by Franklin Dmitryev

The murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in January brought President Donald Trump’s war at home to new heights, just as his kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his threats to Greenland ramped up his assaults abroad as he slouches toward a new world war.

Ms. Good, a 37-year-old white woman whose wife was standing nearby and whose three children were elsewhere, was trying to drive slowly away from the crowd of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swarming near her car on Jan. 7, when one of them, Jonathan Ross, shot her in the head three times, twice through the side window. As she died, he called her a “fucking bitch”—not long after she had said to him, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Trump and his mouthpieces then set out to assassinate Good’s reputation and discredit the whole movement resisting ICE—while at the same time claiming that they would come to the rescue of Iranian protesters gunned down by that government and ignoring that ICE deported Iranian immigrant seekers who feared for their lives if returned. As always, they immediately lied that Ross acted in self-defense, even though multiple videos quickly surfaced disproving that.

DEMONIZING ANTI-FASCISTS

Trump lied that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” and he was in the hospital, when in fact he walked away without being hit. Professional liars like Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin accused Good of “domestic terrorism.” DHS justified the operation with 3,000 agents with lies about Black Somali residents, whom Trump demonizes in vicious, racist terms. Agents openly target people through racial, ethnic, and language profiling. Later Trump floated invoking the Insurrection Act and ordered 1,500 soldiers in Alaska to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota.

Fascists in media and on social media piled on, implying that Good deserved to die because she objected to ICE abuses, didn’t obey cops, was divorced, had a female partner, sent her child to a school that talked about social justice, and/or was a liberal white woman. As Jessica Valenti wrote:

“This is what we’re meant to believe made Good a dangerous domestic terrorist who deserved to be killed in front of her wife? That she regularly attended school board meetings? That she believed people shouldn’t be snatched off the street by anonymous men in masks?

“That’s what all this coverage and right-wing backlash is ultimately getting at—that we deserve to die. That for the crime of resisting, or having pronouns in our bios, we should be shot. That for being women, or having a wife—or for caring about the people in our communities regardless of their immigration status—we should just go ahead and die.”

The cover-up and character assassination continued as Trump’s Justice Department refused to investigate Ross for civil rights violations, which would have been standard procedure, but instead would investigate both Good and her widow, Becca Good, for connections with groups monitoring and protesting immigration agents. That is the kind of activity that Trump wants to suppress in his police state as he destroys the First Amendment. These decisions were so outrageous that four prosecutors are resigning from the Civil Rights Division, while six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest of the phony investigation targeting activists. Then the department began investigations of the state’s governor and the city’s mayor and even labeled them “terrorists.” While the FBI withheld evidence from state investigators, an FBI agent resigned after her investigation of Ross was shut down.

ICE agents and other cops act with the expectation of total impunity. The Supreme Court and other courts have made it almost impossible to prosecute them and they know that Trump will undermine prosecutions and pardon even the most heinous crime so long as it is done in his name, or he is adequately bribed. And of course Trump’s house of lies will spin cover stories for them. That is one reason for the pattern observed in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities of immigration agents stepping in front of cars, or reaching into moving cars, or slamming on their brakes to cause a crash, or ramming cars and claiming the other driver rammed them, all in order to give themselves an excuse to detain, assault, or kill the people in those cars.

ALEX PRETTI CALLOUSLY MURDERED

Impunity fuels the shocking pattern of violence by the migrant-repression complex. Good’s murder was quickly followed by the ICE shooting of two Venezuelans in Portland, Ore., and on Jan. 14 they shot another person in Minneapolis. On Jan. 24, the border patrol (CBP) murdered 37-year-old Alex Pretti, and then issued a barrage of heinous lies.

