You Can't Stop ICE By Ignoring Stephen Miller
Alex Pretti's murder has triggered a huge backlash against America's Gestapo, but as long as Miller remains in charge of US immigration policy, there will be no real change in what ICE is doing.
Back in mid-December, Greg Sargent of The New Republic offered the best analysis I’ve seen of what Stephen Miller, our de-facto domestic commander-in-chief, is doing to America with his deranged anti-immigration crusade. Because Miller sees non-white immigrants as the central threat to American civilization, he not only wants to stop all such people from coming to the US, he wants to push out as many as possible. “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Miller has said. (White South Africans and rightwingers from East Europe are instead, most welcome.) Sargent wrote:
Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers—the amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the United States or trying to get here—borders on pathological. Take his handling of undocumented immigrants. Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low. Since the summer, arrests have hovered at around 1,000 daily. But he’s demanding 3,000 arrests per day, a pace of about one million people per year. To that end, The New York Times reports, the administration has already shifted thousands of federal law enforcement personnel into deportations, hampering critical efforts to combat serious crimes like child and drug trafficking. What’s more, ICE itself is arresting a lot of undocumented immigrants who are not dangerous criminals, diverting resources away from arresting the latter.
Here’s the thing: Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
There’s a cleaner phrase to describe this policy: ethnic cleansing. But what Miller wants is also forcing another horror to materialize. Again quoting Sargent:
He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, he’s now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. We’re going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Miller’s masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.
As I wrote two weeks ago, this massively expanded immigrant carceral state also can be described by a cleaner phrase: concentration camps. And the $75 billion that Congress appropriated last year as part of the “Big Ugly Bill” to vastly increase ICE’s annual budget over the next four years is intended to be spent on this demented, awful scheme.
Fortunately, for a lot of us, if not our so-called leaders in Congress and elite institutions, this is not OK.
What Happens When People Get Organized
Monday, I heard a Minnesota labor leader on a private call explain why what has been happening there is so much worse than prior ICE assaults on Los Angeles, Washington DC, or Chicago. It isn’t just ICE agents on the prowl—almost half the DEA, Border Patrol and the Bureau of Federal Prisons are also on the ground; together they vastly outnumber the local Minneapolis police. The volume of calls to 911 from residents reporting brutality by these agents are overwhelming operators. And the level of violence being inflicted on this relatively small city can be summed up with one simple fact: two-thirds of the homicides in Minneapolis so far this year have been committed by ICE.
This is producing tremendous strains in the state’s social fabric. Even “normal” parts of the carceral state in Minnesota are publicly distancing themselves from the whole federal attack. Sunday, Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara went on Face the Nation to declare “people have had enough” after Alex Pretti’s killing. He added, “The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks.” And after weeks of being disparaged by federal officials, the Minnesota Department of Corrections launched a new website to combat what it called “ongoing misinformation” from the Department of Homeland Security about its operations.
After a year where Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy seemed to be working, since there were too many outrages to keep track of and respond to, the revved-up federal assault on Minnesota has backfired, with 82% of Americans saying they had seen a video of Renee Good’s shooting. And many are getting off their couches to protest. Of course, that was already happening, as the millions who marched across more than 2,700 locations in October for No Kings II showed. But here’s what’s new and encouraging -- beyond the heart of the fightback in Minnesota – more young people are showing up in the streets alongside the Boomers and Gen Xers who’ve been the backbone of the Defiance to date.
High schoolers have started daytime walkouts again, a tactic that became quite widespread after the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida eight years ago. On January 20, as part of the “Free America Walkout” promoted by the Women’s March, kids in San Diego, Carmel and Bakersfield (CA), Sioux City (IA), Topeka (KS), San Antonio and Tyler (TX), Decatur (GA), Oak Park (IL), and across Loudon County (VA)—not to mention many schools in Minnesota—walked out to protest ICE. The next day, students at eight high schools across Las Vegas (NV) walked out (see below), as did kids at three schools in Merced (CA). And this trend is spreading. On January 22, highschoolers in Cleveland held a district-wide walkout despite the frigid weather. On January 23, there was a huge walkout at Meadowcreek High School in Norcross (GA) while students across Decatur County in a different corner of the Peach State also walked out. Yesterday, kids in Chandler (AZ) walked out.
