Friday, January 16, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Open Hatred, Dismissive Marginalization, and Relentless Exploitation Of Women is A Major Pillar and Ideological Weapon of Culture and Politics Under Fascism And It Is Especially A Large and Central Aspect of the MAGA/Trump Regime That is Inextricably Linked To and A Constitutive Element Of The Powerful Doctrines and Hegemonic Practices Of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism in the United States. Prominent Journalists, Public Intellectuals, Critics, and Activists Joy Reid, Stacy Abrams and Michelle Goldberg Lean In Hard On the Essential Dialectical and Dialogical Dimensions of the Formational And Foundational Unity of Race, Class, and Gender in Our Political Economy and General Culture

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/republicans-ice-white-women.html

 
The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women


Credit: Angelina Katsanis/Reuters
 
Listen to this article · 6:09 minutes
 
by Michelle Goldberg
January 16, 2026
New York Times
 
If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.
 
This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024 after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”
 
It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.
 
One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, most Americans have seen videos of the shooting, and only 30 percent believe it was justified. A plurality of Americans say ICE is making cities less safe, and more people support than oppose abolishing the agency.
 
In the face of such widespread public revulsion, the administration and its enablers have been trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis. That’s why the Justice Department pushed for a criminal investigation of Good’s partner, Becca, leading six federal prosecutors to quit in protest. For authoritarian leaders, lying itself isn’t enough; they must act as if their lies are true. And the lies go far beyond Renee and Becca Good to smear the entire movement of which they were a part.
 
Conservatives aren’t wrong to see furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation. During Donald Trump’s first term, many outraged women protested to their members of Congress. They put their faith in prosecutors like Robert Mueller, in investigations and impeachment. They thought the system could constrain a man they regarded as inimical to American values. They now know they were wrong and that no one is coming to save them. So many have turned to peaceful direct action, particularly against ICE, which they view, with good reason, as the tip of the authoritarian spear.
 
I have more ICE whistles in my house than I can count, because my neighbors are constantly handing them out, most recently at my daughter’s dance recital. Similar bourgeois mobilizations are happening all over the country. CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health.
 
They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.’” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.
 
To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. “She went out of her way to confront ICE and created the predicate for the tragedy, which has been used to propagandize against ICE and mobilize more people to do what she did,” he wrote. “Insurgencies feed off their martyrs.” His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Falluja.
 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. If he does so, some of his defenders might point to scattered instances of real violence by anti-ICE forces in Minneapolis. On Wednesday, Homeland Security claimed that an agent was assaulted with a snow shovel and a broom handle while trying to arrest a Venezuelan man; during the altercation, the agent shot the man in the leg. That led to an angry confrontation with about 200 protesters, some of whom threw fireworks toward ICE agents.
 
But no normal administration would contemplate a military response to such small-scale disorder. Trump doesn’t want to crush just criminal defiance, but the civil defiance that he wishes he could criminalize.
 
It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a “weird kind of smugness” in the way “some of these liberal white women interact with authority.”
 
For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. 
 
More on ICE and protest:
In this critical episode, strategist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams joins Joy Reid for a powerful conversation about defending democracy. Abrams explains her decision not to run for governor in 2026 to focus on the national threat of authoritarianism. She breaks down her "10 Steps to Autocracy" framework, using the recent ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis as a harrowing example of normalized state violence. The discussion then pivots to solutions, with Abrams outlining her "10 Steps to Freedom and Power," offering practical advice for individuals and a sharp critique of performative pragmatism in Democratic leadership. She provides a direct, five-point plan for civic action and shares what gives her hope in this perilous political moment. SUBSCRIBE to never miss a moment!:


/ @thejoyreidshow #JoyReidShow #JoyAnnReid #TheJoyReidShow #JoyReid #JoyReidYouTube #StaceyAbrams #Autocracy #JoyReidShow

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction and Abrams' Decision Not to Run for Governor

04:42 - Analyzing Georgia Republicans and the "Lesser Villain" Problem

09:03 - The Spectacle of Attacking Prosecutor Fani Willis

11:14 - Step 9: Normalizing State Violence (The ICE Shooting Case)

16:59 - Walking Through the "10 Steps to Autocracy"

23:04 - The Antidote: The "10 Steps to Freedom and Power"

26:29 - Advice for Democrats: Stop "Performative Pragmatism"

31:09 - Leadership Critique and the Power of Individual Action

34:08 - Abrams' Five-Point Plan for Personal Civic Action

43:39 - Finding Hope, Joy, and a Birthday Gift for America


ABOUT JOY REID: 
 
Joy-Ann Lomena Reid (AKA Joy Reid) is a best-selling American author, political journalist and TV host. She was a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the Emmy-nominated, NAACP Award-winning political commentary and analysis show, The ReidOut, from 2020 to 2025. Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020).



