In the week following the January 7 murder of Renée Nicole Good by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Minneapolis has been placed under occupation by thousands of federal paramilitary forces operating under the direction of the president.
The situation was starkly outlined in an extraordinary address on statewide television Wednesday night by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz condemned what he called “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
The Democratic governor and 2024 vice presidential nominee gave the following account of conditions in the state:
News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities. Two to three thousand armed agents of the federal government have been deployed to Minnesota.
Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live. They’re pulling over people indiscriminately, including US citizens, and demanding to see their papers.
And at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at schools, they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.
Walz noted the resignation of a half dozen career prosecutors at the US Attorney’s office in Minneapolis, because the Department of Justice designated Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renée Good, as the victim, and proposed to investigate Becca Good, Renée’s wife, for alleged ties to anti-government groups.
And he cited Trump’s declaration on social media that for Minnesota “the day of retribution and reckoning is coming.” Walz called this “a direct threat against the people of this state, who dared to vote against him three times, and who continue to stand up for freedom …”
What Walz is outlining is the emergence of a presidential dictatorship and not just in Minnesota. Trump has already said that there is no constraint on his ordering US military operations overseas but his own dubious “morality.” He clearly has no use for the U.S. Constitution either. The flooding of Minnesota with federal officers could well be followed by invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying the National Guard and regular military forces in cities throughout the country.
Far from pulling back after the murder of Renée Good, the Trump administration has drastically intensified its violent rampage. The scale of the assault is staggering: The nearly 3,000 federal officers are double the manpower of the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments combined.
One ICE atrocity has followed another. On Wednesday night, a federal officer shot a man in the leg during a confrontation in which DHS claims the individual attempted to flee arrest and later struck an officer with a “shovel” or “broom handle.”
A local pastor was detained and threatened at gunpoint by ICE, only to be released with the comment, “You’re white and you wouldn’t be any fun anyway.” In Richfield, Minnesota, two Target workers—both US citizens—were slammed to the pavement, detained in an unmarked SUV, and later released facing federal charges of assaulting an officer.
An immigrant from Honduras, Mauricio Henríquez Serrano, was dragged from his car unconscious as bystanders screamed in horror. He is now reportedly imprisoned in a Texas detention center. On Tuesday, just two blocks from where Good was killed, armed and masked ICE agents smashed through a disabled woman’s car window, sliced her seat belt and dragged her from the vehicle, ignoring her screams that she was autistic and trying to go to the doctor.
There are several reports of ICE agents citing the murder of Good as a threat when confronting protests. “Have you not learned from the past couple days?” one agent told a resident who was filming him.
And it is not just Minnesota. On January 9, in Santa Ana, California, 21-year-old Kaden Rummler was blinded and nearly killed by a “less lethal” round fired by a DHS officer, an assault that left Rummler hospitalized with shrapnel still in his body.
There is a glaring contradiction in Walz’s address. He describes a state of occupation by paramilitary forces sent by the Trump administration. But his proposed remedy is that the people of Minnesota avoid provoking Trump in their protests and wait for “accountability,” which he claimed would come “at the voting booth and in court.”
First of all, the ICE violence that took the life of Renée Nicole Good was not provoked by her or anyone else protesting in defense of immigrants. It was intended and deliberately encouraged by Trump and his fascist cabal. Their response to the murder of Good was to denounce her as a “domestic terrorist” and “paid agitator,” while Vice President JD Vance claimed that ICE agents had “absolute immunity.” Trump’s top fascist aide, Stephen Miller, sent a message to all ICE officers that “no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
As for lawsuits, a regime that is operating out of complete lawlessness will not recognize the courts, and it has no intention of losing elections. Trump has already begun hinting that elections should not even be held in 2026, and if they take place, they may well be held at gunpoint, with military occupation of selected cities.
The force that can and must be brought to bear against Trump’s drive to dictatorship is the working class. It produces all of society’s wealth and holds the potential to shut down the machinery of repression and exploitation.
The only serious and effective response to Trump’s attack on Minnesota is the organization of a general strike by the entire working class, both in Minnesota and nationwide. The organized industrial action of the working class can paralyze the operations of ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the repressive agencies that Trump is deploying against immigrant workers and, sooner rather than later, against the working class as a whole.
Airline workers can block the transportation of federal agents into the Twin Cities. Logistics workers can cut off their supply chains. Hotel workers can deny them lodging—as one suburban hotel did last week, setting off a right-wing panic.
There is growing hostility among working people and the American population as a whole to the violent thuggery of ICE and the Trump administration. Recent polls show a sharp shift, with more Americans favoring the abolition of ICE than opposing it, and a clear majority supporting the prosecution of ICE agent Jonathan Ross for the killing of Renée Good.
Workers in Minnesota itself have a history of political struggle against state repression and violence. It was in Minnesota that truck drivers, under the leadership of the Trotskyist movement, carried out a successful general strike in 1934 that defeated the combined repressive forces of the local police and the Citizens Alliance, the mouthpiece for big business in the Twin Cities.
The events of the past week mark a new stage in the Trump administration’s conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship. Over the past year, as this conspiracy has unfolded step by step, the Democratic Party has done absolutely nothing to stop it. As a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, it is far more terrified of the emergence of a mass movement of the working class than it is of dictatorship. Such a movement would not stop with Trump but threaten the entire capitalist system.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school, and neighborhood. These committees, independent of the corporatist trade union apparatus, must become centers of resistance to the Trump dictatorship.
These committees must rally workers across all industries—healthcare, education, transit, logistics, manufacturing and beyond—into a unified counteroffensive against the Trump administration and the capitalist oligarchy it serves. They must demand the arrest and prosecution of Renée Nicole Good’s killers; the immediate withdrawal of ICE, CBP and DHS forces from Minneapolis and every other city; the abolition of these paramilitary agencies; and the release of all detainees.
The fight to stop dictatorship must be linked to the fight against the capitalist system itself. The massive fortunes accumulated by the ruling class must be expropriated, the major corporations and banks transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working class, and social resources redirected to meet human need, not private profit. The SEP advances this program as the basis for the political mobilization of the working class to put an end to fascism through the fight for socialism.