A speech by one student at Oak Park River Forest High School, a suburb of Chicago, caught my attention. Senior Grace Zoloto didn’t just focus on ICE; she also went after how Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has talked about autism.
“Hello. My name is Grace, and I’m autistic,” Zoloto began her nearly seven-minute typed out speech. “I’m also a lot of other things. I’m an artist, a writer, a poet, an activist, and a big sister. I like dystopian fiction, long car rides and cookie dough ice cream. I don’t like horror movies, loud noises or fascist imperial governments taking aim at our most precious rights and liberties.”
Zoloto pushed back on RFK’s describing autism as a dire condition that prevents children with the condition from having a meaningful future or the ability to participate in society.
“Autism looks different in all of us and affects all of us differently,” Zoloto said. “Some cannot speak, some speak more than necessary. Some cannot move through their lives without constant support, and others blend fairly well into the general public. We are your next door neighbors, your classmates, and your teachers. We are all different, all incredible, and none of us are broken, diseased, or a burden to be eliminated.”
Take note: There’s an intersectional response to the Trump-Miller-Kennedy program of stigmatizing, marginalizing and terrorizing groups that they deem lesser—and it will resonate.
On the General Strike
From an organizing perspective, the most important development of the past week was the general strike in Minneapolis on Friday (which was itself backed by smaller sister rallies in 300 cities around the US). About one thousand businesses participated, and more than 50,000 people marched in sub-zero temperatures, a massive rebuke to ICE and the Trump administration. This kind of mass coordinated regional action could not have happened if thousands of Minnesotans hadn’t already spent the last ten years in deep and thick relationship-building across a network of faith organizations, labor unions and community groups. As Sarah Jaffe, one of the best reporters we have on movement organizing, wrote for The New Republic, while the strike call came from the grassroots, it was “endorsed by dozens of labor and community organizations, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul Regional Labor Federations; the North East Area Labor Council; the Minneapolis Federation of Educators; the St. Paul Federation of Educators; the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, or CTUL; Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005; SEIU Local 26; Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia, or United Renters for Justice (IX); the New Justice Project, or NJP; Unidos MN; and UNITE HERE Local 17.”
Just as important, Jaffe notes, “Some 80 different groups, according to Todd Dahlstrom, the director of organizing and growth at the Minnesota AFL-CIO, ‘have come together under the banner of the Democracy Defense Table.’ They’ve been coordinating rapid-response teams and recruiting new people to the struggle, watching as those people deliver food to their neighbors or drive them to work or volunteer to track ICE vehicles throughout the city to raise the alarm. Dahlstrom admits that he was afraid the movement would stall after Good was killed; if anything, it added fuel to the fire: “Four times as many people signed up for these nonviolent direct action trainings here in the Twin Cities, in St. Cloud, up in Duluth. We’ve trained over 1,200 people over the past six weeks.”
This is what happens when you invest time and money in year-round organizing.
The effects of all that hard work in Minnesota are now spreading back out nationally. For example, the arrival of several hundred faith leaders from around the country last Thursday to bolster the local ICE watch efforts is likely to produce spillover effects not unlike what people who went south for Mississippi Summer did when they went back home. As Jack Jenkins reports for Religion News, for many participants it was a deeply eye-opening experience. He writes, “For the Rev. James Galasinski, who leads a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Canton, New York, it was only a few minutes after he arrived at his designated neighborhood before he and two of his clergy colleagues encountered ICE agents [as they harassed some women outside a shopping mall]. ‘I’m becoming radicalized,’ Galasinski said, his voice rising. “I’m seeing our nation become more and more fascist before my eyes — I saw it. I saw it. I mean, demanding papers? I never thought I would live in a country like this.’”
This is all deeply unsettling to hard-core MAGA, because they’ve been told that Trump and his whole project is more popular than it is, and that whatever opposition they have been seeing is only coming from people paid by the likes of George Soros to demonstrate. As I write, this reaction is manifesting not just in the behavior and statements of ICE agents on the ground in Minnesota and the claims of people like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. It’s also spreading as something a few rightwing activists are calling “SignalGate.” That is, they’ve discovered that community activists and volunteers in the Twin Cities have been using Signal to build their neighborhood watches, which they claim are actually coordinated by higher-ups in the state Democratic establishment. MAGA diehards have also decided that the hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing into “Stand With Minnesota” offer a secret path to understanding how devious and unrepresentative the anti-ICE left is.
