Reining In Trump's Goons

[Celerity]

With the apparent murder of Renee Good, our thugocracy has outed itself for all to see. We cannot let them escape the consequences.

https://prospect.org/2026/01/12/reining-in-trumps-goons-immigration-ice-minneapolis/


People are detained as federal agents and police clash with protesters outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, January 8, 2026. Credit: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP

There are at least two things that can stop a government police force that’s violently out of control. One occurs when it performs its brutality out in the open, where it can be recorded. The second comes when it attacks people with whom the public can empathize. In Minneapolis last week, ICE did both. Minneapolis is no stranger to the first of those. When a cop’s protracted murder of George Floyd was recorded and shared with the world, it yielded immediate public outrage.

This past week, ICE upped the ante. Until then, most of ICE’s brutality had been unleashed on immigrants, chiefly Latino—or, at least, people who looked like immigrants or Latinos, or at a minimum, nonwhite. What mattered, at least to some, was that they were attacking people who were “others”—certainly not native-born, visibly white females, or, worse yet, native-born, U.S. citizen, visibly white mothers of small children. Not “there but for the grace of God go I” Americans.

Now, even that line has been crossed. It takes a lot to turn the public against police agencies. Millions of us know they routinely abuse young Black men under cover of night or behind closed doors, but out of sight can be out of mind. And even when police havoc is recorded for all to see, it may not deliver a gut punch unless we have some connection with whoever is on the receiving end.

But when we do, when the gut punch hits us straight on, it can change things. One of the turning points in the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s came when Birmingham, Alabama’s Sheriff Bull Connor set attack dogs loose on Black schoolchildren who’d come out to join their parents’ and older siblings’ crusade for racial equality—attacks played and replayed on network news. That compelled President Kennedy to go on national television to announce he was sending Congress a civil rights bill that mandated the desegregation of public facilities.

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