Coffee Break: Stephen Miller vs ICE Barbie & Corey Is a Distraction

The notion that Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his allies DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, her “special advisor” Corey Lewandowski, and Border Patrol goon Greg Bovino are falling out of favor with POTUS Trump is a delightful distraction from what’s actually happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

So much so that the original post was almost 5000 words long and focused almost entirely on White House intrigue and power jockeying.

Fortunately I came to my senses and realized I needed to focus on the bigger conflict, the contrasting responses of Minnesota citizens and Democratic officials, tech-empowerd ICE agents watching their watchers, and why I think this is not the time and place that will kick off a second American Civil War.

Let’s get into it.

Put Bovino’s Head in the Trophy Case

The apparent fall of Gregory Bovino is a good thing for a variety of important reasons, but let’s not let personalities distract us from systems for more than a few paragraphs.

Even if we’re discussing the man Kristi Noem called the “Border Patrol Commander at Large” in her October, 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Left Attacks the Rule of Law.”

This Gregory Bovino:

Greg Bovino rocking a 2025 Hugo Boss SS collection trench coat pic.twitter.com/frlmoVRGcB

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) October 30, 2025

Fans of MSM hand-waving and obfuscation should check out Politico’s anxious-to-resassure piece “There’s More to Greg Bovino’s Coat Than You Think.”

Bovino didn’t just wear a big coat, he also had his own cadre of special forces within the Border Patrol who have been identified at the center of some of ICE’s worst excesses in Minnesota.

Like many Trumpers who flew too close to the sun enjoyed too much media coverage, Bovino’s time at the top appears to have ended.

The Atlantic was the first to report on Bovino’s transfer:

Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.
Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.
…
For the past seven months, Bovino has been the public face of a traveling immigration crackdown on cities governed by Democrats. Noem and other Trump officials gave Bovino the “commander” title and sent him and his masked border agents to Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and then Minneapolis. Bovino became a MAGA social-media star as he traveled the country with his own film crew and used social media to hit back at Democratic politicians and random critics online. Veteran ICE and CBP officials grew more and more uneasy as Bovino worked outside his agency’s chain of command and appeared to relish his role as a political actor.

In Minneapolis, the Trump administration used Bovino as its lead spokesperson, scheduling daily press conferences where he defended agents’ rough tactics and cast blame on protesters and local officials. Border Patrol commanders typically avoid engaging in political arguments with elected officials.

Students of intrigue should know that the fall of a valued underboss often precedes the fall of the boss.

Kristi Noem Fights for Her Political Life

The ICE Barbie seems to understand this and she’s doing her best to cling tightly to her boss, Stephen Miller.

Per Axios:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to “massacre” them.

But that language was dictated to Noem and her department by the man most responsible for the controversial operation: Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, four sources tell Axios.

The episode illustrates the sheer power of Miller, Trump’s close and longest-serving political adviser whose dominion in the White House far exceeds his title.

His influence extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she’s a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.
…
“Stephen heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” a source briefed on the process of assembling the press statement said.

Daily Beast had more, including a description of “the alleged extramarital affair between Lewandowski and Noem as the ‘worst-kept secret’ in D.C. ” and a discussion of Lewandowski’s unusual employment arrangement “as an unpaid special government employee who can only work 130 days in a calendar year.”

More importantly the piece claimed that Bovino’s demotion “fueled speculation that Noem and Lewandowski could be next on the chopping block” and blamed Lewandowski for the elevation of Bovino.

And most importantly that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller have “turned against” Noem and Lewandowski, “with Miller furious that Bovino’s tactics have become the focus of the national conversation.”

But it’s not just ICE Barbie and her boytoy Corey that seem to be out of favor with POTUS trump, based on White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s Monday comments per the New Republic.

Leavitt was careful to distinguish Trump’s desire to “let the investigation continue and let the facts lead in this case” with Miller’s feverish claims on X that
“A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”

This was a bit of a switch in direction for the administration as Miller’s tweet had been reposted by official administration accounts, including @TrumpWarRoom and @RapidResponse47.

Miller has now switched his messaging and is blaming his subordinates, via CNN:

In a statement to CNN, Miller said the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he said.

