The Boss composed, recorded and published a new song this weekend, honoring the victims of the killings in Minneapolis and decrying the lawless violence and harassment rained on that city by various state organizations, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE.

In case you are inclined to belittle ICE as a threat, you are out of touch with your President. His most recent fundraiser explicitly raises dispatching ICE as a threat if you do not send the financial support he desires at the end of the survey.

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While all eyes are on Minnesota, a new round of true ethnic cleansing is pending. Tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who are here under legal protection, will lose that status – by the stroke of the presidential pen – on February 3rd. 1000 ICE personell is slated to arrive on the 4th and begin removal of non-criminal, tax paying, integrated citizens. Brown ones, though.

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It is easy to be captured by the tragic ramifications of the extra-legal killings of individuals, whether bystanders or detainees in camps. They should not detract from our attention, though, to all the other things going on, out of sight in the camps, or in plain view in the courts and the news where administration officials state their demands.

Minneapolis U.S. District Court Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, a Republican, wrote in a new court filing, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” in close to 100 instances and counting. “This list should give pause to anyone — no matter his or her political beliefs — who cares about the rule of law.” (Ref.)

Out of sight, human and civil rights violations are happening for detainees. As just one example, the tent camp in Fort Bliss, Texas, holds over 2000 detainees. Lawsuits by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, are alleging that detained immigrants are subject to beatings and sexual abuse by officers, as well as medical neglect, hunger and insufficient food, and denial of access to attorneys. Several instances of intentional crushing of testicles of young immigrants remind of eugenic practices known from another dark time in history. Female inmates report on rampart human trafficking and sexual abuse. And don’t get me started on the incarceration of infants and small children.

Access to attorneys is affected by strategic transfer of detainees across multiple states with little or no notice. These transfers are disrupting legal cases, delaying hearings, and denying access to attorneys, never mind leaving families without information as to the whereabouts of their loved ones. This increasingly frequent practice, every time a court hearing or some such is imminent, is harming due process and basic legal protections.

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In the aftermath of the killings in Minneapolis, public backlash seemed to impel the Trump administration to change course. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, a top official in Trump’s nationwide immigration enforcement operations, was removed (he’ll continue just in another part of the country.) He was replaced by Border czar Tom Homan (he of the $50.000 bribe in a paperbag). Has anything changed?

Homan, just like Miller, Noem, and the President himself, have spent months telling the militias that they are the victims and can act with impunity. Peaceful protesters, making use of their constitutional rights, are treated as the aggressors. Today, Homan reiterated these sentiments and recited the extortionist and coercive demands in AG Bondis letter – turn over your voter rolls, abandon your state policies, and give us Medicaid data & we’ll end the occupation and terrorization of a state – as the terms for withdrawals. (Ref.)

The intermittent shifts in tone, now rescinded, and replacement of one figure head for another, seemingly less aggressive one, hold the danger of what sociologists call “symbolic compliance.” The institution violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that it stops momentum towards demands for accountability, insisting on meaningful change.

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And this is where the Democrats need to be held to account: this is the moment, during household and spending debates, where they have an opportunity to put the breaks on a continuation of the abuses by ICE and DHS visible to all of us. What is at stake is best laid out by two experts on Totalitarianism. Timothy Snyder explains the political consequences of living with paramilitary forces. (In case you wondered if that term can be justly applied to the goons on hand, read here.)

Masha Gessen describes the psychological consequences of a state using terror, including our attempts to find explanations that would assure us we will never be the victims. An illusion, of course.

“The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.”

Will Democrats find the spine to call for the abolishment of ICE, the impeachment of persons responsible?

One can hope.

Alas, my predictions align more with some random comment in my inbox:

Here is Billy Bragg with City of Heroes.