‘If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.’
—LAPD officer Sunil Dutta, The Washington Post, 2014
‘Comply or die’ has been used to characterize the black experience of policing in America. Officer Dutta was trying to be helpful when he wrote his Op-Ed amidst nationwide protest over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, more than a decade ago. A Los Angeles cop, professor, music lover, Dutta did not advocate excessive use of force; he simply wanted people to understand that life depends on obedience. This was something Brown, an unarmed teenager shot down in the street, had not understood. Nor Eric Garner, who uttered, ‘I can’t breathe’ as police choked the life out of him on a Staten Island sidewalk a few weeks earlier during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes. Nor thousands of individuals before and since, disproportionately black men, most infamously George Floyd, recorded suffocating for nine minutes under the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin in the summer of 2020 in Minneapolis, not far from where blonde, blue-eyed, lesbian mother-of-three Renée Good was shot in the arm, breast and face by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on 7 January. Seventeen days later Alex Pretti, a veterans’ hospital nurse, also white, joined the roll of the dead when Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Guttierez shot him in the back, ten times. The Trump regime called Pretti and Good ‘terrorists’.
Metaphorically and literally, ‘Comply or die’ is an apt tag for Donald Trump’s style of rule, embodied most starkly by his paramilitary forces. Whatever the official designation of the agents in the paramilitary array, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has come to symbolize the whole. Although typically masked, with no name plates or badge numbers, sometimes wearing street clothes, driving unmarked vehicles, unaccountable to local or state authorities, ICE is the face of power with the mask off. Employed to hunt immigrants from the darker nations, its agents aim to strike terror – clustered as they are at immigration courts, occupying city streets, targeting Latinos primarily but not only, videoed tackling people, pulling them from cars, smashing their windows, stripping them from screaming children (when not kidnapping 5-year-olds), putting them in chokeholds, kneeling on the necks of protesters. In some immigrant neighbourhoods people are sheltering in place, attending school online, ordering food in, sending one family member to venture out when absolutely necessary. On Christmas Eve in Yakima, Washington, ICE kidnapped a man in a Walmart parking lot, taking the groceries he’d bought for his family.
Pressed to meet quotas and emboldened to make up the law as they go along, ICE has set new rules to snatch people from their homes without the bother of a judicial warrant, advising its agents to ‘only use a necessary and reasonable amount of force to enter the alien’s residence’. The continuum of violence from threat to arrest to detention has ended in death for thirty-eight immigrants over the last year, six of them in January. Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban national who was arrested in Rochester, New York, and died in a desert concentration camp near El Paso on 3 January, was last observed struggling with guards. ‘No puedo respirar’, he’d said repeatedly, a fellow inmate told The Washington Post. ‘I can’t breathe.’
For all the horror wrought by the regime, intended to stun its opponents like iguanas in the cold, this feels like a period of flux. Mass noncompliance has revived the promise of life amidst death. As it did during the pandemic after the murder of George Floyd, Minnesota has altered the political temperature. Immediately following Good’s execution, much mainstream commentary focused predictably on ICE agents’ training or lack thereof; now, as resistance broadens, we expect the unpredictable. On 4 February, chants of ‘Fuck ICE’ from patrons at a wrestling match in Las Vegas delayed the nationally televised show. Recall that Trump hauled professional wrestling and mixed martial arts into the national political arena. The winner of this match, Brody King, sells ‘Abolish ICE’ T-shirts featuring his masked visage to aid Minnesota’s Latino and Somali communities. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on 8 February, a love letter to his native Puerto Rico and Latino humanity, broke records with about 140 million viewers while Trump, affixed to his phone, spat on the culture of 36 million eligible voters as ‘an affront to the Greatness of America’. In flux, discontinuities and continuities provide one measure of the moment.
Continuity. No one can honestly say they didn’t know. After Good was killed, Trump posted a screed that echoed his 2024 campaign blasts, concluding in all caps, ‘Fear not, great people of Minnesota, the day of reckoning and retribution is coming!’ Mass deportation was his top promise to voters; punishing political enemies a close second. Populist froufrou aside, his economic programme amounted to starving nonlethal federal agencies, enriching himself and his cronies, and threatening tariffs for revenue, revenge and ego massage. To the extent he had a social programme, it aimed to swell employment and incomes in the guard economy. The ICE workforce more than doubled in his first year, from 10,000 to 22,000, and Border Patrol reports that it received record applications, encouraged by a promised signing bonus higher than the US median personal income. In the federal workforce, only military personnel and those in what is called law enforcement got a raise this year that corresponds to the cost of living. Free rein is the extra cherry. ‘You have immunity to perform your duties’, Stephen Miller, the fascistic, white nationalist architect of the war on immigrants, told ICE agents. ‘And no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist, can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties’. He might have added ‘no court’, as the regime flouts judicial decisions it doesn’t like, and finagles the process to get decisions – e.g., a recent one permitting mandatory detention – that it does. Surnames like Ochoa and Guttierez present no contradiction for Miller. A multicultural strike force makes enthusiasm for violence against a dehumanized enemy appear normative.
