Paul Garver reports on the grassroots movements organising anti-ICE actions and the work of the Democratic Socialists of America in the wake of Mamdani’s election
We Americans inhabit two wildly different nations. In one variant, life goes on as before. We cheer for sports teams, drive children to school, shop for food, go to work. Another world of horror, though omnipresent in the news that shows immigrant communities being torn apart by masked armed thugs, seldom impinges on the daily lives of most citizens. In Minneapolis in January, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were abruptly catapulted from that world into the inverted world.
Like tens of thousands of other US citizens acting as legal ICE observers or “verifiers“ across the country, Renée Good dropped her daughter off at school on January 7 before responding to an alert that agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) were raiding the neighborhood where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, triggering the Black Lives Matter protests. Following a confusing instruction from an ICE agent, she attempted to comply by slowly backing her car out of the traffic lane. The ICE agent shot her three times in the face. Within hours of her summary execution, loudspeakers in the MAGA arsenal, including President Trump himself, declared that Renée Good had earned the death sentence. She was accused of using her vehicle to assault the agent, of being a radical antifa, and perhaps even a lesbian. The ICE agent, who was recorded as calling Renée a “fucking bitch”, was not charged with any crime; rather, he rapidly accumulated donations of over $1 million from MAGA supporters. The Department of Justice has focused on investigating the background of Renée and her wife, while state and local authorities have been barred from seeking evidence about the killing. Numerous federal and local legal officials have resigned in protest.
As tens of thousands of Minnesotan citizens took to the streets to call for removing the ICE agents from Minneapolis, Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to suppress the largely peaceful protests with federal troops. His tame Republican-led Congress sent subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, not to ICE.
Trump has long spewed venom on Minnesota, especially on its large Somali community. He has also called for the impeachment and even execution of Minneapolis Congresswoman and Somali immigrant Ilhan Omar, calls which arguably provoked the vinegar attack on her late in January. Trump claims to have won the state of Minnesota and been unfairly deprived of its electoral votes by cheating.
Within a few days, “Abolish ICE” protests were organized in several hundred US cities. Several Minnesota labor unions called for a one-day strike/stayaway on January 23, which was largely successful as between 50 and 100,000 demonstrators braved the sub-zero cold. Support rallies in nearly 100 cities across the USA, often organized by labor federations, supported the Minneapolis strike.
On January 24, Alex Pretti, an ICE nurse and another verifier, was executed in the same neighborhood of Minneapolis by ten shots from Border Patrol agents while recording one of their raids. Across the USA, verifiers have been videoing and recording ICE arrests on their smartphones. In Massachusetts, the immigrant-led LUCE coalition mobilizes some thousand such ICE verifiers in nearly 20 hubs, committed to observing and documenting, not interfering with ICE arrests. For safety reasons, verifiers are US citizens like me. We can all imagine what it would be like to be summarily shot like Good and Pretti for engaging in this totally legal verification.
National polling indicates that a small majority of US citizens support abolishing ICE, rising to 77% of Democrats. However, the official Democratic Party leadership has not been convinced. National Democratic legislators have routinely approved massive increases in spending for hiring more ICE agents and funding more ICE detention camps, which passed the House of Representatives. Following the murder of Alex Pretti, Senate Democrats have another opportunity to block the latest budget bill that includes more increases for ICE. Under pressure from their constituents, many may grow spines. Until recently, more fundamental opposition to cruel anti-immigrant policies was left to democratic socialist elected politicians, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Armed, masked and camouflaged ICE and Border Patrol agents have become the visible face of American fascism, and recruitment propaganda openly stresses militarization, white American nationalism, and other MAGA themes. The rush to recruit agents to carry out Trump’s ambitious deportation quotas has bypassed basic policing training, including de-escalation.
This dramatically sums up the current clash of culture and morality in the USA. I am painfully reminded of the Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler. Trump himself may be too narcissistic and self-referentially undisciplined to achieve a full authoritarian takeover, but within the MAGA camp, the likes of Homeland Security Advisor Steven Miller and Steve Bannon are scheming to do so.
Will the traditional institutional barriers to a collapse of American democracy, political parties, media, legal courts, or universities (many of which are already genuflecting to the Mad King) block Trump’s authoritarian coup? I trust more in the thousands of Renée Goods and Alex Prettis, confronting ICE and rallying across the nation.
Elsewhere, the Greenland crisis is a symptom of the disorder the Mad King is spreading globally. It is hard to do justice to the overweening insanity of Donald Trump. If the kidnapping of Maduro was more about oil than about drugs or democracy, what is Greenland about? Not military security, for which the USA already has full access by agreement with Denmark, not the rare earths, which can be bought through trade, nor the rights of the Inuits. What madness compels Trump to threaten Europe and NATO with no rational purpose? His tweets keep calling Greenland “huge” and claim that he “needs” it for psychological reasons. Could he be dazzled by the Mercator projection of a huge landmass looming over North America? In his delusory speech in Davos, he referred four times to Greenland as Iceland.
We in DSA – Democratic Socialists of America – are helping mobilize the resistance to the Mad King’s designs. We are in touch with democratic socialist parties in Denmark and Greenland for mutual assistance. The rapidly growing DSA chapter in Minneapolis, at the core of the current struggle against ICE, is receiving full political and financial support from DSA. A national call organized for January 21 by the DSA International Committee drew more than 250 participants, building upon a full year of steadily growing immigrant rights and anti-ICE organizing in coalition with immigrant-led groups. Another Abolish ICE call organized by New York City DSA drew 4,000 participants and raised money for Twin Cities DSA and a community organization in Minnesota fighting evictions that further expose immigrants.
Our often-fractious DSA “big tent” is becoming better aligned and less ridden with sectarianism. DSA member Zohran Mamdani becoming the Mayor of New York City has enabled DSA to place itself more firmly at the center of the anti-MAGA movement. His victory is accelerating the rate of democratic socialists running for office at all levels, and could lead to a DSA member like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2028.
But 2028 is far down the road. Although the congressional elections in November 2026 may push MAGA back for a while, the longer-range prognosis for US democracy depends primarily on the grassroots mobilization of the widest possible spectrum of the American population. As organized labor finally begins to join the fray, the chances of success for the resistance are growing.