Pretti, with a phone in one hand and nothing in the other, was observing CBP agents when he went to help a woman who was being pepper-sprayed and pushed to the ground by the thugs for recording their actions. Bystander videos show that half a dozen agents surrounded Pretti and threw him to the ground, and he was shot ten times. In other words, they deliberately murdered him. Agents then turned their guns and tear gas toward protesters. One of the CBP thugs exclaimed, “It’s like Call of Duty. So cool, huh?”

In a moving statement, Pretti’s parents wrote:

“We are heartbroken but also very angry.

“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman.

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed.

“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.”

ICE, THE TERRORISTIC OCCUPYING ARMY

In the past year, ICE, CBP, and other DHS agents have shot at people 25 times, injuring 14 and killing seven. That includes Silverio Villegas González, who was driving away from ICE agents in a Chicago suburb after dropping his children off at school, and they lied that he was trying to kill them. It includes Keith Porter, a Black father of two, killed by an off-duty ICE agent who claimed self-defense after Porter fired shots in the air to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Agents also frequently, deliberately shot protesters with pepper balls and tear gas grenades, blinding both Kaden Rummler and Britain Rodriguez in Santa Ana on Jan. 9, coming within a quarter inch of severing Rummler’s carotid artery.

The violence also includes smashing car windows and dragging out people, sometimes face down on the street, like a woman in Minneapolis who screamed, “I’m disabled, I’m trying to go to the doctor up there”; breaking into houses to beat and drag people in front of their children; filling a car carrying six children with tear gas, causing a six-month-old baby to be hospitalized; detaining a two-year-old girl and flying her to Texas against court orders; detaining a five-year-old and using him as bait; and trashing an entire Chicago apartment building in a Black neighborhood, throwing flash-bang grenades into apartments, detaining and zip-tying citizens and Venezuelan immigrants and parading them in front of TV cameras as “terrorists” (none were charged but some ended up homeless), while leaving zip-tied children in vans separated from their families.

Less visible is the toll taken inside the squalid concentration camps, many of which are run for profit by private contractors. Often, the conditions amount to torture, as verified by human rights groups, and detainees are frequently denied medical care and isolated from family and lawyers. Thirty-six people have died in the detention centers in the past year. That includes Geraldo Lunas Campos in Texas on Jan. 3, who two fellow detainees said was choked to death by guards—and then the administration started trying to deport the two witnesses. An untold number of people abducted by heavily armed, masked men in unmarked vehicles have disappeared, with family members unable to locate them.

Under the Biden administration, many people were labeled “alarmist” if we warned that Trump, reinstalled in the White House, would drive the country and the world toward fascism, dictatorship, the dismantling of Constitutional rights and protections, and orchestrate a blitzkrieg against labor and social movements. The Democratic Party leadership rhetorically warned of threats to democracy but tied it to a defense of the existing crumbling capitalist institutions, never acknowledging how closely connected they were to oppression, exploitation, and the nurturing of fascism. They focused on trying to tamp down revolt and channel energy into the 2026 elections, as if Trump has any intention of allowing elections to be free and fair. He and his allies are already planning ways to delegitimize and subvert those elections. When Trump returned to office, corporate, university, and media leaders mostly pursued cowardly appeasement and compliance in advance rather than any serious resistance. Today it is clearer than ever that Trump and his cronies are at the vanguard of fascism’s onslaught.

‘WHO KEEPS US SAFE? WE KEEP US SAFE!’

Outrage at the brutality of this occupying army energized revolt in the Minneapolis area, as it had in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Charlotte. Even more people awoke to the fact that Trump is waging a war against not only immigrants, and certainly not just “the worst of the worst,” but the majority of the population.

More and more people are calling this state terror and ethnic cleansing. The crowds who had already been confronting sadistic agents grew larger and bolder. Rage at the injustice mixed with not only fear but the feeling of our own power from below, our care and respect for each other in communal endeavors. ICE watch patrols, rapid response networks, and mutual aid had already been functioning, with multiracial participation including from the large Somali-American community, most of whom are citizens but all of whom are potential targets for ICE/CBP abuse.