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Discontinuity (possibly tentative). ‘Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now’, Kevin Stitt, Republican from Oklahoma and chair of the National Governors Association, told CNN after Pretti was killed, as masses were in the streets on a weekend of ferocious cold and snow through much of the country, despite tear gas and rubber bullets. The nation’s governors, twenty-six of them Republicans, had just urged the administration to ‘consider a reset’. CEOs of sixty of the biggest Minnesota-based corporations – 3M, Target, General Mills, Cargill, etc. – called for ‘de-escalation’. Professional sports figures spoke out. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song. Podcaster and key Trump endorser Joe Rogan toyed with comparing ICE to the Gestapo. Some elected Republicans called for an independent investigation. They had not done so after Ross killed Good and exclaimed ‘Fucking bitch’ as her vehicle rolled aimless away, finally crashing into a parked car and a utility pole. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) peremptorily cleared Ross of responsibility, while the Feds investigate Good’s widow, Becca. Senate Democrats vowed to shut down part of the government rather than advance a budget with $64.4 billion for DHS, and got seven Republicans on board. Even the Obamas dragged themselves from their Netflix pursuits to issue a statement, their first since Trump’s version of ‘Comply or die’ began. This ‘heartbreaking tragedy’ is also ‘a wake-up call’, they wrote, reminding citizens who have been dissenting for a year that dissent matters. As the regime justified Pretti’s murder, lying that he had ‘brandished’ a gun he shouldn’t have been carrying, gun-rights advocates cried outrage.
This has not played well for Trump, a man for whom what’s playing – whether and in what manner he dominates the news – is of primary concern. The president first tried distraction, posting on Truth Social that the DHS must tout the ‘thousands of vicious animals in Minnesota’ it has seized, so that ‘the people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE’. He tried extortion, in the form of a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi, which, hours after Pretti’s murder, informed Minnesota governor Tim Walz that he could ‘bring an end to the chaos’ by turning over voter rolls so the Feds could scour them for ‘ineligible’ voters. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon likened this to a ‘ransom note’. Trump found a fall guy, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, a vile tough who’d behaved exactly as expected and is now exiled. He tried pacification, talking with Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, whom he had previously only threatened and reviled. He cut a deal with Senate Democrats, who continue to be spineless. As his lieutenants in the White House fought among themselves to rewrite the story, Trump blamed poor public relations for the tumult in his typically submissive party and the country. The regime’s default position of Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes may have hit its limit.
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Discontinuities within continuity. Most white Americans do not experience power with the mask off. White people have long been murdered by police forces in the US, in larger numbers, though smaller per capita percentages, than other groups, according to records pieced together since about 2014. We just haven’t known their names in the context of uproar. We now know two. Renée Good, 37, who smiled telling an ICE agent, ‘Dude, I’m not mad at you’ instants before bullets tore into her body, had not been schooled in the message that, with law enforcement, it can always get worse for you. She was killed for getting in the way. Ordered both to stay in the car and to get out of the car, she could not have followed orders if she had wanted to. Alex Pretti put himself between Border Patrol agents and a woman whom they had hurled into the snow. It was not his first scuffle while bearing a licensed weapon, tucked at his back in a conceal-carry state. He probably didn’t imagine that having the gun and informing enforcers of the fact – after being pepper-sprayed, disarmed and pinned to the ground – would trigger his execution. Also 37, Pretti would not have known a time in America when gun-toting was not promoted as the ultimate protection, or, as Republican Congressman Thomas Massie said after the shooting, ‘a God-given right’.
