Trump’s Comply-Or-Die Policing Isn’t New

What’s shocking is who’s getting shot

The Trump administration’s deadly policing in Minneapolis has shocked the nation. But it is evoking a pain that’s not new to many people.

(Photo credit: Chad Davis, via Wikimedia Commons)

The killings of the poet and mother Renee Good by an ICE agent, and of the ICU nurse Alex Pretti by a squad of masked Border Patrol deputies were each caught on video, from multiple angles — leaving horrified Americans to watch, frame-by-frame, for any plausible justification for the deadly violence.

There is none.

The ICE officer who killed Good was never in life-threatening danger, and fired kill shots as Good was pulling her car away from him. Pretti’s killing was even more flagrant. Seemingly just for filming masked Border Patrol agents, he was assaulted with pepper spray, tackled to the ground, relieved of his legal, holstered weapon — and then repeatedly shot, execution-style, in the street.

These hair-trigger homicides were senseless. And the justifications from the Trump administration have been pure gaslighting. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of “domestic terrorism” — alleging she had “weaponized” her Honda Pilot. Trump White House deputy Stephen Miller slandered Pretti as an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents” — on the basis that Pretti exercised his second amendment right to carry a weapon.

The wanton killing. The flamboyant lies. The cocksure confidence of getting away with it. This seems new and appalling to much of the nation. But the ghastly pattern is familiar to many people of color, and anyone who has scrutinized the practice of American policing.

I’ve reported on police brutality, off and on, since the Ferguson uprising in 2014. I have seen more videos than I care to count of black and brown bodies being destroyed by cops who shot as a first resort — in much the same way DHS agents struck down Good and Pretti. As the progressive activist and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner puts it: “This pain is not new to Black America.”

One need not even look outside of the Twin Cities metro to find wretched, similar killings by local cops. Recall the 2016 police stop of Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old school-lunch supervisor, who was driving with a broken tail light. Immediately after Castile attempted to do the responsible thing, and disclose to police that he was legally carrying a pistol, an officer killed him in a hail of seven bullets.

What one learns by watching policing is that the valuable and necessary function of law enforcement — including tracking down and arresting violent criminals — is married to a much darker function. Namely, enforcing a hierarchy of dominance and control. (Academic research backs this up.) This latter function rears its rotten head with random, but predictable, bursts of violence, that have the effect of menacing those at the bottom rungs of an American society still stratified by race.

The George Floyd protests of 2020 challenged this corrosive, low-grade authoritarianism — to insist that no one should live in fear of state-sanctioned killing for failing to abjectly comply with the cops. And in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter movement sparked meaningful reform, including a consent degree signed between the local police and the Biden Justice Department.

The Trump administration’s current tactics in Minneapolis, however, are not only reviving this rotten core of American policing. They are reveling it. The agents of ICE and Border Patrol are not in Minneapolis significantly as “law enforcement.” They are there to impose federal control over a vibrant, multicultural community, with paramilitary aggression.

People of color are bearing the brunt of Operation Metro Surge. DHS officers have been harassing and intimidating the Twin Cities’ large Somali and Hmong populations, many of whom are second and third generation citizens. And they’ve been rounding up as many Hispanic non-citizens as possible — targeting even a five year old and a toddler — and speed running them to camps in Texas, regardless of their legal status.

The threat of official violence is constant. Only now, the menace is extending beyond black and brown residents, to anyone who dares to decry or document the administration’s overreach. In short, the protective factor of white privilege is collapsing in the face of Trump’s fascism.

We are watching an attempt to fashion an expanded authoritarian hierarchy, with Trump and his MAGA partisans on top, and anyone committed to multiracial democracy on the bottom. In this new order, those who espouse beliefs the regime deems threatening — including about “migration, race, and gender” — risk being branded “terrorists.”

For their crimes of empathy and solidarity, Renee Good and Alex Pretti became literal enemies of the state. After they were gunned down, the administration rushed to defame these Americans, while offering encouragement to the shooters. Vice President J.D. Vance touted the “absolute immunity” of federal agents after Good was shot. Following Pretti’s death, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised immigration agents on X, writing: “We have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country,” and adding, “ICE > MN”.

The stakes are life and death — not just for individuals who stand up for their diverse communities, but the future of the American democratic experiment. Attorney General Pam Bondi made the big-picture gambit explicit by issuing an extortionate demand to gain federal access to the state’s voter rolls, teasing a withdrawal of ICE in return.

Bondi’s subtext was clear: The punishment will continue until democracy is degraded. As Rep. Illhan Omar (D.-MN) analyzed the administration’s demands: “This was never about immigration…It was always about rigging elections.” Securing the integrity of the ballot box is the essential work of the coming months and years. Because the alternative is an overbearing police state — in which none of us is safe.

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Tim Dickinson is the Senior political writer for The Contrarian.