Mastodawn

Paul Cantrell Jan 31

ICE is disappearing people.

This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.

https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/

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The Disappearances in Minnesota - emptywheel

Right now, all the focus is on competing videos of conflicts involving Alex Pretti and his murderers. But the bulk of kidnapping that proves this is a paramilitary occupation remains disappeared.

emptywheel

It was the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that punctured the bubble of the comfortable and launched Minneapolis to the top of international news. I understand why that is: the whiteness of the victims combined with unbelievably damning, stomach-churning video were something that a whole lot of people who’d been tuned out simply could not ignore. And those murders alone are so horrific that either one •should• be sufficient to pop the bubble of comfort — but they’re just the tip of an iceberg here.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

For many people who’d been inside that bubble of comfort, particularly at national news orgs, the story •started• with those two murders. They now seem to have a half-formed mental narrative that runs something like this:

❝
1. First the Trump administration started deporting a lot more people.
2. Then ICE murdered Good and Pretti.
3. Those two escalations caused widespread unrest in Minneapolis.
❞

That narrative is wrong.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

White people did not start protesting because ICE murdered Good and Pretti.

ICE murdered Good and Pretti •because• white people were protesting — and fighting back.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

People were jumping into action here in Minneapolis — droves of people, comfortable people, white people — not in mid-January, but in •early December•. (And the groundwork started much earlier!)

Community meetings overflowing. Signal groups exploding. Observer trainings filling day after day after day. Mutual aid networks popping up like mushrooms. On and on.

Why? Because we saw brown and Black neighbors being dragged from their cars, dragged from their homes, stalked, terrorized, •kidnapped• with barely the slimmest shadow of due process or legal oversight.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

Increased deportations would be bad enough. An increase in the kind of immigration nightmares you see in, say, “Mo” on Netflix would be awful already. But that’s not what we were seeing.

We were seeing anonymous masked thugs abducting people and disappearing them. We were seeing a secret police with blanket immunity. We were seeing a complete breakdown of the rule of law. We were seeing an authoritarian police state forming.

And we were expected not to care, because it was targeting dark-skinned people.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

That is the horror that spurred Minneapolis-St. Paul into action. That is the horror we’ve been fighting. That is the horror that Renee Good and Alex Pretti died fighting.

And it is the horror that is destroying countless lives of people whose names you do not know.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

I see that misguided narrative in the gutless business leaders who talk about “de-escalation” and “finding real solutions” — as if the problem is just that a few ICE murdered two people, not that all the ICE agents are an authoritarian secret police in the making.

I see that misguided narrative in the elected officials who decry ICE, but then talk about “better training” and “more oversight” — as if the secret police will become humane if they just get a few new rules to ignore and have to sit through a Powerpoint about them.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

I also see that misguided narrative in the people who still (but increasingly rarely) dredge up stats about how many Obama- and Biden-era deportations there were, thinking it’s some kind of mic drop, thinking that deportations are the whole of the evil here, an evil we can just tally up with a bean counter.

And to be clear: those deportations •were• inhumane and evil. US treatment of immigrants has been morally intolerable since long before I was born. I need you to know that I know that when I tell you that this is a whole other level.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

I see some posts arguing that everything in Minneapolis is just more of the same that people of color have been living with forever, and white people are just waking up to it. I have never once heard that sentiment, however, from a BIPOC person who’s been living •in Minneapolis• for the last two months.

There is a crucial point there: this •is• precedented. It’s all precedented. But it’s not just more of the same.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

This •is• precedented:

DHS murdered Pretti and Good the exact same way police have been murdering Black people for generations. The ICE+CBP abduction patrols sure look a heck of a lot like the bounty hunters who operated in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The terror tactics of CBP and ICE bear an uncanny resemblance to the tactics of the KKK.

None of that is a coincidence. It’s the same historical thread. It’s basically the same people.

Precedented.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

Precedented, but not the same:

If ICE and CBP are basically the reincarnation of the KKK, it’s the KKK with a budget the size of Russia’s entire military.

Literally. In the literal sense of “literally.” The incoming ICE + CBP budget is ~$140 billion.[1] Russia’s military budget is ~$145 billion.[2]

(If I’m misreading these numbers, please correct me.)

[1] https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_homeland_security_conference_bill_summary.pdf

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

Not just more of the same.

Note that this eye-popping graph only includes ICE, and not CBP, which saw a similar explosion.