STAY CONNECTED WITH THE SHOW:


Website: https://www.joyannreid.com
Substack: https://substack.com/@joyannreid
Facebook: / 61576759980854 
Instagram: / joyreidshow 
TikTok: / thejoyreidshow 
Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/joyannreid.bsky.social


FOLLOW JOY ON SOCIAL:


Facebook: / joyreidofficial 
Instagram: / joyannreid  
Posted by at

Thursday, January 15, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Joy Reid On Trump Year 2: A Sick and Tired America And the Ongoing Horrific Violent Assault by ICE on Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Human, Constitutional, and Civil Rights of Its Citizens

Trump Year 2: A Sick & Tired America | The Joy Reid Show LIVE!


The Joy Reid Show

Streamed live
3 hours ago 

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O7pY7LoXXs



ABOUT JOY REID:

Joy-Ann Lomena Reid (AKA Joy Reid) is a best-selling American author, political journalist and TV host. She was a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the Emmy-nominated, NAACP Award-winning political commentary and analysis show, The ReidOut, from 2020 to 2025. Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020). 

 
STAY CONNECTED WITH THE SHOW:

Website: https://www.joyannreid.com
Merch: https://shop.thejoyreidshow.com/
Substack: https://substack.com/@joyannreid
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/The-J... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joyreidshow/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thejoyreidshow

FOLLOW JOY ON SOCIAL:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joyreidoffic... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joyannreid/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joyreidofficial

Posted by at

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Michelle Goldberg On What the Murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE and the Fascist Thugs Who Run Our Federal Government Means Not Only For Minnesota but the Entire Country

By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All


Credit: Tim Evans/Reuters


Listen to this article · 5:11 minutes


Learn more


by Michelle Goldberg
January 8, 2026
New York Times

Leer en español

Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked ICE agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make. Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.

Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.

Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”

Homeland Security’s social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose Christian nationalism. An image posted on New Year’s Eve shows a classic car on an idyllic beach with the slogan, “America after 100 million deportations.” Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” One hundred million, it’s important to note, is almost twice America’s entire immigrant population. They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.

In such a system, the relationship between citizens and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.

All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

More on border patrol:


Opinion | Sarah Wildman
‘The System Is Meant to Break You’: What ICE Is Doing to People Here Legally
Nov. 21, 2025

Opinion | Jemmy Jimenez Rosa, Ayman Soliman, Jasmine Mooney, Francesca Trianni, Alexander Stockton and Sarah Wildmane Followed the Rules. ICE Jailed Us Anyway.
Nov. 17, 2025

Opinion
Separation: A Family Navigates the Risks of Being Undocumented
Posted by at

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: "The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates--The Atlantic October 2017 issue published on September 7, 2017)

 "What's Past is Prologue..." 

“...It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself...In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible…Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president…”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President” The Atlantic, September 7, 2017

The First White President
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
October 2017 Issue
The Atlantic

[Published on September 7, 2017]:

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.


Audio version of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article for The Atlantic: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

AUDIO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk1yAkN44Sghttps://www.youtube.com/embed/qk1yAkN44Sg

All,

Raging white house white supremacists get caught as always in a BIG LIE and typically double/triple down and LIE SOME MORE in vile “defense" of their first series of LIES. This is yet another brazen example from the Orwellian demon chamber run by the bilious billionaire sociopath in charge of what the word PATHOLOGICAL truly means…Stay tuned because as bad as it is it’s only GUARANTEED to get far worse. Probably by the very next time the hopelessly infantile Daddy Tee TWEETS again (which should be any…minute…now)….


Kofi

Posted by at

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Prominent Veteran Journalist and Political Analyst John Harwood States: "The Essence of Trump 2.0 Is Violent White Supremacy The Veil is off: the MAGA president is openly taking the country back to its violent, racist past.

The Essence of Trump 2.0 Is Violent White Supremacy
 
The veil is off: the MAGA president is openly taking 
the country back to its violent, racist past.

by John Harwood
January 15, 2026
Zeteo

Tune In TODAY:

Join me for a Substack Live at 2 pm ET (11 am PT, 7 pm GMT) today with author Robert P. Jones, whose books and polling have long documented white supremacy in the US. We will discuss my column below, ICE’s latest actions in Minneapolis, and the Trump administration’s recent posts echoing Nazi slogans. Plus, we’ll take your questions.

Mark Your Calendar


PHOTO:  Protesters rally against the Trump administration in Hingham, Massachusetts, on Aug. 13, 2025. Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan ousted Democratic President Jimmy Carter by consolidating the political realignment that followed the civil rights movement.