Daily Beast had more White House intrigue in another post, citing an anonymous source who claimed that “Bovino is Corey’s guy” and another who said “the elevation of Bovino and Border Patrol over ICE was “a miscalculation on Lewandowski’s part.”

That same piece said that Stephen Miller “now views Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino as a ‘liability.'”

But they can also see things from Stephen Miller’s perspective:

The administration finds itself in a bind, though, because its senior officials believe Noem is incapable of running DHS without Lewandowski at her side—and that unwinding the whole trio risks making Trump look like he is retreating, which immigration hardliner Miller is keen to avoid.

The piece also claims that Noem and Lewandowski had planned to step aside until the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota “threw everything into the air.”

That claim that Noem was on her way out is somewhat contradicted by the January 21 piece in the Washington Examiner which reported that Noem and Lewandowski had been doing the intriguing, having “waged an aggressive campaign to make U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott so uncomfortable at work that he would resign.”

Trump Holds a Sit Down With Kristi and Corey

The NYT covered the meeting between Trump, Noem, and Lewandowski based on two anonymous sources who were “briefed on the meeting.”

The Oval Office meeting also included several of Mr. Trump’s top aides, including Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, and Steven Cheung, his communications director. Stephen Miller, a top aide to Mr. Trump who oversees the administration’s immigration strategy, was not part of the meeting.
…
The meeting came the same day Mr. Trump announced he was sending Tom Homan, his border czar, to oversee the operation in Minneapolis. The move was seen as a way to elevate an official who is steeped in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s longstanding practice of prioritizing targeted arrests, rather than the kinds of sweeping raids that the Trump administration has carried out in cities across the country.

The Wall Street Journal had more on the Trump admin dynamics:

Noem and her top adviser Corey Lewandowski, have pushed for missions that include roving patrols doing street sweeps in large liberal cities. Homan and others have favored a more methodical but slower approach to go after immigrants with criminal histories or final deportation orders, according to people familiar with the matter.

…Trump fielded calls from anxious Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina…

But Trump worried that his administration’s enforcement activities in Minnesota looked chaotic, not strong, according to people familiar with the matter. His concerns only grew as cable news commentators picked apart comments made by his top immigration officials, with even some of his allies noting on television that their words weren’t supported by the video footage.

Ah, it’s the old “Audience of One” theory of Trump in action once again.

And while we’re talking theory, I have been meaning to share some of the theories of Stephen Miller with NC readers and this is as good a time as I’ll get.

The Dark Vision of Stephen Miller

Greg Sargent had an epic Miller profile in The New Republic in December:

Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measures—which created the contemporary refugee and asylum system—drew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades.

Miller is, at bottom, trying to eradicate that set of obligations and values—to undo that larger consensus. To grasp this, you need to look at all the small things Miller is doing, which, taken together, all add up to one very big thing.

Take the administration’s handling of white South Africans. Officials recently announced that they will accept only 7,500 refugees this fiscal year—a dramatic reduction from 125,000 under President Joe Biden—and, critically, it reserved a majority of those slots for white Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers.
…
Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
…
At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.

The American Prospect warns of what Miller is hoping to achieve in Minnesota:

ICE and CBP goons look like occupying soldiers—particularly CBP, who have a frankly fetishistic level of “operator” cosplay going on—but from a military standpoint, the way they are behaving is both stupid and dangerous. There are two basic ways to approach a situation like this. Counterinsurgency theory (whatever its merits in practice) emphasizes that occupying troops should go out of their way to build trust among civilians, so civilians will not aid guerrillas. The opposite approach—call it Genghis Khan theory—says that if a city defies your rule, you burn it to the ground and kill everyone inside.

What ICE and CBP are doing is a mixture of the two, virtually calculated to put their own officers in maximum danger. We have a bunch of swaggering, violent goons, armed to the teeth, regularly kidnapping, beating, injuring, and now and then murdering innocent civilians—but there are not remotely enough of these thugs to actually win a pitched battle with an entire city, should it come to that. All the while they are roaming around in plain sight in small groups, routinely surrounded by residents. They are inflaming white-hot hatred while behaving in a way that would have gotten you killed in about five seconds during the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working feverishly to prevent the perpetrators from facing any punishment whatsoever. Good’s murderer, Ross, is in hiding, and whoever it was that killed Pretti wasn’t even taken off duty. The administration is signaling that the only way there will be any punishment for what happened is if someone takes the law into their own hands.
…
I think the Trump administration—and particularly Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy, who bears a marked resemblance to Reinhard Heydrich—knows all this perfectly well. They are intentionally sending in their paramilitary goons to create chaos, manufacture a few martyrs, and ideally touch off a riot, to provide an excuse for further violent escalation: Invoking the Insurrection Act, attempting to federalize the National Guard, and eventually moving up to a coup. This isn’t even the first time the far right has attempted to create Horst Wessel 2.0. They attempted it with Charlie Kirk, though in that case it seems to have backfired.

