We’ve Become a Different Country: Minneapolis is an Occupation

“Make no mistake, this is an occupation,” said Angela Conley, a commissioner for Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis.

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“The Czechoslovak resistance against the August 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies was the most dramatic case of non-violent action against a foreign aggressors that the world has ever known. For six days following the invasion Czechs and Slovaks openly defied the invaders, disobeyed their orders, refused all cooperation, and argued with them in an attempt to undermine the troops’ reliability and internal moral. This disciplined and astute campaign of civilian resistance was the clearest case yet of the type of response to military attack which forms the subject of this book.”

Source: Adam Roberts, Civilian Resistance as a National Defense: Non-violent Action against Aggression. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969 (p.7). Adam Roberts is Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for International Studies in Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations. He is also Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

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America is watching a federal agency mutate in real time. America is also watching what an invasion into a U.S. city by the Federal Government. Three-thousand armed white Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) combatants have descended upon the streets and neighborhoods of Minneapolis, MN. Adam Roberts quote is apropos 58 years later. The non-violent actions of Gandhi are significant in Minnesota. Martin Luther King, the great leader of America’s civil rights movement, also plays a crucial role there. The citizens, as well as the mayor of the city, and governor of state have joined in supporting the protesters. Mayor … and Governor Walz face federal charges of contempt, but they have turned their backs on Washington.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement—created in the post-9/11 era as a specialized arm of immigration enforcement—now operates in many cities like a roaming, lightly accountable federal police force. That’s not a partisan insult. It’s the plain meaning of what happens when armed agents run aggressive operations inside U.S. communities, shoot civilians in disputed circumstances, block local oversight, and keep expanding their footprint while public trust collapses.s

More than 3,000 ICE officers are masked and armed to the teeth. They are roaming the streets of the Twin Cities. This number is more than 5 times the number of Twin Cities police personnel.

The question isn’t whether the United States has the right to enforce immigration law. It does.

The question is whether the way ICE is doing it has crossed a line. This concern is especially relevant under the Trump administration’s intensified enforcement campaign. It threatens public safety, civil liberties, and democratic legitimacy at home.

The data suggests it has.

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Immigration Data

When Trump returned to the White House, he followed the orders of Stephen Miller (see Southern Poverty Law Center Miller bio). Those orders were to arrest criminal illegal migrants from the streets of the United States. Miller wants ICE to round up and deport 1 million per year. They haven’t come close to that. They are angry. Mad. Vicious.

The graph below (Figure 1) is a good view of immigration arrests from 2019 (Trump 1.0) to November 2025 (Trump 2.0). Notice that arrests by ICE only spiked during Trump’s second term. It spiked because of a racist policy of apprehending citizens and non-citizens who looked and spoke like someone from another country.

Figure 2 shows how the ICE detention population increased after Trump, Miller, and Noem initiated the removal of undocumented migrants. Note how the rate of change accelerated beginning in the Spring of 2025.

Instead of arresting and deporting 1 million immigrants, Miller and ICE have maybe 400 – 500 thousand. It’s difficult to obtain actual numbers, and consequently that plays into their hands. For example, Miller, et.al. claim that 2 million immigrants have self deported. This would mean about 200,000 per month. How did these people return or go to another country? Did they catch a cheap flight to Venezuela? Did they cross the southern border in hoards, just like they arrived? Or maybe the returned via small fishing boats that came from Venezuela carrying fentanyl.

There is little to know data on any of these transits. Don’t believe Miller and Noem. They are lying. They are trying to convince us that immigrants are so scared, that they want to go home. There is no evidence for this. What the administration has done is create an environment of fear which causes people to hunker down. People don’t do to work. The don’t take their kids to school. They avoid church, parking lots near big box stores, and fearful that their personal data collected when they apply for medicaid or SNAP will used by ICE to track them down.

In a Center for Migration Studies report, the ICE claim that self-deportations will be close to 2 million, seems to simply be a convenient extrapolation of the initial lie about self-deportation. Edward Kissam, author of the report, is a trustee of the Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund, which focuses on sound immigration policy reform and civic integration of immigrants. He has conducted and published research on migrant and seasonal farmworkers and immigrant integration in the U.S., as well as educational initatives in Afghanistan. 

In his report, Kissam says this about self-deportation:

There is also no basis, no exit survey of the legal status of the entire flow of out-migration, to support the deceptive statement that the entire outflow consists of “illegal aliens”. It is more likely that the actual outflow is much smaller, perhaps one-tenth of what is alleged, and likely mirroring the composition of the detained population, three-quarters of whom have no criminal convictions. 

What we do know, according to a recent national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Times, is that 15% of all immigrants have considered leaving, but not that they have “gone home.” 

Kissam estimates that the total number of self-deportations of unauthorized immigrants for the first year of the Trump administration might be about 200,000 individuals, about one-tenth of the year-end estimate of almost 2 million touted by DHS. 

The most alarming detail isn’t the raw number alone. It’s the pattern.

Since the administration’s crackdown escalated in 2025, independent reporting has documented at least 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire, resulting in four deaths and at least seven injuries.

That figure includes ICE and other federal immigration agents such as Border Patrol, because on the street the distinction matters less than the outcome: armed federal immigration personnel using lethal force in civilian neighborhoods.

A major share of the shootings involve vehicles—people shot while driving away from traffic stops or attempting to flee enforcement actions. In fact, the reporting identifies at least five people shot in these vehicle-related encounters.

This matters because shooting at moving vehicles is widely recognized as one of the most dangerous, escalation-prone tactics in modern policing. It risks killing the driver, passengers, and bystanders—and turning a chaotic encounter into a fatal one in seconds.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis—shot as her SUV moved forward during a tense encounter—has become a national flashpoint precisely because it looks, to many Americans, like a federal agency acting with the same worst instincts communities have spent years trying to reform out of local police departments.