Reagan used symbolism to court aggrieved white conservatives, delivering a “states’ rights” speech in the infamous Mississippi town where Ku Klux Klansmen had murdered three civil rights workers 16 years earlier. But his rhetoric reflected the 20th-century evolution in right-wing racial politics, from raw and ugly to sly and subtle.

The following year, a young White House aide explained that evolution in an interview:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****,’” Lee Atwater began. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’…abstract.”

“Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these…totally economic things. A byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing.”

Cynical though it was, the shift reflected progress; modern America had made overt racism broadly unacceptable. That’s why conservative politicians took umbrage when journalists like me spotlighted their veiled appeals.

Nearly a half-century later, Donald Trump’s throwback administration has discarded the veils. Its essence, in plain sight, is white supremacy enforced with violence.

The 79-year-old president also conjures even more repugnant demons. Before his rise, comparing political opponents to Nazis was famously considered too shrill and extreme to be credible.

That’s no longer true. With words, actions, and appointments, Trump invites those comparisons.
 
Trump 2.0 Rips Off the Mask


Posted by at

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Brilliant and As Always National Treasure Journalists, Public Intellectuals, Truth Tellers, and Progressive Media Producers Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie On What a FASCIST Infrastructure Looks Like

This Is What a FASCIST Infrastructure Looks Like!!


Wajahat Ali

January 13, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P28Dbwvr6I8

#BreakingNews #AmericanCrisis #Authoritarianism


America’s darkest forces aren’t lurking in the shadows anymore they’re operating in plain sight. Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie break down how white supremacy, misogyny, and authoritarian power have fused into a federal machine from ICE’s militarization to the normalization of extremist language and state violence. This isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about infrastructure and who it’s being built to crush. 

 
http://Thelefthook.substack.com#BreakingNews #AmericaInCrisis #Authoritarianism #ICE #Trump #Accountability #CivilRights #democracy#wajahatali #daniellemoodie #news #maga #white #news






Posted by at

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Vicious Federal Government's War On The Human, Constitutional, and Civil Rights Of the U.S. Citizens in Minneapolis Minnesota. Who and What Is Going To Stop This Carnage?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/ice-videos-minnesota-trump-immigration.html


Skirmishes between residents and heavily armed federal agents have been nerve-racking for residents in Minneapolis. Credit: by David Guttenfelder/the New York Times

Listen to this article · 8:44 minutes

Learn more

‘Like a Military Occupation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents in Minneapolis

Arrests and aggressive tactics by ICE and the Border Patrol, many seen on viral videos, have intensified the frustration and fear among residents  

by Thomas Fuller and Jazmine Ulloa

Jazmine Ulloa reported from Minneapolis.

Updated January 14, 2026, 7:17 a.m. ET

The video shows a young employee in a reflective vest being hauled away by federal agents from the entrance of a Target store in a Minneapolis suburb.

“I’m a U.S. citizen!” the worker shouted as the armed agents shoved him into an S.U.V. after he had directed expletives at one. “U.S. citizen! U.S. citizen!”

In and around Minneapolis in recent days — in quiet residential neighborhoods and busy shopping districts, at gas station and big box store parking lots — similar chaotic scenes are unfolding, an escalation of tensions between residents and federal agents as the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown in Minnesota after the killing of Renee Good by an immigration officer last week.

“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” said State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat whose district includes Richfield, where the Target employee and another colleague were seized.

Video

“Look at that.

Videos showing a Target employee shouting expletives at a federal agent before being tackled in Richfield, Minn., have been widely circulated online and shared by a member of Congress. In another video the employee yells, “I’m a U.S. citizen.”CreditCredit...@chris_123_56, via Instagram, Rep. Jimmy Gomez, via Facebook

Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.

Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.

The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.


Federal agents outside a home in Minneapolis on Tuesday. Credit:  Todd Heisler/The New York Times


Protesters gathered around a home where agents arrested two people on Tuesday. Credit: Todd Heisler/The New York Times


Federal agents deployed tear gas as some protesters shouted and threw snowballs in their direction. Credit:  David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Local concerns over the federal government grew on Tuesday when six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of Ms. Good and questions over whether the shooter would be investigated.

Homeland security officials have made roughly 2,400 immigration-related arrests in Minnesota since Nov. 29, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the department. Some of those immigrants have been convicted of sex crimes, armed robbery, drug crimes and other offenses, federal officials said. But it was not clear how many of the people immigration agents had arrested had criminal records. The number of arrests does not include protesters.

As the surge has intensified, so have the efforts among activists, community volunteers and live streamers to document federal agents’ aggressive tactics. Federal officials and local residents both say the presence of the other on the street is making the situation worse.

Images circulating on social media over the past two days and verified by The New York Times show agents approaching a car at a gas station, seeking out the immigration status of the driver and demanding that he open the door. When he doesn’t, they break the window of the car and remove him. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, yells at bystanders to back up.