In this mirror universe, it’s the left who is gaslighting the public with claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were just innocent bystanders, while the right asserts that they were “trained anti-ICE agitators.” Their evidence? A lot of it comes from Cam Higby, a former social media manager for BarStool Sports, who is now one of the White House’s pool of “independent journalists” honored with press passes. PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes, “Cam Higby from Newsmax spent days undercover inside the Signal messaging groups these activists use to coordinate their efforts. What he found was stunning in its sophistication. These aren’t just angry citizens showing up to protest. This is a well-oiled machine running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Among his discoveries, Higby has found that “the protestors use a ‘mutual aid’ system” built on big Signal chat groups. The horror, the horror!
But wait, there’s more! As Margolis summarizes, “The groups use emojis next to members’ names to denote specific roles. You’ve got mobile patrols driving around searching for federal vehicles. Foot patrols are working the streets. Dispatchers are running constant calls directing people where ICE has been spotted and how best to interfere with their operations. License plate checkers maintain databases of known federal vehicles. Even medics are standing by. They’re running shift changes, clocking in and out, just like any organized operation. All to stop the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Each area of Minneapolis has its own group chat, with the city carved up into patrol zones that tell activists exactly where to operate. The chats max out at 1,000 members by midday and get deleted and recreated daily to avoid detection.” Higby’s X thread about all this had gotten more than 21 million views, as of Monday night.
Someone going by the X handle of “DataRepublican (small r)” has gone further, claiming to have discovered, via Higby’s research, a file that lists all the donors to Stand with Minnesota, a grassroots directory that has been steering money to an array of worthy local organizations. The list of donors, in fact, isn’t a secret, because Stand with Minnesota uses a donation platform called Chuffed (similar to GoFundMe) which lists donors and the amounts they gave. But DataRepublican wants their readers to join in a digital witchhunt to figure out who all these donors are, convinced that they’ve found the motherlode that would prove the anti-ICE movement is all astro-turf. This would all be funny, except for the fact that FBI director Kash Patel announced Monday that he had opened an investigation into the Signal group texts that Minnesotans have been using.
The Politics of Stopping ICE
What has been organized in Minnesota in response to ICE’s ethnic cleansing campaign also presents a major challenge to self-styled centrist Democrats. It was just two weeks ago, after the murder of Renee Good, that the Searchlight Institute rushed out a memo written by Blas Nunez-Neto, a senior policy fellow, urging Democrats to avoid calling to “Abolish ICE” and instead seek to “rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”
From the standpoint of political messaging alone, Nunez-Neto had a point. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, “defund the police” was understood by too many people to mean starving police departments of all resources, not reforming them and reallocating funds to community safety. If Democrats aren’t careful now, “Abolish ICE” could backfire in a similar way, he argued. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE,” Nunez-Neto wrote. ICE, he says, should be “rightsized,” with the agency refocused on its core mission and “remaining One Big Beautiful Act funding…spent on core law enforcement functions, not immigration theater,” he concluded. There was no mention in Nunez-Neto’s memo of demanding that the architects of the ICE Gestapo be fired, or that the giant increase in ICE’s annual budget be rolled back. Adam Jentleson, Searchlight’s founder, doubled-down on this approach with a Substack post a few days ago, titled “Play hardball on ICE.”
That Searchlight memo has clearly been read in the offices of Senate Democrats, who are dealing with intense demands from grassroots activists that they block any new funding for ICE and impeach and remove DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, for starters. Today, as the uproar over Pretti’s murder crests, there are signs that they are instead going for a package that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.” (I’m not sure why Grandpa Chuck needed to use both restrain and restrict, so maybe he meant to say, retrain.) The Department of Homeland Security would be required to cooperate with state investigations (like the ones it’s currently obstructing in Minnesota), the Customs and Border Patrol force would be required to stay at the border, ICE agents would be required to get judicial warrants for arrests, show IDs and wear bodycams, and ICE would stay out of churches and schools.