Alright, now that we’ve flipped those rocks over and looked at the scorpions and centipedes wriggling around in the mind of Stephen Miller, we need to talk about Border Czar Tom Homan.

The Man Who Is ‘Really Good at Deporting People’

Old school haters will remember Homan as one of POTUS Obama’s 2015 Presidential Rank Award winners for “distinguished service”, or as The Washington Post reported at the time “honored for deporting illegal immigrants.”

Despite his resume, or perhaps because of it, ICE Barbie doesn’t like Homan as Axios reported in December:

“Kristi’s doing a great job,” Trump, unprompted, recently told an adviser who relayed the conversation to Axios.

“Her and Tom don’t get along,” the president chuckled, the source said. “But they’re doing great.”

The adviser said Trump doesn’t mind the conflict: “Trump is like that. He kind of likes people competing against each other. He thinks it makes the product better.”
…
Supporters of both officials accuse the other of contracting irregularities, which each side denies. Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has more than $170 billion from Congress to spend on catching, detaining and deporting what the White House hopes will be millions of unauthorized immigrants.
…
“Tom expected to have more operational control of day to day, and especially on contracts,” one agency official said.

“It’s disappointing that he chooses to go after Secretary Noem when he is unhappy that he does not have ‘The Tom Homan Show’ to be a part of.”

The removal of Bovino and elevation of the award-winning Deep Stater Homan has at least one Democratic elected official hopeful.

Tim Walz Marks Out Over Homan

Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is excited about the switch from Bongino to Homan:

TIM WALZ: “I don’t agree with Tom Homan’s philosophy on things, but I do understand that he is law enforcement and he understands right and wrong.” pic.twitter.com/G4GdovWpm2

— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) January 28, 2026

Not everyone is quite as impressed with Homan, or Walz’ faith in his expertise and good intentions.

Popular podcaster Kyle Kulinski tweeted to his over half-million followers, “I’ve defended Tim Walz a lot in the past – he did stuff like 12 weeks paid family & sick leave, free school meals, legal weed, free college – but this crop of dems is just so naive and pollyannaish it’s embarrassing. This sounds like someone who falls for a Nigerian prince email scam.”

Perhaps Kulinski is aware of Homan’s previous public sattements, like this one, from last February in which he vowed “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.”

NBC had more gems from Homan from his CPAC speech including this love poem to his teammates in Trump 2.0:

“And to sanctuary cities, game on, because Pam Bondi is back in the place, and Kash Patel is back running the FBI,” Homan added, referring to Trump’s Justice Department appointees. “I’m afraid I’ll have a heart attack one of these days, because it just keeps getting better.”

Maybe that’s why some observers are skeptical that Democratic electeds like Walz and the various repositories of the state monopoly on violence nominally under his control will actually do anything material to oppose Stephen Miller and ICE.

Which is kinda sorta a good thing, insofar as it reduces the chances of a second American Civil War kicking off right away.

Civil War Requires Intra-Elite Conflict

I’m basing that on a recent Guardian article titled “We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start” which is based on the findings of an “October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL).”

Relevant bits:

In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.

…in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved.
…
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders.
…
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.

Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.

This analysis checks out as far as I can tell, except for one giant factor the analysts miss: Democratic officials are highly unlikely to order the military and law enforcement units nominally under their control to resist the forces of the federal government.

For an example of what is happening in real life, see this this recent incident which might single-handedly refute the claims of The Guardian’s scholars of civil conflict.

Just hours after reports emerged that CBP commander Greg Bovino would be leaving Minnesota imminently, anti-ICE activists, along with other members of the community, gathered outside Bovino’s hotel.