Video

At a gas station in St. Paul, Minn., federal agents smashed the side window of a Jeep, and pulled a man out and tackled him.Credit Credit: Status Coup News/Jon Farina, via Storyful

In another video, Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, is seen being shoved by an agent.

Mr. Payne said in an interview on Tuesday that federal agents with assault rifles and combat gear were patrolling the streets in convoys. At night, they shine lights from the vehicles onto pedestrians, he said.

“This is a military occupation, and it feels like a military occupation,” Mr. Payne said.

Mr. Payne said federal agents scream obscenities at residents and repeatedly holster and unholster their weapons. “It’s like living in a war zone,” he said. The federal presence was not ubiquitous. Residents said the federal agents were concentrated in areas with large immigrant populations and were absent in others.


Christian Molina stood by his damaged car after federal immigration officers crashed into the vehicle and questioned his immigration status on Monday. He was released after proving he was a U.S. citizen. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times


Residents and activists recorded federal agents after they rammed Christian Molina’s car, according to Mr. Molina and a witness. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times


Federal agents have been deploying pepper spray and tear gas to scatter residents and activists. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

President Trump said Tuesday that federal agents were in Minnesota to remove “convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals.”

Mr. Trump wrote on social media that “THE DAY OF RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION” is coming for Minnesota, without elaborating.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said Minnesota was not cooperating with the federal government and said 1,360 illegal immigrants were in Minnesota prisons. The department demanded that they be handed over to the federal authorities when released.

Mr. Howard, the state representative, said federal agents for the most part did not have warrants and were staging in the parking lots of stores and apartment complexes and targeting people of color, asking for proof of citizenship.

“Nothing about that is making our communities more safe,” he said. “We have many people in our community that are undocumented, but they are valued members of our community.”

For many in Minneapolis, where 70 percent of people voted Democratic in the 2024 presidential election, the resistance from neighborhood groups and community volunteers has felt empowering in what has felt like a hopeless time, residents said in interviews.

But even some of those in favor of the community defense efforts were on edge that protesters could go too far. Residents said they were worried that with the number of agents patrolling the area and heightened tensions, weapons would be fired, deliberately or by accident.

“It’s just a matter of time before something else occurs. Another person shot. ICE agents injured,” said Maurice Ward, 54, who runs a social justice organization.

Video

“I am U.S. citizen.

Nimco Omar filmed an encounter with masked Border Patrol agents, who repeatedly asked her for identification to prove her citizenship and where she was born.CreditCredit...Nimco Omar, via Storyful

On Monday afternoon, a few blocks away from where Ms. Good was killed, witnesses recounted how a group of federal agents had crashed their vehicle into a car that they had been trying to stop. As officers spoke to the driver, a crowd began to swell. Neighbors rushed out and groups of activists who had been following and filming the agents arrived, many whistling and shouting.

“Get out of our city!” they yelled.

Some threw snowballs at the officers and pelted their vehicles with water bottles. The agents deployed pepper spray and tear gas, sending residents scattering.

In an interview later, Christian Morales, 40, said he had been driving to his mechanic shop when he noticed what could be federal agents sitting in a vehicle in an alley. They began to follow him, he believed, solely for looking Hispanic.

He said he was grateful for the community volunteers and neighbors who came out, some in sweats and pajamas, to document the scene, and he believed their presence was why agents ultimately left him alone. But he also worried whether some of the volunteers shouting obscenities at agents emboldened them.

“It makes them act different, like they have more power,” he said.

Mr. Payne, the City Council president, said he was encouraging residents to take video of federal agents, which he said could be used as evidence in legal action that state and local officials are pursuing against the federal government over the deployments.

A lawsuit filed on Monday by the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul asked a judge to block the federal government from “implementing the unprecedented surge in Minnesota.”

The lawsuit said “thousands of armed and masked D.H.S. agents have stormed the Twin Cities to conduct militarized raids and carry out dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional stops and arrests.”

On Monday night near a fast-food restaurant in South Minneapolis, whistling began to fill the air, a warning by volunteers that federal agents were in the area. Two immigrant workers locked the doors of the restaurant. Muna Ahmed, 37, who had walked in to order a sandwich, was grateful for the signal. A former hospital interpreter of Somali heritage, Ms. Ahmed was in disbelief over the hostility of federal officers on the streets.


“This is not the America I know,” she said.

Ernesto Londoño, Mitch Smith, Madeleine Ngo, Sonia A. Rao and Arijeta Lajka contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Thomas Fuller, a Page One Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front page.

Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 14, 2026, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Clashes With Federal Agents Rise in Minneapolis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper 


See more on: U.S. Politics, Homeland Security Department, Donald Trump


More on the Minnesota ICE Shooting

Posted by at
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)