“That package unites a lot of Dems,” Senator Chris Murphy told Greg Sargent on his podcast today. “Of course, it requires Republicans to agree with us, but I think when people see what we’re asking for, they’ll see that it’s reasonable. It really is simply about getting ICE back to obeying the law.” But here’s the problem with adopting this approach: it fundamentally misunderstands and lets stand Stephen Miller’s project of ethnic cleansing, which the entire Republican party has been backing since day one.
If Senate Democrats use this package to justify voting for more DHS funding, there will be no clawback of the whopping $75 billion in extra funding ICE was granted through 2029 in the Big Bad Bill. People like Noem and Miller, who both called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” immediately after his murder, will face no accountability. Gregory Bovino will still lead Customs and Border Patrol, even if he has been reassigned away from Minnesota. There will be no transparency into what is going on inside ICE’s teeming camps, which keep refusing Members of Congress any right of entry to inspect them. Nor will we find out if DHS is building a database of “domestic terrorists” made up of civilians who have done nothing more than hold up a camera or blow a whistle when ICE visited their neighborhood, or why the DHS social media arm keeps posting the modern equivalent of Nazi propaganda. (If you’re an activist, you should be calling your Senators demanding they reject this compromise.)
The larger reality is that most Democrats in Congress are still operating as if we are on Earth One, a place where the government follows the rules and checks and balances hold, and where the smart move in politics is to chase “the median voter” and aim to “look reasonable” and stick to “kitchen table” issues rather than engage in a fight over an issue like immigration. Earth Two, the place where we are, where the government defends state agents who murder innocent civilians in broad daylight and prosecutes their family members and friends under suspicion of being “domestic terrorists,” is too hard a reality for them to face. (Another useful way of thinking about this is Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” which is ably described by David French here and here.)
But getting the only opposition party we have to behave like one means doubling down on the kind of organizing that has made the Minnesota Defiance so strong, and abandoning the conventional wisdom so prevalent among Democrats that the reason we are facing the rise of fascism in America is because the left got too strong and “too woke.” Just last week, at a DC conference put together by the Democracy Journal that sought to find common ground between centrist and progressive Dems, I heard Jentleson, the founder of the Searchlight Institute, still bashing “the groups” for supposedly causing Democrats to lose elections. “Instead of just working on policy,” he declared, “we’ve got advocacy groups that sort of taken on this role as political actors, and it’s led us to very bad places. It’s caused Democrats to take positions that are far outside the mainstream of the American people, and has contributed to them losing elections and feeding the reactionary backlash that has helped Trump get back into power and the rise of fascism.”
So, faced with the rise of fascism and ethnic cleansing, what centrists like Jentleson want is for groups committed to fighting it to settle for reforming it—a recipe for yet another collapse of support for Democrats among their fired-up base when November’s crucial elections occur. I don’t think so.
Related:
—My friend Lee Drutman has written a smart post on how Minneapolis may represent a turning point that could set off a real collapse in Republican support for Trump; or not. Worth a read.
—See also this thread collected by Charlie Warzel showing how various influencer accounts and sub-Reddits devoted to “normie” topics like golfing, catbongos, gravestones of New England, quilting, rock-climbing, duck painting, and bourbon are all posting condemnations of ICE and receiving massive votes of support. This kind of thing is only going to get more important as TikTok’s new owners crackdown on posts critical of Trump.
--More signs that ICE’s plans to build more concentration camps is running into a buzzsaw of local opposition: In Dallas, clergy and supports of the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response gathered January 23 to speak out against a proposed detention center in nearby Hutchins, Texas.
Unrelated:
The good folks at The All American have posted my essay called “Time for a New Synthesis” from their Out of Many, One anthology. Though I wrote it last summer, I think it still holds up pretty well. Yikes!
Everywhere I look, there is this false dichotomy between the 'woke' surge that 'cost us the election' and the unpalatable compromise of drifting to the center. These are not the only choices.
Take a look at Minneapolis right now. A surge in community activism that is not about identity politics, but about community. As Shaun says here: citizens are turning protesting into protecting. This is "the politics of care"-- which both satisfies constitutional values and goes well beyond them. It pushes the concept of what it means to belong to a country back into hopeful territory.
"this approach: it fundamentally misunderstands and lets stand Stephen Miller’s project of ethnic cleansing, which the entire Republican party has been backing since day one."
Yes!