The make-up has melted a little more this week on the face of America’s shambolic government.  17 days after the murder of Renée Good, ICE, Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agency set up for the express purpose of deporting all illegal aliens from the country, have claimed another scalp in Minneapolis.  Alex Pretti, a 37 year old nurse, was executed in the street for trying to help a woman they had just violently shoved to the ground.  The irony is that neither Good nor Pretti were immigrants but native-born US citizens.  Nor were they directly involved in any activities relating to illegal immigration.  So what sort of offence were they committing that appears to warrant execution without trial in the street with the sanction of the US government?

 

The mystery deepens when you consider that Minnesota is not exactly, contrary to bluster coming from the Trump administration, a hotbed of immigration.  Only 9% of its population is foreign-born, well below the US average of 14.8% as of 2024.  And while its true that its Democratic government had introduced some relatively liberal laws for immigrants, such as drivers licences and healthcare for all regardless of immigrant status, both of these measures are being rolled back anyway.

 

Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that it is Democratic.  Minnesota voted Blue every year that Trump has stood, and even though Minnesota has a long record of voting Democrat, such details will mean nothing in the face of King Donald’s boundless paranoic lust for vengeance.

 

Perhaps, also, the truth about what ICE is really for is coming to the surface.  While the agency was set up in 2002, its funding enjoyed a massive boost in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill Act.  It now gets more than the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the US Marshals and the Prison Service put together, making it the biggest Enforcement Agency in US history.  They get more money for detention alone than the Federal Prisons service.  And while one result of this is a massive increase of recruitment and ill-trained officers, and there is the usual siphoning of taxpayers’ money to private contractors, since they can’t realistically spend all this money on detaining and deporting illegals, the question remains, what is this massive enforcement agency for.

 

Trump doesn’t really give a shit about immigration.  That is proved by the record of his first term in the White House, when he let in an average of 905,584 immigrants per annum, way more than the average 779,727 per annum allowed in during the Obama presidency.  The truth is that Trump and his acolytes need immigration.  They need it to maintain a surfeit of labour to keep wages and working conditions down.  They need it to keep house prices up and so protect their wealth.  And most of all, they need it as a scapegoat for people’s resentment at the mounting poverty they have to live in.

 

So no-one in America, and perhaps even further afield in its vassal states, should think that ICE poses them no threat as long as they neither are nor look like a foreigner, because Trump’s real hatred and contempt is not for immigrants but for working-class Americans.  We’ve all seen the proof in Minneapolis.

 

If its true purpose, then, is as an enforcement agency with a scope (given Congressional approval last year) for considerable latitude in terms of how they spend their money and what activities they spend it on, it is quite likely to expand beyond its official remit to detaining people anywhere for any reason at the whims of King Donald.  Or even taking no prisoners at all.

 

In such circumstances Americans can, and indeed must, take up arms.  The right to bear arms and form militias for the defence of a state is well-established in the US constitution and has a long history in America, predating the Revolution when they played a critical role in winning the War of Independence against the British, who at the time had the greatest army in the world.  If the British were acting as tyrants then for taxing Americans without representation then the Federal government is acting as a tyrant now for taxing Americans and then using the money to murder them.  Alex Pretti showed more discipline in declining to draw his weapon than the ill-trained thugs drafted into ICE who are showing no such restraint.  But we’ve all seen the result of that restraint in Minneapolis.