Abolishing ICE is the Bare Minimum

Two days ago, federal immigration authorities murdered the second legal observer in Minneapolis this month. The extrajudicial execution of a V.A. ICU nurse and south Minneapolis resident Alex Jeffrey Pretti comes less than three weeks after the murder of poet and mother Renée Nicole Good, also in broad daylight, a few blocks southeast. Just as with Good, the wheels of the regime’s propaganda machine quickly began spinning. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller branded Pretti as a would-be assassin and others resisting ICE in the Twin Cities as “terrorists”. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem alleged Pretti charged at agents with a gun. Pretti was a registered gun owner and had his gun on him at the time of the encounter.

The reaction of Minnesota electeds has largely been ideologically split—Rep. Ilhan Omar described the execution as such while fellow Democratic representation Betty McCollum called for the State of Minnesota to lead the investigation (as they were blocked from doing with Good). Meanwhile, Republican representative and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer chastised his state’s leaders for “endangering law enforcement”—despite the fact, of course, that it is only American civilians that have been killed in the occupation of the Twin Cities (whose suburbs of Blaine and Chanhassen Emmer also represents). President Trump issued a similar statement shortly thereafter, accusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of “inciting insurrection,” continuing to lay the groundwork for potential use of the Insurrection Act as he has threatened.

Yet for anyone who has seen the video, and as more angles of this cold-blooded killing hit timelines, it is clear that this is not the case. According to witnesses, Pretti rushed to help a fellow legal observer being harassed by agents—before being tackled, pinned down, and executed. In the video of his murder, Pretti is seen holding his phone to record, but no gun in hand. In newer videos, Pretti’s gun can be seen being confiscated before he was shot. This hasn’t stopped the regime and its allies from brazenly lying about what has happened, even as their staunchest allies in the media are beginning to challenge their narrative. The state is again telling Americans to not believe their own eyes and ears. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “It was their final, most essential command,” for if people know what they see, the regime’s legitimacy would freefall. But it has been a long project of the right to cleave reality into two, to the point that now much of their base lives in a completely different world (indeed, you may know some of these people). While Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election may be the most prominent, there are plenty more: kids are going to school and turning transgender; cities are third-world, crime-ridden hellholes; there are 100 million illegal immigrants in the country eating cats and dogs. Any person grounded in reality would recognize these as patently false—delusional ramblings, even. But the right-wing media machine, buttressed from smaller centre-right publications like now-CBS head Bari Weiss’s Free Press to Elon Musk’s algorithmic redesign of Twitter into Nazi-boosting X, sucked the right and its base in to build this alternate reality.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the help of the Democratic Party, the ostensible opposition. Just days ago, seven Democrats voted with Republicans to advance an expanded DHS budget in the aftermath of Renée Good’s murder. One of these enablers, Maine Representative Jared Golden, voiced his public support for ICE’s latest operation in Maine (which, like Minneapolis, has a significant Somali population, especially in Golden’s hometown of Lewiston) two weeks after Good’s murder. Maine’s governor, conversely, has called for ICE’s withdrawal.

Outside of explicit support for the regime’s agenda, Democrats have continued to be ineffective and spineless even when they are trying to be opposition. Even after the murder of Good and ICE’s reign of terror over his city, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went on Fox News and declined to endorse abolishing the rogue agency. Party leaders in the House and Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, have yet to be replaced despite being handed a crushing election defeat in 2024—in almost any other country (or at least a serious political party), this alone would have warranted their replacement. If not that, then perhaps the confirmation of Trump appointees, voting for dogwhistle GOP anti-socialism bills, refusing to endorse the Democratic mayoral candidate in their own backyard, or completely giving up all of their leverage in the shutdown battle should have. In the aftermath of the two ICE murders in Minneapolis, they have begun to show some spine in opposing the latest DHS funding bill.

And this is all without mentioning the Beltway consultant class who constantly preach that if Democrat’s give just some credence into to the right’s delusions, accept just a few of their fascist policies as a compromise, they can win the votes of some of the same people who believe that they are a satanic cabal of pedophiles. But perhaps one the biggest recent failures of Democrats—at least domestically under Biden—is that they largely neglected to prosecute the crimes and abuses of the first Trump administration, of which (especially post-January 6th) were plentiful and ripe for prosecution. Instead, they allowed its hateful rhetoric to spread and grow more extreme, drifted to the right with it, and ended up losing an election to a pedophile with 34 felony counts. Now, we face the consequences of their failure with President Trump turning ICE into his personal retribution force—Minnesota and Maine do not have high levels of immigration infractions, but their two Democratic governors both had high profile spats with Trump. And yet, many Democratic representatives, including Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro, can still not bring themselves to support simply lowering funding for ICE, let alone abolishing it.

As we enter day three of the fallout, the regime’s media allies (The Free Press and National Review, notably) are turning on Krisiti Noem as she becomes the likely fall guy for the government killing of a white man (which, as an aside, has seen significantly more backlash from the right than the deaths of Good or ICE detainees). 140 representatives, roughly two-thirds of the Democratic caucus, have now signed on as co-sponsors to articles of impeachment against her. And Noem should be impeached: but if they focus solely on Noem’s impeachment, Democrats risk losing sight of the bigger institutional evil that is ICE and the urgent need to uproot it. Whether or not an only 25-year-old agency that is brutalizing and killing Americans, deporting immigrants with no criminal record, and holding children in concentration camps should continue to exist is a non-starter. Of course it should.

Yet as the regime continues to double down on its use of force and occupation of Minneapolis (and who knows what cities will be next: Portland? Providence? Boston?), it is painfully clear that there needs to be a plan for after administration. We are a little over one year in and have seen two American citizens murdered in broad daylight, with more and more reports coming out of brutalization and deaths of detainees in concentration camps at home and abroad. Democrats, should they retake the executive branch come 2028, must not show the same fecklessness they did after Trump 1.0. Kristi Noem must not be the only one to face consequences for the terror unleashed upon our communities. State legislators in Maryland and Washington have introduced bills that would bar those who joined ICE after Trump’s second inauguration from law enforcement jobs in the states. While the bills are a good start, they do not go far enough: letting those who worked for ICE or guided the regime’s draconian immigration policy simply go about their lives—just not in law enforcement—is reckless. They will continue to organize, radicalize, and terrorize outside of office unless they face legitimate, criminal punishment. The wrongfully-nullified prosecutions of January 6th rioters provide an idea for how ICE must be dealt with after the storm. From Jonathan Ross to Stephen Miller, regime agents and officials should stand trial for their abuses and state terrorism. Judges such as those on the appeals court that permitted ICE to resume violent tactics against observers and protestors mere days before Pretti’s murder must be impeached and administration lawyers disbarred. Businesses that provided logistical and material support to ICE—from Hilton Hotels to Avelo Airlines—should become persona non grata and barred from future government contracts. And Democratic members who voted for the latest DHS funding bill should, at the very least, be expelled from the party.

Democrats should be ashamed that they increased ICE funding every year under Biden, allowing a trajectory that has led the agency to become a modern gestapo. The current moment is their final fork in the road: if they want to remain on the right side of history, they should not stop at abolishing ICE, but delivering some semblance of justice to its countless victims and their constituencies when the regime falls. ICE agents, DHS officials, and their enablers cannot be let near the levers of power ever again.

Free Minnesota. Abolish ICE. And then, prosecute them.