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Friday, January 30
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Minnesota Not So Nice

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Minnesota Not So Nice

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Agents in the streets: In Minneapolis, where the death of 37-year-old citizen activist Renee Good at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents has galvanized considerable anger at the feds, raids just keep happening.

“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” state Rep. Michael Howard (D–Richfield) told The New York Times. Video circulated online of ICE agents roughing up Target workers who resisted them; the workers said they were U.S. citizens and were reportedly later released. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (ICE is under the DHS) claimed the workers were “assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers.”

There’s a showiness to all of it: It feels made for TV and not actually oriented toward finding and deporting the worst criminals who are here illegally. “ICE arrests dozens of criminal illegal aliens convicted of murder, child rape and more in sanctuary state Minnesota,” reads a recent press release from ICE’s website, substantiated by a few examples; but DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin says officials have made about 2,400 immigration-related arrests in Minnesota since the end of November. How many of them are the worst of the worst? To what degree are they milking the numbers? These are rather low numbers if you consider the sheer amount of federal resources deployed to do this task: Roughly 2,000 federal agents are currently circulating in Minneapolis.

“Most ICE officers and agents prefer to work in plain clothes, focus on finding immigrants who are known criminals, and keep a low profile, especially in major U.S. cities where they are loathed by many, and where some activists use crowdsourcing apps to report their whereabouts in real time,” wrote Nick Miroff for The Atlantic back in August. “Driving around in ‘wrapped’ vehicles not only blows their cover; it potentially makes them a target for protesters, vandals, and attackers, agency veterans told me. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her small cadre of loyal aides have been pushing the agency to do more showy operations in Democratic-run cities that can advance the president’s agenda—and supply clips for social media and the MAGA faithful. ‘They love this cowboy shit,’ one frustrated ICE official told me.”

Meanwhile, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned from their posts yesterday over the Department of Justice’s push to investigate Becca Good, Renee Good’s wife, and the department’s refusal to investigate the ICE agent responsible for killing Renee. Unintended consequences: “The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that [Joseph H.] Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies,” reports The New York Times. “The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.”

Miroff again: “ICE aims to more than double the number of deportation officers on U.S. streets by the end of 2025. The slick cars and the bouncy rap tracks are recruitment tools, they say, along with a ‘Join ICE’ website and an ad blitz using 1940s-style Army posters, many with Uncle Sam, to depict Trump’s deportation campaign as a patriotic war effort, akin to fighting the Nazis. Many of the new hires will enter ICE with different motivations than the generations before them, seeing the position not as a federal-law-enforcement career but as a chance to serve as a foot soldier in Trump’s mission to bring sweeping social and demographic change.” This approach is inconsistent with what Americans—even those who supported Trump—say they want.

Scenes from New York: A new lawsuit filed in federal court claims the state of New York is using solitary confinement for incarcerated teenagers. The facilities in question “are for youth up to 21 years old who are convicted of a crime in family or the youth part of criminal court,” per The New York Times. “The system is intended to be rehabilitative, but youth are often held in solitary confinement as a form of punishment for ‘alleged rule infractions and, at times, minor misbehavior, including manifestations of youth’s disabilities,’ according to the suit.”

QUICK HITS

  • Rest in peace, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert comics and a very kind guy in person. A lot of the obituaries for him have centered on various controversies to which he’s been connected, but I’ll just say: I thought Dilbert was awesome, Adams is a very original thinker, and I loved randomly chatting with him when I ran into him at an airport lounge in Athens, Greece, a few years back. God bless his family.
  • “The notion that [Renee] Good would be able to drive away from this scene just as easily as she drove into it—and that the armed agents commanding her to exit her vehicle could be safely ignored—is as understandable as it is misguided, the product of a world in which activism and political conflict have become Disneyfied,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “What was once an organized, strategic movement with high stakes and concrete political aims has evolved today into a sort of intramural sport for all comers, from influencers to wine moms to aging Boomers who prefer protest marches to pickleball. And if the ease of participation has swelled the ranks of activists to include anyone with an Instagram account, it has also given the entire enterprise a distinct veneer of unreality, like a theme park populated by actors who spend their days LARPing as cops or cowboys and then retire at night to a dorm where they eat pizza and hook up with the guy who plays their nemesis. In 2026, political protest—and even political violence—might feel like a party, or a movie, but the one thing it rarely feels is serious, until it’s too late.”
  • Relatedly, kind of insane for the Department of Homeland Security to be co-opting the Captain Phillips meme from 2013 as they push to deport more Somalians. Supports the Rosenfield point above.
  • Did anyone ask for, um, autistic Barbie? New from Mattel.
  • “More Americans are living with cancer as death rates continue to decline, thanks to improved detection methods and better treatment options,” reports Bloomberg. “Seven out of ten people survived for five years after a diagnosis during 2015-2021 across all cancers, a key goal of therapy, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report released Tuesday. The improvement extended to more aggressive types, with higher survival rates for myeloma, liver and lung cancers compared with decades prior, the report found.”
  • Wild scenes from the Supreme Court:



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