On the menu today: This — the last Morning Jolt until Tuesday, January 20 — is not going to be a fun edition of this newsletter for readers in the Minneapolis area, and this is entirely separate from our Haley Strack’s report that more than 2,000 participants signed up for an ICE Watch and Community Defense Training seminar hosted Wednesday night. The Democratic Party’s views on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now nearly uniform, and no Democratic elected official can afford to express anything but furious denunciation of ICE from now until the primaries. And we all know President Trump isn’t going to back down from this fight, either. It all adds up to a formula for more confrontations in the streets.
Minneapolis Mayhem
If you live in Minneapolis or the city’s surrounding area, the safety of your streets will probably get worse before it gets better. This might be a good time to visit Aunt Edna.
What the city is experiencing is not a reenactment of the 2024 A2 dystopian thriller movie Civil War, but a lot of the participants in the ongoing clashes want to believe that it is, and they are acclimating to playing their roles accordingly.
Francisco Segovia is executive director of Minneapolis-based Comunidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina or COPAL, an “organization established in 2018 to improve the quality of life of Latine families.” (“Latine” is the new gender-neutral term for the group of people we used to call “Latinos.” Like an old dog, the term ‘Latinx” has been sent to live on a farm.) In a podcast interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Segovia said:
It is a scary moment for thousands of families in Minnesota. We see ICE agents all over the city driving their cars and stopping people, and we see people chasing them as well — people whistling, alerting others that ICE is present. There are a lot of videos of ICE arresting people and people crying, car windows being broken. It’s like being, maybe, in the middle of a civil war.
Yesterday, for instance, right outside my office, we saw a woman running — I think she was telling businesses to close doors because ICE was around — and we all, from the office, ran out, put on our vests to see what was happening. And immediately ICE came to the corner, stopped a vehicle and arrested two people.
The Syrian people, who have just lived through a 13-year ordeal that is indisputably a civil war and that involved a lot more than broken car windows and arrests and deportations, could not be reached for comment.
Natasha Korecki, writing over at NBC News:
The federal officers arrived weeks ago. But since the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, their numbers have swelled — and people here say the weight of it all is inescapable. Federal officers are flooding the sidewalks of their neighborhoods, honks and whistles sound when they are near and, occasionally, the smell of chemical agents wafts by.
Some videos provided to NBC News by activists show officers smashing car windows or spraying chemicals point blank into the faces of residents.
“It feels like an invasion,” said a woman who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation.
The unnamed woman did not elaborate on who, exactly, she felt was doing the invading. ICE officers are required to be U.S. citizens. They are not a foreign invasion force.
I’m not a huge fan of law enforcement officers wearing masks; traditionally in this country the bad guys wear masks and the good guys aren’t afraid to show their faces. But the risk of retaliation against an ICE officer is, at least at this moment, higher than for FBI agents, Drug Enforcement Agency agents, U.S. Marshals, or other federal agents. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers traditionally live near or in the communities they operate in. The guy you see arresting an illegal immigrant on the news might walk by you in the grocery aisle a week later.
And while the Trump administration has sent an additional 2,000 Department of Homeland Security personnel from other states to the Minneapolis area, there’s a pretty good chance that any given ICE agent you see on the city streets in any recent video was not merely American, but Minnesotan.
This woman quoted by MSNBC feels like Minneapolis is being invaded by people from the city or other parts of Minnesota. I am sure she does not think of herself as xenophobic.
Stephen Collinson, opining for CNN:
This is ruthless crackdown theater choreographed by the president. Minneapolis has become a petri dish for his hardline immigration policies, zeal for militarized law enforcement tactics and attempts to use immigration as a cudgel to crush progressive values in cities that reject his strongman leadership. . . .
Yet the sight of masked, armed men in camouflage piling out of cars, tackling people on the streets and demanding citizenship papers evokes authoritarian imagery that feels distinctly un-American.
“A civil war.” “An invasion.” “Un-American authoritarianism.” If you keep telling the people of Minneapolis and the rest of the country that they are in that situation, they will start acting as if they are in a civil war, an invasion, or a sudden takeover by an “Un-American authoritarian regime.
This is when we would like cooler heads to prevail, but as noted last week, we live in a political culture full of arsonists, and a whole bunch of elected officials don’t really want peace or calm.