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

My neighbors definitely do not think this is more of the same. You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at how many Somali and Latin-American restaurants were thriving in November and now are closed, or getting almost no business if they are taking the risk of staying open. Look at how many kids are staying home from school — regardless of legal status, just because of the color of their family’s skin. Look at how many families are living in houses filled with dirty laundry because they won’t even take the risk of leaving the house to go to the laundromat.

My neighbors are living in •terror•.

If it’s more of the same, why did all of this suddenly change in the last two months?

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

All of what’s happening in Minneapolis is deeply rooted in US history. And in Minneapolis and St. Paul history specifically: Read about the Rondo neighborhood, for example. It’s no accident the the flagship lake in the City of Lakes was named after the vice president of the Confederacy until just a few years ago. Don’t get too excited about making saints of us all here.

It’s crucial for us to recognize that historical precedent. It’s also crucial for us to recognize the extreme new danger of the present moment.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

The KKK but with a budget the size of Russia’s military. Running mass detention camps.

Think about that for a minute.

Think about what it could mean, what it •already is•:

https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss

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Into the abyss

The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.

Degenerate Art

Paul Cantrell Jan 31

All of this is why I get uncomfortable with a certain kind of focus on the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the mistaken narrative that focus can create.

Don’t get me wrong: we •should• focus on those murders. We should mourn them. Alex was one of the nurses who cared for my father-in-law when he was in intensive care at the VA. My wife remembers how gentle he was, what a good listener. They were my neighbors. Please remember them both.

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Paul Cantrell Jan 31

Please remember them. Remember them, and then remember what they died for: fighting a much larger danger. Remember what they were fighting, •see• it, and •act•.

Do not let their deaths be in vain by making their deaths the only thing you see.

/end

Pollinators Jan 31

@inthehands Well said! #iceout

KnowAttitude Jan 31

@Pollinators @inthehands
I will emphasize some of your points when I call my Senators.

Pollinators Feb 1

@knowattitude @inthehands Thank you.

Violet Madder Feb 1

It's kinda the same, in the way a hatching coccoon of a hideous bloodsucking monster is the same as its hideous bloodsucking larva. Same species, different stage.

It's been incubating. The larva was smaller, and not as often biting at white skin-- but it was a sign, proof, of awful things left unchecked and hungrily growing stronger. It's accelerating, getting bolder and testing where it has or hasn't built up enough political and social infrastructure to bring the hammer down in earnest.

And it has a great many nests and a great many stinging tentacles.

I wish I were that optimistic. But using your metaphor, the larva have actively been quietly attacking the political and social infrastructure, to make sure that we can't bring the hammer down when fascism rears its ugly head. The solution (as always) is to make the rich not rich somehow, but as long as they are and have been rich, richer than ever, they've pushed programs to criminalize friendship and decimate communities. To turn our hammers into manacles, and turn us against each other.

This isn't a parasite. This is leukemia.

CC: @[email protected]

Fortunately, society is not a biological organism, and we're not brainless cells, so I think we have a chance, if we can just figure out how to keep the machinations of the rich from manipulating us into acting like brainless cells. If we cannot resist the manipulation though, the prognosis for an organism composed of dumb cells with leukemia is not promising.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm Feb 4

@cy @inthehands @violetmadder

I think its critical we remember none of the wealth the rich have accumulate happens without us. If we don't work for monopolies, if we don't buy from monopolies, if we're willing to do a little work to source our requirements locally things change. The financial structure is very unstable right now. Its not going to take much to crash it. How we react, how we reorganize our day to day business will be the real revolution. It takes education. Getting out and talking to people, trading.

f*cking b*tch club Feb 1

@inthehands Thank you for writing about these horrors. It’s important for all of us to get first-hand accounts, not pablum filtered into neutrality by MSM.

#iceout #minneapolis #cbp #dhs #crueltyisthepoint

funbaker; Je suis Antifa Feb 1

@inthehands German here. I dont care much about US History, for us the obvious comparison is related to Mike Godwin

Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm Feb 4

@funbaker @inthehands

I don't think anyone is comparing the situation to the holocaust. Part of the concern is the vocal worship the orange cabal express for Hitlers methods. The historical comparison to slave patrols is more apt, largely because US federal law was actually written to allow for corrections by the aristocracy if they deemed it necessary, although that has been tempered by more recent law and precedent. When the orange cabal insists we need to interpret everything in light of the founders interpretation of the constitution, these facists are generally refering to the Virginia Territories interpretation which rained hell on coloreds and indigenous. The body of law has been tempered since then, but the structure still remains allowing the aristocrats to take the reigns. We need to look this in the face and be willing to fix it.

funbaker; Je suis Antifa Feb 4

@oldoldcojote @inthehands if it is about slaves, where are the plantages and stuff?