And Minneapolis is not alone.

In Portland, federal officials said a Border Patrol agent shot two people during a targeted stop after a driver allegedly rammed a federal vehicle. In the Chicago area, a man was killed during an encounter in which he reportedly tried to flee.

Even beyond shootings, the same reporting documents 15 incidents where immigration agents held people at gunpoint without firing, including raids in apartment buildings where children were present.

That is not a “targeted removal of violent criminals.” That is a climate of intimidation.

The “violent criminals” promise doesn’t match the enforcement reality

For years, the political justification for aggressive ICE operations has been the same. The agency is focused on removing the “worst of the worst.” These are violent criminals who endanger American communities.

But independent data analysis of ICE detention and enforcement patterns repeatedly shows something else. The majority of people detained by ICE do not have violent crime convictions. Also, large numbers have no criminal convictions at all.

Figure 4 shows that 73.6% of current detainees have no criminal convictions. The invasion we see in Minneapolis is a direct attack on the civil life of citizens in that city. Three thousand armed ICE agents are not needed to arrest undocumented migrants. In fact, the resistance we see in the city is a crucial mark the right we have to protest and speak our minds. Trump supports the Iranians that are protesting the Iranian Regime, yet considers those resisting in Minneapolis “domestic terrorists.

Sorry, Mr. Trump, you can’t have it both ways. We know your game. We have historical data about how you demolished projects, brands, and companies you started. Each effort resulted in a bankruptcy. You are on your way to demolishing our foreign policy, under mining affordability by unconstitutionally getting away with tarriffing the world, unnecessarily taxing American citizens.

The Cato Institute summarized the imbalance starkly. Only a small share of ICE detainees have violent convictions. The overwhelming majority have no convictions.

That doesn’t mean there are no serious offenders in ICE custody. It means the agency’s operations are not narrowly aimed at the public safety threat politicians invoke to justify them.

So what is happening instead?

Volume enforcement. Spectacle enforcement. Fear enforcement. Shootings. Killings of American citizens.

A government sells the public on a mission—“we’re going after violent criminals.” It creates a democratic problem when it then conducts broad sweeps. These actions ensnare nonviolent people, bystanders, and families. The gap between promise and practice becomes clear. Citizens start to suspect that the real aim isn’t safety. It’s power. We see you. We see Miller. And then there is Noem.

ICE is losing the country

Public opinion is not a side note here. It’s a warning light.

A YouGov poll in early January 2026 found Americans disapprove of ICE’s job performance by a wide margin. About 52% disapprove, while 39% approve.

The partisan divide is enormous: Republicans approve, Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove. But what matters for the stability of a democracy isn’t whether an agency has a political base. It’s whether a major federal law enforcement body is viewed as legitimate across communities it polices.

Even more telling: support for abolishing ICE—once a fringe demand—has become a mainstream position for a large minority of Americans. Civiqs polling shows it hovering around the low as nationally.

When nearly half the country is ready to dissolve a federal agency, the institution is no longer merely controversial. It’s in crisis.

And it’s not hard to see why.

As ICE operates more like an unaccountable domestic police force, it invites backlash. This backlash makes enforcement harder. Communities stop cooperating. Witnesses disappear. Victims fear reporting crimes. Local officials resist coordination. That is how you weaken public safety while claiming to strengthen it.

This is how democracies corrode—quietly, then suddenly. But by resisting, citizens in democracies resist authoritarians. Remember, Mr. Trump, we know your game.

The most dangerous feature of ICE’s current posture isn’t a single raid, or even a single killing.

It’s the normalization of a new kind of federal presence in everyday life: masked or heavily armed agents operating in neighborhoods, conducting stops, pointing guns, firing shots, then retreating behind federal jurisdiction and internal review. In Trump’s first term, the press normalized his behavior. It’s happening again.

That is how democratic accountability erodes. It happens not in one dramatic coup, but in repeated acts. These acts teach the public a lesson: you don’t control this. Your city doesn’t control this. Your state doesn’t control this. And when something goes wrong, you never get answers.

We’ve seen this story before in other contexts. When policing becomes untethered from local consent and public oversight, it doesn’t just endanger targets. It endangers the social contract.

The reforms are obvious. The political courage is not.

If the United States is serious about immigration enforcement and serious about democracy, the path ahead isn’t complicated. It’s simply uncomfortable for those who gain from the current arrangement.

Concluding Remarks

At minimum:

1) Ban or sharply restrict firing at moving vehicles.
This is a known flashpoint in deadly encounters. Agencies across the country have moved away from it for a reason.

2) Require transparent, independent investigations of use-of-force incidents.
If a local police department kills a civilian, the public demands review. Federal agents should not be exempt simply because their badge is federal.

3) End broad “volume” operations and narrow enforcement to genuinely serious threats.
If the political claim is “violent criminals,” then enforcement should match that claim. It should not treat immigrant communities as a hunting ground for easy arrests.

4) Put ICE under real congressional constraints, not rhetorical oversight.
The problem is not that ICE lacks rules. It’s that the rules do not meaningfully bind behavior in the field.

None of that can be achieved. If the agency can’t operate without turning American cities into enforcement zones, then the abolition debate becomes unavoidable. Not as a slogan, but as a sober conclusion: a democracy can’t sustain a domestic force it can’t control.

America deserves immigration enforcement that doesn’t look like occupation

If ICE continues down this path, the agency won’t just destabilize immigrant neighborhoods. It will destabilize American civic life itself. It will teach millions of people that federal power can arrive at their doorstep, armed and unanswerable.

That is not security.

That is a warning.

We’ve Become a Different Country: Minneapolis is an Occupation.