Several law enforcement agencies, including Minnesota State Troopers, county… pic.twitter.com/0pxTnMmbLz

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) January 27, 2026

Streamer Hasan Piker has outlined the likely scenario to his over 1 million followers on X:

its looking like the local & state administrators might have folded and will let ice continue to operate in minneapolis WITH local law enforcement protection in exchange for some fake promises that there will be a real investigation into the two murders & a “scaleback” https://t.co/91pBQVX7Au

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) January 27, 2026

And it’s not just Minnesota cops who are prioritizing protecting federal forces from the people they are notionally sworn to protect.

Even Mayor Mamdani is doing it in New York City:

Manhattan, New York, Tuesday Evening: The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested dozens of protesters on Tuesday evening at an anti-ICE protest inside a Manhattan hotel, marking the first mass arrest under the new administration of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani.… https://t.co/f9nuDIsaF8 pic.twitter.com/H6vwc9sajz

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) January 28, 2026

So if they’re not deploying their police and national guard forces to protect their voters from Stephen Miller and his goons, what are Democrats doing?

Democrats Up to Their Usual Misdirection

The misleadership class of the US House of Representatives is working hard to personalize the issue, like they do with Netayahu in Isreal, focusing on personnel rather than policy, via The NYT:

The top three House Democrats on Tuesday came out in support of an effort to impeach Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, part of a growing chorus in the party calling for Ms. Noem’s ouster…

In a joint statement, Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California called for “dramatic changes” at the Homeland Security Department and accused officials of carrying out a violent “killing spree.”

“Kristi Noem should be fired immediately, or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives,” they wrote. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

More than 150 congressional Democrats have now joined the bid to impeach Ms. Noem. The effort would need Republican support to move forward, and, so far, no G.O.P. lawmaker has called for the secretary’s removal.
…
So far, 162 House Democrats — about three-quarters of the total caucus — have backed a resolution to impeach Ms. Noem, according to a spokeswoman for Representative Robin Kelly, who introduced the resolution earlier this month. That is 51 more than had signed on as cosponsors to Ms. Kelly’s measure as of Friday, the last day the House met for legislative business and the day before Mr. Pretti was killed.

Mr. Jeffries, Ms. Clark and Mr. Aguilar have yet to sign on as co-sponsors.

Greg Sargent reports on what Senate Dems are thinking:

Dems coalescing around 5 restrictions on ICE, I’m told:

DHS must cooperate with state probes (big)
CBP stays at border
warrants for arrests
IDs, bodycams
ICE out of churches, schools

“That unites a lot of Dems,” Sen Chris Murphy tells me on the pod:https://t.co/Y86u6FQZyH

— . (@GregTSargent) January 27, 2026

Legal scholar Nate Holdren calls Senate Dems on their kayfabe, saying, “Fig leaf bullshit. These aren’t restrictions in any important sense, they’re mostly making border enforcement more orderly and less disruptive, ie, more politically palatable. Trump’s awfulness has de-normalized violence against immigrants. Dems are trying to re-normalize it.”

Ken Klippenstein warns that, “What we need is a systemic change to DHS and its policies. Politicians are trying to get you to focus on personalities like Noem and Miller so you don’t touch their institutional equities. Don’t fall for it.”

And he reminds us that the Homan for Bovino swap is pretty immaterial:

Federal deployment to Minneapolis “is steady state and expected to continue as planned,” per Border Patrol memo leaked to me pic.twitter.com/HiigN9xmmX

— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) January 27, 2026

Interested readers should also check out Klippenstein’s Substack post in which numerous ICE and DHS officials leak their frustration with what’s happening in Minnesota under Stephen Miller.

Rep. Omar Has a Scare

Meanwhile, Minnesota Congressional Rep. Ilhan Omar had a scare last night, which Mark Ames ominously called a “test run”:

NEW — Rep. Ilhan Omar was just charged by a man at a town hall event in Minneapolis. Crowd says he “sprayed her” with something.

You can hear Omar demand to continue the town hall — and she’s back to speaking now from the podium. pic.twitter.com/4OpSWHo0Z9

— Jay O’Brien (@jayobtv) January 28, 2026

Nah, this angle is even CRAZIER omfg 😭 pic.twitter.com/t0OYB85aQW

— devilette (@deviIette) January 28, 2026

It’s certainly easy to see why Democratic electeds are wary of kicking off a full-on intra-elite conflict and finding out if they can actually count on the support of the forces nominally under their command.

