ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota – Damon Linker – Persuation

ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota

The state has become Trump’s most radical experiment with militarized government.

By Damon Linker, Jan 17, 2026

Agents deploy tear gas as residents protest ICE in Minneapolis on January 14, 2026. (Photo by Madison Thorn / Anadolu via Getty Images.)

Not only did the Trump administration and its media cheerleaders respond to the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by lying about and demonizing the victim while valorizing the shooter. They also used the event as an occasion to intensify ICE’s actions in the Twin Cities.

According to Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, there are currently 3,000 ICE officers swarming the city. That’s five times the total number of sworn officers who work on the city’s entire police force. They know they can act with impunity in inflicting violence on anyone they wish—undocumented immigrants, permanent residents, and American citizens.

I remain deeply uncertain about what we can and should do about this dawning reality. But there is value in simply documenting it in its appalling details. We need to have our eyes wide open about this as we prepare for more—and worse.

The Evidence

Last weekend, Noah Smith wrote a powerful post about the Good shooting and, more broadly, about what ICE is doing in Minnesota and around the country. The piece contains a paragraph with links to reports of abuses committed against people up to that point:

Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. … Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. … Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. … Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. … Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

Things have gotten substantially worse in the intervening week.

Here’s a video of ICE using flash-bang grenades against protesters and reporters. Here’s a claim that ICE officers are knocking on doors, asking residents to identify the ethnicities of their neighbors. Here’s journalist Eric Levitz documenting how white nationalist memes and allusions have been posted on official government accounts over the past year. Here’s the news that the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over their statements condemning ICE activity.

And here’s the text of an email from Jonathan Oppenheimer, the brother of Substacker Daniel Oppenheimer, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and works in its public schools:

They are swarming our neighborhoods in unmarked cars; pulling people over at random; arresting and detaining people with no warrants or cause or justification other than being brown or black; intimidating people with assault weapons in their cars, at the local Target, and at nearly every immigrant-owned business; bashing out people’s windows after traffic stops and dragging them out of their cars; knocking on doors indiscriminately and asking people for documents or to turn on their neighbors …

[It] wasn’t real to me until I was seeing it up close and personal. Students of mine crying in my room because they’re scared to come to school. Students not showing up in the first place. Students getting pulled over for no reason and being told their car needed to be searched. Coming to work at a school every day where parents need to surround the premises in case they need to document a student or staff member being assaulted by a paramilitary force and whisked away to a detention center that our elected officials are not allowed to visit.

The Twin Cities Are Living Under Authoritarian Rule

This is wrong. And every American whose capacity for moral judgment has not been addled by partisan derangement should recognize it.

Until five minutes ago, nearly anyone who saw these images and read these accounts about any place in the world would conclude, quite reasonably, that the people there were living under a dictatorship. Probable cause, rights of the accused, the need for search warrants, due process of any kind—ICE is proceeding as if such restrictions on government power no longer exist. These are extra-constitutional acts, and they are now happening on the streets of a major U.S. city every single day. The Trump administration is attempting to turn it into a new American normal.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

 

Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

A version of this article was originally published at Notes from the Middleground.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota – by Damon Linker

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Letters from an American – January 16, 2026 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, January 16, 2026

By Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 17, 2026

Well, President Donald J. Trump finally has his Nobel Peace Prize. Yesterday, in a visit to the White House, Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado presented Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize medal the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded to her in October 2025. Although the medal commemorating the prize can change hands, the committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute have made it clear that “[o]nce a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others.”

Asked today why he would want someone else’s Nobel Prize, he answered: “Well, she offered it to me. I thought it was very nice. She said, ‘You know, you’ve ended eight wars and nobody deserves this prize more than—in history—than you do.’ I thought it was a very nice gesture. And by the way, I think she’s a very fine woman, and we’ll be talking again.”

With all its members dressed in dark blue suits and red ties—Trump’s usual garb—the Florida Panthers hockey team presented Trump yesterday with a jersey bearing his name and the number 47, two championship rings, and a golden hockey stick. At the ceremony, Trump looked over at the gifts laid out beside the podium at which he was speaking, and told the audience: “I heard they have a little surprise. Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s the stick and not just the shirt. That stick looks beautiful. That looks beautiful. Maybe I get both, who the hell knows. I’m president, I’ll just take ‘em.”

And then, of course, Trump says he wants Greenland, a resource-rich autonomous island that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. In a January 8, 2026, piece in the New Yorker, Susan Glasser noted that Trump dumbfounded his advisors in 2018 by suggesting a trade of Puerto Rico for Greenland and, in the fall of 2021, told Glasser and her husband, journalist Peter Baker, that he wanted Greenland as a piece of real estate.

“I’m in real estate,” he told them. “I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ ” He added, “It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.” (Observers note that map projections often either minimize or exaggerate the true size of Greenland: it’s about three times the size of Texas.)

Trump announced his designs on Greenland as soon as he took office the second time, but talk about it quieted down until the administration attacked Venezuela and successfully extracted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Then Trump turned back to his earlier demands.

Those threats against Greenland and therefore Denmark, a founding member of the defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), directly attack the organization that has underpinned the rules-based international order that has helped to stabilize the world since World War II. As NATO allies, Greenland and the United States have always cooperated on defense matters—indeed, the U.S. Pituffik Space Base is operating in Greenland currently.

In an interview with New York Times reporters on January 7, Trump explained that he wants not simply to work with Greenland, as the U.S. has done successfully for decades, but to own it. “Ownership is very important,” he told David E. Sanger.

“Why is ownership important here?” Sanger asked.

“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump answered. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.”

Katie Rogers asked: “Psychologically important to you or to the United States?”

Trump answered: “Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.”

In a different part of the interview, Rogers asked Trump: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?” Trump answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”

“Not international law?” asked Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “I don’t need international law,” Trump answered. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people. I’ve ended—remember this, I’ve ended eight wars. Nobody else has ever done that. I’ve ended eight wars and didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty amazing.” After more discussion of his fantasy that he has ended eight wars,” Kanno-Youngs followed up: “But do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global stage?”

“Yeah, I do,” Trump said. “You know, I do, but it depends what your definition of international law is.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country with which the U.S. has been allied for more than two centuries, is “extraordinarily dangerous.” Nichols suggests that Trump might simply declare the U.S. owns Greenland and then dare anyone to disagree (much as he declared he won the 2020 presidential election). That could create a disastrous series of events that would “incinerate the NATO alliance.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: January 16, 2026 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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