Unless, perhaps, one is black. It is hard to see a civilian killed on the streets of America by those acting under the colour of law and not think of the trail of black death, the chant ‘Say their names’ that has rung out for more than two decades, the Twin Cities man Philando Castile killed after politely disclosing that he had a gun in his car, the child Tamir Rice holding a toy gun and shot dead within two seconds of police arriving at a Cleveland playground; hard not to remember that in Trump’s first term our cities erupted in demands for a new social compact after a police murder in Minneapolis. ICE is not the same as local police. The difference is stark in Minneapolis, where cops are now outnumbered three to one (even with the recent withdrawal of 700 federal agents) and where the police department was forced to reform after protesters burned down its headquarters in 2020. A federal investigation in 2023 found a pattern of racial discrimination, abuse of protesters, deadly force against unthreatening people and other illegal practices. Trump withdrew the feds from the court-ordered agreement to monitor the department’s overhaul, no doubt in his frenzy to eradicate the spoor of Bidenism, but the populace has been vigilant. In general, police are not sent out every day to hunt, nor do black Americans and others disproportionately harassed by police hide in their homes, but the experience of policing is threatening enough and brutal enough historically that it is not irrational for people to feel a certain way. When people speak of ‘fascist police’ – as now when some call ICE a kidnapping ring, a death squad – it’s the acquaintance with state terror that is speaking. White people do not teach their children that a traffic stop could be fatal. Might they now warn that a protest could be? The message emanating from the White House – reiterated ad absurdum, as in the now nearly forgotten ultimatum on acquiring Greenland, ‘If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way’ – is that the regime might target anyone.
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Continuity and change. In the Twin Cities on 23 January, students walked out of classes, tens of thousands of people marched and rallied, 100 clergy were arrested at the airport protesting deportation flights, and some 600 local businesses closed their doors in solidarity with the call for no work, no school, no shopping. Pretti was killed the next morning. Nationally, the group Indivisible has called a third ‘No Kings’ protest for 28 March, focused on ‘a secret police force terrorizing American communities’. Such actions are familiar to the left. What’s been happening in Minnesota transcends the familiar. The state’s storied labour history, its activist and government commitment to immigrant life, and, especially since George Floyd’s murder, an organizing method of block groups, mutual aid networks, rapid response communication, as well as rainbow labour-community alliances, have created conditions for a response that has been hyper-local, solidaristic and spontaneous.
As a veteran of left trenches describes it: ‘Turns out people don’t like the structural and everyday evident infliction of pain on their neighbours and workmates and congregants and folks on the other block nearby – so much so that they will rush toward danger, mortal danger, to try to protect the regime’s targets. It’s said that every day about 700 people per neighbourhood, in some eight neighbourhoods in Minneapolis, are out on the streets: 5,600 people, every day. I can attest that about 800 show up at a church every Tuesday night in a sleepier part of St. Paul. The people doing all of this in both cities now know one another while building capacity, worrying about security, learning trust, organizing, experiencing success and failure, feeling pain and hope. Together, in clandestine but formalized networks.’
If, as seems likely, Minnesota was chosen for federal assault as a demonstration of punishment for its progressivism, its politically formidable Somali community represented by Ilhan Omar in Congress, and its rebellious history, it also symbolizes a current of opposition that, though less advanced organizationally, has been growing around the country. This is reflected in church congregations training members in public witness and nonviolent intervention, holding vigils and accompanying or otherwise assisting immigrants. In court watchers or people who visit small businesses, sharing tactics to try to keep workers safe. In spontaneous ‘ICE Out’ protests against mooted detention sites in districts Trump won. In quiet efforts to prepare for mass-based civil resistance. In ICE Watch teams that have sprouted in cities, towns and rural areas, and whose participants – sometimes working assigned shifts – might be teachers or young anarchists or church ladies or construction workers or pro-Palestine activists or retirees from the finance sector, a motley bunch hard to pigeonhole, and potent for that reason. This opposition is mostly unseen nationally. Its weapons are whistles, cameras, Signal and ‘Know your rights’ cards. Its advantage is in numbers and conviction. Someone was bound to die.
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Continuity (how long?). During the first iteration of ‘Make America Great’, under Ronald Reagan, Alexander Cockburn remarked that in the absence of a social programme, there is always a violence programme. Beneath the spectacle of ICE lies a substructure of cruelty. Trump embodies this, and, because he thrives on instigating mayhem – enjoying the suffering of others, notching a win no matter how fleeting or destructive so long as all eyes are on him – it is easy to pretend he created it. ‘Bring Back Shame’ popped up on placards at some nationwide demonstrations last year, as if the Klansman was nobler because he hid beneath a sheet.