Certainly, President Trump has never seen a politically charged fire that he didn’t want to pour gasoline upon. But he at least has the legitimate arguments that U.S. immigration laws must be enforced, that this is the duty of the federal government, that there’s no such thing as a “sanctuary city” that gets to nullify or overrule federal immigration law, and that the whole country had a whole big argument about this topic in the 2024 presidential election.
As for the other side, there’s no one in the Democratic Party with enough incentive to want to calm things down.
People generally respond to incentives. If they feel certain actions will be rewarded, they are more likely to attempt them; if they feel certain actions will be punished, they are less inclined to try them.
According to Quinnipiac University polling, nationwide, just 4 percent of Democrats approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws and 94 percent oppose how ICE is performing its duties. In the most recent Yahoo/YouGov survey, just 7 percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of ICE, while 90 percent have an unfavorable opinion of it. In the most recent CNN survey, 86 percent of Democrats say President Trump has gone too far when it comes to “deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally,” while just 12 percent say the president has “been about right.”
To be a Democrat at the start of the year 2026 is to be opposed to the continued work of ICE, and vice versa. Congressional Democrats may well acquiesce to the continued funding of ICE, but you will have a hard time finding any Democratic official willing to make an ardent defense of the agency or its current methods. And the branch of the party that is still advocating for the abolition of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement never went away; Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar of Michigan introduced the “Abolish ICE act.”
If you want to be the Democratic nominee for public office at any level, you must win the primary first. As we’ve seen in the rapid-fire rise of Zohran Mamdani, a comfortable — far too comfortable — well-known and well-funded figure like Andrew Cuomo can get beaten if he’s out of step with what the typical Democratic primary voter wants.
Minnesota doesn’t hold its 2026 primaries until August 11. The state’s Democrats will pick their nominees for a new governor, a new senator, its entire U.S. House delegation, secretary of state, attorney general, auditor, every state Senate and state House of Representative seat, and three of the state’s seven Supreme Court seats. In other words, the entire executive branch, the entire legislative branch, and a decent-sized chunk of the judicial branch of the state government of Minnesota must stay on the right side of public opinion from now until preseason football.
No Democrat who wants to win a primary in August can afford to say things like, “ICE has legitimate federal immigration law enforcement duties,” or “it is a crime to obstruct a federal officer from performing those duties,’ or “President Trump has a point.”
And in every other state, primaries run from March until September. So, for most of this year, a Democratic incumbent will have no incentive to defend ICE or encourage citizens to accept federal agents performing their duties in their neighborhoods. Expressing that perspective will mean taking a risk in those primaries. And Democratic primary challengers, eager to get any advantage they can, are likely to express their opposition to ICE in ever-more furious and incendiary ways.
One last detail from Douthat’s interview with Francisco Segovia. Describing how his organization trains “Constitutional observers,” Segovia says, “when ICE asks you to step back, step back, do not obstruct. When ICE tells you to turn your camera off, you don’t have to obey that, because it’s your right to video record what your government is doing.” And later in the interview, Segovia reiterates, “It is key for us to say your job is to observe, not to obstruct. Keep distance from the agent and just document. Again, we’re not there to condemn what people do or don’t do. . . . In our booklet, we suggest to keep eight feet away from the agent and keep yourself safe.”
Even a guy who is vehemently opposed to what ICE is doing on the streets of his city recognizes that attempting to obstruct an armed federal agent is unsafe, as well as against the law.
I doubt that every anti-ICE activist on the streets of Minneapolis understands that, and I have my doubts that every anti-ICE activist on the streets of Minneapolis wants to understand what the law is.
ADDENDUM: In that most recent CNN poll, respondents were asked, “Which of the following is the most important issue facing the country today?” The top answer was “the economy and cost of living” at 42 percent, “the state of U.S. democracy” was second with 22 percent, and “immigration” came in third at 15 percent.
When asked whether they approve or disapprove how President Trump is handling the economy, 61 percent said “disapprove,” 39 percent said “approve.”
Dismiss it as a CNN poll if you like, but 58 percent said they considered Trump’s first year “a failure,” while 42 percent said it was “a success.”
As I have written, “You cannot spin people’s perceptions of their own finances.” Exaggerations and half-truths do not persuade people when they know how much they’re paying for groceries, rent, car repairs, etc. The president insisting that he’s done the best job ever does not sound all that different from Joe Biden insisting in mid-2024, “America has the best economy in the world.”