The doomsday scenario former Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats warned about has arrived.
President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on American citizens in Minnesota, which is already under siege by armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are brutalizing citizens in the streets and even killing them in cold blood.
In a Truth Social post, Trump falsely accused Minnesotans—who have been racially profiled and violently beaten by immigration agents—of being paid protesters.
Trump said that if Minnesota's leaders don't "obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State."
Of course, the protesters are not paid.
Here's how one Minneapolis resident put it in an interview with Status Coup News:
I've never protested in my life. ... You know what really pisses me off is the fact that they detain people, cuff ’em, and then still beat the shit out of ’em. They tell you it's immigrants, only immigrants—it's fucking anybody. I have friends that got detained and all they were doing was fucking driving home from work. What the fuck? I'm not fucking paid to be here lik e everybody fucking says. What the fuck is that? I gotta work in the goddamn morning, just like everybody else. I'm just here trying to stand up for community, dude.
In fact, many of the people getting beaten and arrested aren’t even protesters. They were just people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time who filmed the horrifying behavior of agents—as the First Amendment gives them the right to do.
For example, one woman said she was trying to get to a doctor’s appointment when masked ICE agents broke her car window, ripped her from her vehicle, and arrested her as she screamed.
Here's how The Minnesota Star Tribune’s editorial board described what is going on in the city:
Heavily armed and masked government agents are prone to confront any American they encounter in the street but especially people of certain colors, accents or styles of dress. The encounters are often violent. The federal agents operating under the insignia of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security, functioning largely anonymously, have disrupted the life of large swaths of a state.
Deploying the military in an American city already under siege by ICE and other federal immigration agents will do nothing but further inflame a volatile situation.
But that is exactly what Trump wanted all along. He relishes in seeing those who may not have voted for him suffer.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Harris had warned this chaos and violence was what Trump wanted.
"He considers anyone who doesn't support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country," Harris said at an October 2024 rally in Pennsylvania. "This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous."
A few days later, she made that warning again.
“Yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had," Harris said in a speech, referring to a then-recent report in The Atlantic. “He does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution. He was a military that is loyal to him.”
Sadly, it is unlikely Minnesota politicians can stop Trump's invasion. Trump wanted this violence and chaos, and he is probably watching it unfold on cable news with glee as he sips a Diet Coke.
But there is hope for us yet.
While Trump derives pleasure from the horrific images we’re seeing, Americans do not. Polls show ICE’s conduct is overwhelmingly unpopular. A Yahoo News/YouGov survey released on Tuesday shows that 54% of Americans think ICE’s actions have done more harm than good, while just 34% think ICE has done more good than harm. Overall, 54% view the agency unfavorably.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz gave a powerful speech Wednesday night, saying that "[n]ews reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities."
But Walz also tried to give residents hope and an action plan to combat the nightmare that we all knew was coming if Trump ever took office again. He implored residents to record ICE's actions "to bank evidence for future prosecution."
"We will not have to live like this forever. Accountability is coming at the voting booth and in court," Walz said. "We will reclaim our communities from Donald Trump. We will re-establish a sense of safety for our neighbors and we will bring an end to this moment of chaos, confusion and trauma. We will find a way to move forward and we’ll do it together. And we’ll not be alone."
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