In the present, they are not deported to work, but to be put out of sight. Just like as it started in the third Reich before the exterminations started later.

Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm Feb 4

@funbaker @inthehands

Its the process and structure of the activity referenced, as well as the chaotic lawlessness thats being compared..
Your own historians frequently point out Hitler's group modeled much of their process on the Virginia legislature's rule over the US purchased Louisiana territory.

Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm Feb 4

Very well put. And its worthwhile to make your point this kind of resistance to unfairness and helping your neighbor is an expectation in MN culture and its the resistance that triggered the murders. Maybe it woke up the rest of the country, but every Minnesotan I know on any side of the immigration controversy was immediately concerned about precedent for uncontrolled police and military action and denouncing the blatant attack on our state.

@inthehands
From the wonderful post https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss you cited:
"…nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training."

"…the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II."

Into the abyss

The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.

Degenerate Art

@inthehands
"…we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean."

Arena Cops 🇺🇦✌Feb 1

@inthehands It's the people's duty...
"...
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
..."
— Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence —

Violet Madder Feb 1

"The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards."

We have an IMPORTANT WINDOW HERE.

Things are getting bad enough that ordinarily complacent people are getting nervous. More people are starting to notice the signs and recognize concentration camps for what they are. This is not a drill.

We still have ENOUGH freedom and internet capability that we can reasonably look up and find information about how this works, and what other people have done about it before. The botslop hasn't eaten it yet. Our access is still there-- although the system is probably ALREADY trying to keep track of who's searching it up and who's reading what books/websites, they aren't fully stopping us from reaching the information. (Yet.)

There are TWO things that could happen next:

1-- Full Fash: Elections get canceled, the hammer comes down, things get really ugly really fast.

2-- Diet Fash: Republicans pratfall on their faces, some grinning limousine neoliberal Democrats swoop in smiling, they promise things will get back to "normal", and things simmer back down to the miserable grind where we watch our healthcare and wages shrivel while the sky gets angrier.

EITHER WAY, the concentration camps will keep getting built bigger, and our access to information will continue to get worse. Option 2 doesn't mean it's over-- it means they're going to catch their breath and try again.

We're not gonna get through to the other side of this until most of us get upset enough to get used to the idea of showing up the way Minneapolis has been doing lately. That's the level of involvement needed, the energy. The system is going to watch our reactions and be trying to get ready to counter it better next time, trying to figure out how to drain our energy and make it harder to muster or maintain it.

The Obama/Harris/Newsom types are NOT going to put the brakes on that power. They'd be in no more hurry to close Dachau than Guantanimo. Get it? And don't give me that, "aww but they're trying so hard" shit. No. See Minneapolis? That's what resistance looks like. It's not strongly worded letters, grandstanding, or handwringing excuses. The Democratic Party leadership aren't just cowards, but traitors actively collaborating with the nightmare.

Look at what the people in Minneapolis are doing. Figure how to carry that feeling of being FED UP close at hand and ready to deploy. Learn as much as you can while the information window is still open. The main lesson of history, as I see it, is: people should freak out and stand up for what's right harder, sooner, and more often.

@inthehands https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115991953783115796

Paul Cantrell (@[email protected])

The KKK but with a budget the size of Russia’s military. Running mass detention camps. Think about that for a minute. Think about what it could mean, what it •already is•: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss 16/

Hachyderm.io

Pollinators Feb 1

@violetmadder @inthehands Well said. “More people are starting to notice the signs and recognize concentration camps for what they are.” #concentrationcamps, #iceout

Pollinators Feb 1

@violetmadder @inthehands And you included, “while the sky gets angrier.” Thank you.

Violet Madder Feb 1

@Pollinators @inthehands

Have to include it! That's the worst part.

While we've been politely sitting around waiting for "incremental change", planetwrecking megacorps have been pillaging the environment at a feverishly accelerating rate, unleashing pollution and climate chaos that is currently on track to kill billions.

Pollinators Feb 2

@violetmadder @inthehands It is the worst part.

SearingTruth Feb 1

"We have become the evil we fought."
SearingTruth

Lyle Solla-Yates Feb 1

@inthehands Thank you, I didn’t know about Rondo. I have been there but didn’t know what I was looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_neighborhood

Rondo neighborhood - Wikipedia

cognitively accessible math Feb 1

@inthehands I appreciate: Precedented, but *not* the same.

