardly incidental, but are a key component of MAGA’s vision of disciplining and abusing blue America.
However, exposing and discrediting MAGA’s vision of immigration and citizenship is only half the battle. As Greg Sargent recently wrote at New Republic, Democrats need to start forcefully advocating for a positive vision of immigration, and begin working on reforms to our immigration laws to put this vision into practice once they return to power. As he suggests, recent major shifts in public attitudes toward immigration — and which track what has largely turned into a public-relations fiasco in Minnesota for the Trump administration — show that the majority is simply not in tune with the Trumpist vision. Strikingly, a Marquette Law School poll from earlier in the year showed that by 56% to 44%, respondents oppose “deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record.” He also points to polls showing that strong majorities support a path to legalization for most longtime residents, as well as a large increase “in percentages of Americans who see immigration as a positive good for the country.”
Additionally, Sargent highlights the stances of two prominent Democratic governors — California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’s JB Pritzker — and how they’ve adopted pro-immigrant rhetoric while engaging in confrontational rhetoric (and actions) that show they’re standing up for the rights of their states’ inhabitants. We need far more of this, from a far broader range of Democratic leaders and other officials. They stand on increasingly firm ground not simply because Americans are so repelled by what they see Trump doing to the documented and undocumented alike, but because they would be tapping into long-standing notions of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Recognizing the indispensable contributions of immigrants, acknowledging that millions of undocumented and documented immigrants are already valued members of our communities, and calling out the immigrant forebears of so many current citizens: to relate this to my point above, such arguments tell a compelling and positive story about this population, while rooting it in the lived experience of most Americans. This is how you blunt and ultimately shatter the MAGA myth that the United States has been “invaded” by violent, mooching brown hordes.
A positive narrative about immigration should be paired with a relentless emphasis on the cruelties and bad faith of the Trump immigration regime, which punishes hard-working undocumented immigrants, seeks to strip even long-term legal residents of their rights, and intentionally sweeps up non-white Americans in its blue state dragnets. Concrete examples unfortunately abound, and Democrats should bring them to the public’s attention. In particular, they should keep the Good and Pretti killings front and center in efforts to rein in ICE and discredit the MAGA vision. Not only do these murders epitomize the violence at the heart of Trump’s ethnic cleansing effort and MAGA’s hatred of blue America, but the subsequent slander leveled against them and the administration-led cover-ups help illustrate the immorality and lawlessness that are integral to the deportation regime. This should be twinned with a concerted attempt to highlight the obscenity of the gulag archipelago of concentration camps condemned by Will Bunch, Jamelle Bouie, and increasing numbers of other observers.
Given the money and momentum behind the mass deportation onslaught, it is likely that it will continue even in the face of determined Democratic opposition and escalating public repugnance (already, we are seeing firmly pro-Trump regions rejecting the construction of detention facilities in their cities and towns — a promising sign that a mammoth public awakening is under way). Democrats should counter this by promising legal accountability for members of the administration and immigration agencies who abuse and endanger the lives of detainees — but should also turn this lumbering juggernaut into a weapon back against MAGA, as the depredations continue on, zombie-like, even in the face of what is likely to be massive and widespread opposition. The ultimate goal should be to make the Republican Party synonymous in the public eye with authoritarian incompetence, racist hatred, and unforgivable violence against immigrants and citizens alike.
A clear-eyed strategy should understand that the anti-immigrant assault will not end so long as Trump and his MAGA fellow travelers are in power — but also that attacking and destroying any remaining perceived legitimacy of their immigration policies will be key to taking apart MAGA, given the centrality of white supremacism and anti-immigrant hatred to Trump’s political coalition. As I discussed recently, the Democrats’ decision to cede the “immigration” issue to Republicans may be one of the greatest disasters of political strategy in modern memory. This premature surrender has allowed Trump and MAGA to conduct a one-sided war to redefine not only the desirability of immigration, but also the very nature of what it means to be an American, and what sort of country we all want to live in. As historian Thomas Zimmer puts it:
Who gets to tell the national story? Who gets to define national identity – and thereby determine the boundaries of what counts as “American” and who belongs in America? The Right understands precisely that this is what the political conflict is all about. And no matter how much the Democratic consultant class insists we should all ignore what they discard as “culture war issues”: There is no way around this fight. It has to be fought, and if democracy is to prevail, it has to be won.
This gets us to a final, overarching point: the Minneapolis occupation was the most striking evidence to date that steadfast resistance to what is being done under the banner of an anti-immigrant purge is both morally and politically necessary. To fail to resist attacks on our cities and our free society is to assent to a bleak, straitened version of the United States in which a radicalized white nationalist minority rules over the rest of us through state terror. Conversely, Minneapolis showed that resistance works: that actively rejecting the repression and the blatant propaganda can actually sway public opinion against this regime, while awakening Americans to the threat they face and the alternative path we can collectively take. Democrats must not only embrace but escalate conflict with the Trump regime, in a well-grounded faith that a public alerted to the profound stakes of this fight will break decisively in favor of equality over hierarchy, pluralism over white supremacy, and democracy over tyranny.