The occupiers can hardly go anywhere in the Twin Cities without being monitored, followed, whistled and yelled at, and often blocked at least momentarily, which is sometimes enough to thwart their chases. Neighbors organized to stand guard at schools, to make sure kids get to school safely, and to deliver groceries and necessities to families afraid to leave their homes.

New forms of revolt broke out, including student walkouts at several metro area schools on multiple days, with hundreds of youth participating in the ICE Out for Good rally at the state capitol in St. Paul on Jan. 14. Over 1,000 ICE Out for Good events took place on Jan. 10-11 across the country, and events memorializing Good and Pretti continue.

MINNEAPOLIS GENERAL STRIKE

Labor unions and community groups called for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on Jan. 23 to protest the abuses. It turned into a general strike, the first there since 1934, although the labor bureaucrats in the leadership shied away from using the word “strike.” They called it “Day of Truth & Freedom,” or “economic blackout.” The coalition demanded ICE out of Minnesota now, prosecution of Ross, no additional federal funding for ICE, and investigation of ICE violations of human rights and the Constitution.

The shutdown of economic activity was broadly successful. No count was available of people staying off work, but tens of thousands were protesting, while many thousands more have been staying home to avoid abduction by ICE or CBP. Over 700 businesses closed in support of the strike, some under pressure from their workers and neighbors. Museums and other cultural institutions also closed. Leading up to the protest, Target, Home Depot, Enterprise, Delta Airlines and Hilton—all headquartered in the Twin Cities—were targeted with actions pressuring them to resist ICE.

The march in downtown Minneapolis, just one of many across the state on Jan. 23, brought out 50,000 to 100,000, braving a -30 degree wind chill. More large protests were held that day from New York City to San Francisco, Boston to Chicago. A national economic blackout was called for Jan. 30, with “ICE Out of Everywhere” actions Jan. 31-Feb. 1, and with talk of more to come.

Hundreds of demonstrators also showed up at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, highlighting its use as a key site in disappearing abductees. About 100 clergy were arrested after they stepped out onto the road there to stand or kneel and disrupt traffic.

Sticking to its routine Orwellian doublespeak, a DHS spokesperson ranted, “This is beyond insane. Why would these labor bosses not want these public safety threats out of their communities?” Of course, that is exactly what the strikers demanded: remove the threat from ICE/CBP that is there to instill fear, danger, and violence. For the most part, they target people with no significant criminal record, at times randomly grabbing people to fill quotas.

In Minnesota, as in other places, the movement built on what Rosa Luxemburg called the “mental sediment” from earlier revolts, as well as already established activist networks. In Chicago, activists pointed to immigrant protection efforts starting in 2017 against Trump, like Protect Rogers Park, and also to the Cop Watch started by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In the same way, the revolt that shook Minneapolis—and the whole country—after the racist police murder of George Floyd in 2020, still fuels the city’s people, and neighborhood-level organizing continues.

GEORGE FLOYD: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

“2020 never ended,” as rapid response network member Jamie Schwesnedl said. The ruling class and especially the Trumpist movement never forgot that nationwide uprising and have been trying to demonize it ever since, while millions of people who participated have been seeing racist police violence week after week. It has helped break down some of the divisions between Black and Latine communities who are both under the gun.

It’s no wonder that ICE has become so hated. Recent polls found that U.S. respondents overwhelmingly consider Good’s murder to be unjustified and that a plurality think ICE should be abolished. That hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to make ICE even more powerful and to shape it into an unaccountable police force driven by explicitly white supremacist, even Nazi ideology and emotions. While it always attracted sadists eager to exercise power, especially over people of color and women of all races, its latest recruiting ads use neo-Nazi memes and slogans, the kind that go under the radar of people who aren’t immersed in fascist culture. DHS and White House social media posted from the neo-Nazi song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” and an associated meme, as well as the phrase “Which way, American man?” adapted from a white supremacist slogan. For months DHS has been posting “a barrage of graphics, ranging from overt nationalist and antisemitic imagery to coded racist dog whistles about the supposed loss of white American culture, in attempts to recruit people to join ICE.”

