Why Minnesota Was a Wake-Up Call

The end of the federal law enforcement “surge” in Minnesota brought relief to a traumatized Twin Cities community—yet listen closely to the administration, and it is clear that the current quiet may be less a return to normalcy than a strategic retreat after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. A shift in tactics, after all, does not automatically imply a shift in the underlying view—made clear in the administration’s actions in Minnesota—that overwhelming force is an appropriate and necessary response to American protest. Put another way, despite a media narrative that the tide may be turning, Minneapolis might only be the tip of the iceberg. And while the scaling back of federal presence in Minneapolis is welcome, it will not slow what I believe is the administration’s real ambition: constructing the police state of the administration’s dreams. This is not speculation or inference. We know about the administration’s terrifying vision for law enforcement because they have talked about it.  During the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, for example, Reuters unearthed draft recommendations from a commission on policing created by President Donald Trump during his first term. The wish-list included increased funding for facial recognition technology; granting police access to encrypted phone data; and support for a legal precedent that protects police officers in civil lawsuits. At the time, I wrote that the recommendations “could become an actionable blueprint for the kind of dystopian policing that many—especially those who have never experienced state violence themselves—thought we could never see in the United States.” A month later, when Trump lost re-election, I breathed a sigh of relief. Yet President Joe Biden’s victory offered only a temporary reprieve.  Looking back, during Trump’s first term, his administration lacked the personnel, technology, and legal authority to carry out its vision.  While it was the wider MAGA movement that used the metaphor of “total war” against the election mechanisms of 2020, today, we hear from the administration about the need to fight what it ominously terms a “war from within.” This time, thanks to an avalanche of appropriations, a private technology sector eager to appease (and profit), and a pliant judiciary, the second Trump Administration is closer than ever to enacting a terrifying police state. Right now, immigration enforcement is the most visible application. But the bigger picture is a federal police force capable of deploying anywhere in the country to carry out the president’s will, subsuming state and local law enforcement, and even taking over elections—in case anyone was wondering how the president might accomplish his goal of having Republicans “take over elections.” Windfall funding was the first step. Last summer’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” contained a $175 billion cash infusion for ICE—by far the largest budget allocation for a law enforcement agency in history. To put this in perspective, the sum surpasses annual military spending for every country on the planet aside from the United States and China. It is also larger than the annual budgets for every state and local police department in the country combined (roughly $135 billion). These funds enable hiring in the numbers necessary to effectively occupy cities. In Minneapolis, for example, federal agents easily surpassed the roughly 600 local officers on the ground. Because this force does not have to be evenly distributed across the country, they could outnumber state and local law enforcement everywhere they go. And, thanks to cooperation agreements that will give ICE more access to jails—and, again, possibly sensitive voter data—the reach of these agents will be longer than ever. Armed with massive new coffers, technology was next. ICE is using its windfall to develop unprecedented surveillance capabilities. The latest suite of tools, provided by a U.S. tech sector that profits from staying in the administration’s good graces, should terrify anyone who cares about civil liberties. Over the past year, ICE has spent lavishly on an iris-scanning mobile app that can identify a person within seconds; “stingray” cell towers that automatically connect with nearby phones, allowing agents to track a phone’s location in real time; and cutting-edge hardware that can unlock phones and computers, recover deleted files, and read encrypted chats. Importantly, history tells us that once tools of oppression are made available in one law enforcement context, they usually spread to others. The proliferation of military-style gear across police departments offers a useful case study. Three decades ago, most Americans would have been shocked to encounter tank-like vehicles, tactical vests, and camouflage at a local protest. Today, they are as commonplace as bullhorns and posterboards. If you fail to register concern because you agree with this administration’s policies, I would remind you that tools have no say in how they are eventually used, or by whom. If you believe you are safe because the administration will not wield these weapons against U.S. citizens, well—I have a used Humvee to sell you.  Lastly, as this police state expands, Americans who become targets will find themselves with less legal recourse than ever. A 2022 Supreme Court ruling narrowed avenues for accountability to the point of nonexistence. If you sue federal agents for violating your constitutional rights, you will almost certainly lose.  What does this mean for the next three years (and beyond, if Trumpian true believers remain in power)? Americans should prepare to experience law enforcement in the way that targeted populations have throughout too much of U.S. history, which is to say as enforcers of a sociopolitical agenda who treat legal justification as an afterthought.       Federal agents who were recruited using explicitly White nationalist imagery will not be overly concerned with privacy and due process protections. As in the Jim and Jane Crow South, the law will be largely beside the point. We can all take a lesson from the communities who have spent decades at the business end of batons, rifles, and firehoses: The atrocities committed in the shadows will make possible the atrocities committed in public. Consider the effort to label Americans killed by the Department of Homeland Security “domestic terrorists.” This had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with painting victims as criminals to excuse their killings after the fact—something all too familiar in Black and Brown communities. In police states, controlling the flow of information and creating a veneer of moral justification are necessary conditions for brutalization, intimidation, and erasure.  Widely distributed videos revealed the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti as obviously unjustifiable, which is part of the reason for the administration’s strategic retreat. That is reason for hope. Any concessions wrested by Congressional Democrats as a condition of funding the government—limiting the use of administrative warrants, which allow ICE to sign its own permission slips before breaking down people’s doors, and unmasking some agents—are also positive steps, as far as they go. But chipping away at an iceberg does not remove the mountain lurking under the surface. Once built, dismantling a police state often requires generational struggle. And if we do not want to wake up shocked—again—by the cruelty of policing directed by people who fantasize about waging war against those who disagree with them, we cannot celebrate the wins coming out of Minneapolis for too long. Instead, I urge all of us who do not want to live in a police state to recognize the dangerousness of the waters in which we are swimming. And not to rest until the iceberg is fully avoided—or removed.