There are at least two things that can stop a government police force that’s violently out of control. One occurs when it performs its brutality out in the open, where it can be recorded. The second comes when it attacks people with whom the public can empathize.
In Minneapolis last week, ICE did both.
Minneapolis is no stranger to the first of those. When a cop’s protracted murder of George Floyd was recorded and shared with the world, it yielded immediate public outrage.
This past week, ICE upped the ante. Until then, most of ICE’s brutality had been unleashed on immigrants, chiefly Latino—or, at least, people who looked like immigrants or Latinos, or at a minimum, nonwhite. What mattered, at least to some, was that they were attacking people who were “others”—certainly not native-born, visibly white females, or, worse yet, native-born, U.S. citizen, visibly white mothers of small children. Not “there but for the grace of God go I” Americans.
Now, even that line has been crossed.
It takes a lot to turn the public against police agencies. Millions of us know they routinely abuse young Black men under cover of night or behind closed doors, but out of sight can be out of mind. And even when police havoc is recorded for all to see, it may not deliver a gut punch unless we have some connection with whoever is on the receiving end.
But when we do, when the gut punch hits us straight on, it can change things. One of the turning points in the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s came when Birmingham, Alabama’s Sheriff Bull Connor set attack dogs loose on Black schoolchildren who’d come out to join their parents’ and older siblings’ crusade for racial equality—attacks played and replayed on network news. That compelled President Kennedy to go on national television to announce he was sending Congress a civil rights bill that mandated the desegregation of public facilities.
Kennedy didn’t have to wait for polling that documented the public’s revulsion and horror at the attack. It was immediately clear that everyone who watched that footage, white supremacists aside, was stunned and appalled, and that many concluded that any system that had to uphold its rule through means such as those needed to be dismantled, the sooner the better.
I think the recordings we’ve seen of an ICE agent’s murder of Renee Good may have a kindred effect. For months, polls had already been documenting that while there was majority support for President Trump’s effectively closing the border, there was also growing majority opposition to the sweeps that his ICE and Border Patrol agents were conducting. Under pressure from Stephen Miller, they were indiscriminately seizing people with no criminal records, longtime residents, sundering families, communities, careers, ambitions, lives—and with the kind of abusive flourishes that Trump and Miller particularly appreciated.
The administration’s automatic response when its agents arrest, wound, or kill someone is to immediately declare that person a terrorist. But try as they might, try as they have, not even Joseph Goebbels could make Renee Good into a terrorist.
Trump has already been underwater in approval polls for most of the past year. My guess is that Good’s killing will knock a few more points off his approval rating. My guess is that it will swell the numbers at the next No Kings Day. My guess—at least, my hope—is that congressional Democrats will demand the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security permit evidence-gathering by the Minnesota authorities and share the evidence that the feds are currently not willing to reveal. My hope is that Democrats will demand the release of this evidence at least as forcefully—no, more forcefully—as they demanded the release of the Epstein files. My hope is that they will demand ICE’s removal from our cities and fields, and push legislation that, at minimum, limits deportations to those convicted of violent crimes.
As at Birmingham, our thugocracy has outed itself, gone way too far. We cannot let them escape the consequences.