@inthehands someone from Minnesota was telling me today that her mother won't let her 23 year old autistic brother out of the house. He has brown skin and he flails his hands and doesn't talk much. He used to go grocery shopping for her but now she's terrified he'll just get shot.

SearingTruth Feb 3

"It's odd the people we choose to suffer.

For they are the gentlest, most compassionate, and most powerless among us.

The greatest contributors to humanity, in place of the greatest contributors to greed."
SearingTruth

Jonathan Jan 31

That's a graph of the funding of Trump's personal army. Welcome to fascism.

Jonathan Jan 31

Theoretically, if they got rid of all the immigrants, I wonder what they would do with all the money?

I guess they would just return it and the budget would shrink and everybody would go home.

🤡🤡

@jmcrookston @inthehands

A well armed, well financed, fascist paramilitary recruited from Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and neo-Nazis, will *not* disband willingly. It's not going to happen.

They'll defend themselves by every means at their disposal.

Of course. They're being paid huge money right now the likes of which they've probably most of them never seen before. They will absolutely not give that up.

Or their guns and ammunition.

Many of them probably already had plenty of guns and ammunition (go, USA!). However, if we're making a list of everything, add their wonderful immunity to prosecution for everything they get to do to immigrants on the pile.

Edelruth, PBS Passport Holder Feb 4

I had a thought. If you were to edit the tall bar with the statement "this is where your healthcare subsides went", that would make a nice midterms ad for any and all left wing candidate (the lefter the better).

Advanced Persistent Teapot Jan 31

@inthehands n.b. the size of the military of a great power *that's shifted to a war economy as it fights the largest land war on the continent for 80 years*

RootWyrm 🇺🇦

@inthehands you are not misreading it, and it is actually even more than that. Because that is their *sole* budget and does not include other budgets they benefit directly or indirectly from. Some concentration camps for example, likely will be paid for by the BoP or other agencies.

And put another way: that is near the entire GDP of Kuwait.
It is more than the GDP of Luxembourg, nearly twice Venezuela's, and 3.5 times that of Iceland.

RootWyrm 🇺🇦

@inthehands or let's put it another way entirely!

The ENTIRETY of DHS (that's USCS, USCG, USSS, INS, FPS, TSA, FLET, APHIS, FEMA, SNS, NDMS, NIRT, DEST, CDP, CBRN, EML, BioWar, Plum Island, CISA, NCS, NIPC, and more) was a total of 240,000 employees in 2018. They have slashed that number by over 20,000.

ICE is 21,381 employees. That works out to $6.5 MILLION dollars PER EMPLOYEE. Their 2026 budget in brief states that they will spend $24.7M TOTAL on "detainee healthcare."

RootWyrm 🇺🇦

@inthehands "ah, but that's"
TSA is losing $300M including the elimination of VIPR (a security augment force and the only one with CBRNE.)

Election security? Eliminated completely. National Risk Management? Gone. Chemical Security? Deleted.

Shelter and Services? Minus $650M to FEMA. Grant reductions? There goes another $650M.

Citizenship and immigration? Grants, $10M deleted. Application processing? -$163M. Oh, and firing 750+ FTEs.

So yeah. It's even fucking worse.

@inthehands it is becoming increasingly clear that the anti-immigration crackdown is actually an excuse to raise a paramilitary force. They want to avoid another Jan 6 failure and ensure that, the next time they lose an election, they have the force to finish the coup

Frank Bennett 🇯🇵Feb 3

@inthehands @joanpla In Trump 1.0, I remember assuming that it'd take four extra years to build the Proud Boys etc into a properly organized paramilitary force. The oligarchy and its front man are just picking up where they left off.

@fgbjr @inthehands what remains to be seen is what the (non-para)-military will do when the moment arrives. Will Trump-Hegseth & co. have had time to complete the purge of the non-aligned from the Army?

MegatronicThronBanks Feb 1

No, they are the reincarnation of the German Nazi Party's 'SA' - the thugs that ran through the streets under Hitler.

Paul Cantrell Feb 3

@megatronicthronbanks
See the very first post in the thread.

The Russian military budget is largely deflated by artificial means:
- Preferential loans: Private banks are forced to give zero-interest loans to arms industry so they could sell armaments under production costs. These "loans" will never be paid back and are thus government expenses in the end.
- The bulk of the soldiers' salaries, which are about 30 times as high as a normal monthly salary for a factory worker, are covered by regional budgets, not federal military budget.

@inthehands and the mobilization part started even earlier. we attended a training put on by monarca at the end of october right after noem's first "we're coming for you" press conference and they had to get a new venue bc the expected crowd swelled to hundreds. people were already getting activated then.