Fortunately, a constituency is more than just its elected officials.

Emergant Networks of Resistance

Jacobin reports on the resistance put up by the people of Minneapolis:

The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.

One organizer tells them:

…it’s also the most organized community I’ve ever experienced anywhere. We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level — and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people — which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.

Not bad for essentially improvised organizing, what are the pre-existing organizations up to?

Unions Beginning to Flex

While the AFGE (The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is focusing their ire on Noem and Miller, calling for their immediate resignation or dismissal, other unions are working on a more ambitious agenda.

Via The American Prospect:

Over the weekend, workers across sectors met throughout the country to determine their next steps, including striking again for a day, holding an indefinite strike, and building toward a general strike. In 2023, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain called on unions everywhere to set their contracts to end on May 1, 2028, so that workers across industries could go on strike that day legally. Union contracts often include a no-strike clause that forbids workers from going on strike, forcing workers to strike only after their contract expires. (Workers may also undertake a wildcat strike, which federal law holds is illegal.)

But that’s not soon enough, workers say.

“Clearly, we cannot wait until 2028,” said Emily Woo Yamasaki, a member of the UAW Local 2320, Legal Services Staff Association, and an organizer with the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), speaking on Saturday night at an FSP forum in New York City. “A general strike can’t be built overnight,” they said, “but it is more urgent than ever” for organized labor to talk about it.

Dan Troccoli, labor branch co-chair of Twin Cities DSA and member leader in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, was another labor leader who met to discuss escalation with a range of other union members this weekend. The most likely next action is a one-day strike, he said, which will help build strength and labor discipline toward bigger actions.

Some pundits have additional ideas.

Alternate Ideas

A modest proposal from David Sirota:

Senate Democrats are right now formulating a list of conditions they say must be fulfilled for them to consider providing votes to provide more funding to ICE. One of those items could be Democratic legislation that is already written and introduced in Congress — a bill to end qualified immunity for ICE agents, so that communities can hold those agents legally accountable when they murder people.

Days after ICE killed Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News declaring: To all ICE officers: “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
…
Reuters points out that under existing legal doctrines, “Federal officers are immune from civil lawsuits unless their conduct clearly violated a clearly established constitutional right. This legal standard, known as qualified immunity, has become a highly effective tool for shielding police officers accused of using excessive force.”

But simple, two-page legislation introduced in Congress would change that. This bill has been just sitting there in the U.S. House for months. After the killing of Good, some senators and House members who have long criticized qualified immunity for law enforcement have thankfully resurfaced the idea in the debate over ICE — and now they appear to have leverage to actually do something.

Ian Welsh writes:

The silver lining here, the hope, is that Minnessotans have come together to resist this. Thousands of people, not just protesting, but feeding those who can’t leave their houses, helping legally, and putting their bodies on the line. There are good people left in the US, but what they need to recognize is that fixing this requires replacing almost every member of the current elite: Walz has failed, Congress has failed, business has mostly been supine to trump as have universities. Everyone who’s in a position of power, whose duty and responsibility it is to resist has either failed or not even tried.

What needs to be done is to note the ones who tried or resigned rather than engage in illegality and immorality. Go after everyone else, replace them and if they actively engaged in evil, convict them and send them to prison. Put the people who did resist back in, not just politicians but prosecutors and judges and city councillors and so on, and then fill the rest of the ranks with people who went out on the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and put their bodies in the way of evil, or who otherwise meaningfully resisted.

These are the people who proved themselves. When the brownshirts came, they are the ones who stood up. We now know who is actually moral, who is actually brave and who can actually be trusted when the chips down. This is the new leadership cadre, if Americans are wise.

I’ve already gone on way too long and didn’t even get to the way the FBI is targeting the Minnesotans who are resisting ICE, how feds are showing up at the homes of protestors in Minnesota and Maine, the possibility that ICE targeted some of its victims in advance (possibly including Alex Pretti), the fact that the GOP Freedom Caucus is vowing to resist any funding cuts to DHS and ICE, or the connections between the Charlottesville Proud Boys, the Jan 6 rioters, and today’s ICE.

It’s overwhelming, y’all. Stay safe everyone.