Reagan designated ketchup as a vegetable for schoolchildren, rewarded greed and looked away as tens of thousands of gay men died from AIDS; his proxy wars devastated Central America and flooded US cities with cocaine, yet he is remembered nostalgically in the liberal press. Trump flourished in the same new-war culture that both made Reagan and was reinforced by him with an ethos of pitiless simplicity: martial values over human ones. This was not entirely novel – Richard Nixon invented the drug war to crush left and black movements and liberationist culture – but Reagan did it with a dotty smile. Successive presidents would bomb countries nonchalantly, while police roundups of black and brown men built on the foundation that Reagan and tough-on-crime legislatures laid for Prison America. Trump would carry on fleecing his small-business contractors, lowering his tax liabilities and burnishing his own star while this was happening, absorbing the lesson that there is always someone to shaft, some group to label animals or cockroaches – as George Bush’s Gulf War monsterized Iraqis, as LA cops got away with beating unarmed Rodney King despite videotaped evidence.
Getting away with it was the critical cultural lesson, even if Los Angeles burned. Bill Clinton would not be scandalized because prisons were built on the ruins of local economies, or the torture of solitary confinement was normalized, or the first US Supermax, the ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’, was designed for extreme sensory and social deprivation. George W. Bush and the political class in Washington would not suffer because the Patriot Act vastly expanded state surveillance in 2001 and targeted Muslims and Arab Americans, along with people who defended them and people who might be mistaken for them. W. is at his ranch, painting in easeful retirement, despite CIA black sites and the lying, his wars’ toll of dead and maimed, the atrocities of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and the militarization of police even in small cities. Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, then picked Third World assassination targets on Tuesdays in the Oval Office and earned the title ‘deporter-in-chief’. Each of these regimes made Haitians suffer. Each financed the dispossession and slow genocide of Palestinians; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris paid for the outright slaughter of Gaza, in two senses. No one was in the dock for crimes against humanity. Criminality – taken to be indisputably disqualifying for immigrants (‘Everyone agrees people who’ve committed crime should be deported’) – is the presidency’s unspoken job description.
Trump in power and the forces that find him useful have styled the old pattern of dehumanization in the wars at home and abroad in the bombastic fashion they favour. So anonymous thugs torment the weak, and US planes strike boats in the Caribbean and shoot the survivors, and a foreign president is kidnapped, his people killed. Amid continuing precarity among the masses, Trump declares things have never been better, while at a concentration camp officially dubbed Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades, uncompliant immigrants have been forced into two-by-two-metre cages exposed to the elements – ‘like a dog crate’, a former inmate said, ‘a little larger than a coffin’.
If what’s happening in resistant Minnesota does not prefigure a new society, its prominence has opened an imaginative window when the regime has been saying imagination is futile. The streets and communities are terrains for action. Culture is, vitally – as ACT-UP demonstrated, as did other movements opposing the aforementioned horrors. What has been missing, if we’re honest, is an all-for-one ethos for human values, for life against dehumanization and punishment. The overwhelming, enthusiastic response to Bad Bunny’s show in this moment (and the Super Bowl is the biggest, broadest pop culture event in the country) suggests something beyond appreciation for exciting rhythms and sets. Sung almost entirely in Spanish, celebrating workers, lovers, everyday people at home, in a US colony (with an artful, unmistakable reference to the debilities of colonial status), in a hemispheric America where the United States is but one country, it seems to have tapped into yearnings for peace, love and understanding, as the old song goes, for freedom and pleasure: words associated with the era that Trump’s claque is frank about aiming to erase.
Perhaps viewers were simply grateful for a joyous break from the daily stream of suffering. Even if that’s so, it is unwise to dismiss any impulse toward solidarity. After George Floyd was murdered, his image as a man alive became the centrepiece of a street memorial in Minneapolis and appeared on walls worldwide, including on the apartheid wall in the Occupied Territories. Its reach evoked a question implicit in ‘Black Lives Matter’ but obscured as the slogan was swiftly absorbed by capitalism, performative virtue, runway fashion. Whose life is expendable? Janelle Monae’s 2015 ‘Hell You Talmbout’, fiercely memorializing black people killed by police, evokes the corollary. What is the duty of the living to humanity? ‘We see the bloodshed … Silence is the enemy’. Yes, and the interconnected programme of violence, the pattern, is the enemy that Americans mostly don’t see. There is a glimpse now, again. Things have got louder. This is not a time for grief. It’s a preparation time. What comes next?
Read on: JoAnn Wypijewski, ‘Home Alone’, NLR 93.