So it’s no surprise that a Gofundme was set up for the killer, Ross, by a Nazi. The Gofundme page initially called Good “the stupod [sic] bitch that got what she deserved” (later amended to “domestic terrorist”) and raised $788,402 as of Jan. 21. More than two dozen other Gofundme campaigns were set up for Ross, while one for “Renee Good’s Widow and Family” has raised $1.5 million.

Numerous immigration agents have been caught on video flaunting Good’s murder as an open threat to people who protest, record, or observe them. “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” some asked.

Their threats and assaults are not “abuses” because they are not aberrations. The cruelty and the violence—and, as comedian Ronnie Chieng pointed out, showing the violence—are the point. The point is to terrorize and subdue the population, especially Black and Brown people and anyone who dares to stand against the administration’s terrorist agenda—and to divide us, since turning points in U.S. history depend on the coalescence of subjects of revolution: Black masses, and now Brown too, with white labor, with women and youth.

‘THIS IS NOT NORMAL’

The point is to normalize fascist terrorism. This is why people in the movement, who are fighting that, keep saying, “This is not normal.”

That is true. At the same time, we need to resist tendencies urging a return to the way things were before Trump. Those tendencies are dominant in, but not limited to, the Democratic Party, which is obsessed with defending the institutions of capitalist “democracy”—especially the Constitution, which, it is true, the administration is violating constantly, but it is also true that it was written by a group of wealthy white men, a tiny minority of the population, many of whom enslaved human beings and deemed women’s subordination natural, and all of whom supported genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the continent.¹

It is only because of the revolt and outrage sweeping the nation that Trump was forced to make concessions—meager and fork-tongued though they are. Taking Border Patrol “commander at large” and Nazi fashion devotee Greg Bovino out of Minnesota and silencing his social media account was a defeat for the administration, although his replacement is no better. And the revolt made the Democratic leadership finally threaten to force a government shutdown if certain reforms to ICE and DHS are not made. What better time is there to force a shutdown than when the government is waging war on the population?

Don’t hold your breath. At the time of writing, Senate Democrats made a deal with Trump to continue DHS funding at current levels for two weeks, and to split its budget from other funding bills to avert a shutdown. They will attempt to write reforms into the DHS bill to ban ICE agents from masking most of the time, to ban roving ICE patrols, and to require certain other conduct. Do they forget that these agents routinely violate court orders mandating some of those same reforms? Democrats and Trump are both skilled at making deals that are more show than substance, and this could be more of the same. They don’t even mention the phrase “Abolish ICE!” which is now far more popular than either of the two capitalist parties or their leaders.

What is needed is to participate in and build the movement of resistance and to help it develop in a radical, liberatory direction. What is needed is not to return to a more muted class war but a recognition that the system we are fighting against needs to be abolished before it devastates humanity; that the movement that is forming needs to attack the ideology that tries to pass off Trumpism as any kind of defense of working people when in fact it aims—and is succeeding—to enrich billionaire capitalists and Trump’s family and cronies; that the actions, thoughts, and organizing of resistance contain a reach for a new society that needs to be made explicit; and that organization of thought as well as of people is crucial to get beyond the current descent toward catastrophe.

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[1] It was only with the deeper revolution of the Civil War that slavery was abolished, except for prisoners, and full citizenship for Black people was written into the Constitution—reforms that were nullified in practice by the Supreme Court and state and federal legislatures in the post-Reconstruction counterrevolution, restored under the impact of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and slashed again under the Roberts Supreme Court. Trumpism and other white supremacists want to completely erase all those reforms, as well as women’s right to vote.

To be continued in Part 2. Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Gaza, Ukraine: Trump drives for a new fascist world order