"We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start"--The Guardian

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The following op-ed from Tuesday’s Guardian is by Claire Finkelstein, a distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.​

Last weekend I argued here that the United States is no longer merely “at risk” of authoritarianism, as major scholars writing in Foreign Affairs now concede, but that we have entered what Barbara Walter would call the pre‑insurgency phase of civil war, with Minnesota as a decisive test of what comes next. The current operation there is not just another crackdown; it is a trial run, a template for how similar campaigns could unfold in other cities unless there is meaningful pushback.

One obvious form of such pushback did not materialize last night. In a House vote, all but one Republican supported pouring billions more into the DHS/ICE apparatus now targeting residents, citizens, protesters, and migrants with near impunity—disappearing people by the tens of thousands into a rotating archipelago of detention sites that effectively nullify habeas corpus. Seven Democrats joined them, a sobering reminder that there is still no unified opposition party willing to draw a clear line against this machinery.

We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start

Claire Finkelstein

Developments in Minnesota closely mirror a scenario explored in a 2024 exercise conducted at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, which I direct

Since 6 January, roughly 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minnesota under the pretext of responding to a fraud investigation. In practice, these largely untrained and undisciplined federal agents have been terrorizing Minneapolis residents through illegal and excessive uses of force – often against US citizens – prompting a federal judge to attempt to place limits on the agency’s actions. The Trump administration is encouraging the lawlessness by announcing “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. But if the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, does not heed the court ruling, the consequences may be nothing short of civil war.

In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status.

Rather than investigate this conduct and the officer who shot Renee Good, the justice department has opened a criminal investigation into the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, accusing them of conspiring to impede federal agents. Renee Good’s widow is also under investigation, a move that prompted six US attorneys in Minnesota to resign in protest.

As public outrage grows, ICE has escalated its actions, increasingly engaging in what appear to be random acts of violence regardless of immigration status. Governor Walz has placed the Minnesota national guard on standby to support local law enforcement, while Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act – an extraordinary move that would grant him sweeping domestic military powers and potentially sidestep recent supreme court limits on the use of federal troops in law enforcement. One thousand additional ICE agents have been sent to Minnesota, suggesting that Trump is essentially using ICE as a specialized paramilitary force to target protesters and suppress dissent. And the Pentagon has readied the army’s 11th Airborne Division – roughly 1,500 active-duty soldiers – to back up the president’s threat.

This scenario closely mirrors one explored in an October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), which I direct, at the University of Pennsylvania. In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.

While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation. First, none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.

Second, we concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved. This is why Judge Menendez’s ruling is so critical: it may be the last opportunity a federal judge has to intervene before matters spiral completely out of control.

Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders. Any domestic deployment of federal troops must comply with the Department of Defense’s Rules for the Use of Force and with the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops may not lawfully shoot protesters unless they are literally defending their lives against an imminent threat – yet such conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.

Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.

Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.

That obligation is now under pressure. Senator Mark Kelly is under investigation by the Pentagon for publicly reminding service members in a video he made with five other members of Congress that they may – and in some cases must – refuse illegal orders. But they were essentially correct: troops must refuse to carry out patently illegal orders.

For members of the 11th Airborne Division, this may soon cease to be a theoretical question. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.

• Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center

   

  The following NYT Op‑Docs video, released two months ago, remains one of the clearest short overviews of what DHS is doing with public money behind the scenes: an expanding network of long‑term detention sites where due process is systematically undermined. The vast majority of those held have no criminal convictions. In the weeks since the film appeared, the population has increasingly come to include lawful residents and even citizens swept up in mass operations and effectively disappeared into this rotating system of confinement. 

  
  

Regarding the Trump kleptocracy

The editorial board of the NYT published an opinion piece about how much money Trump is estimated to have made from being president. The opinion is entitled How Trump Has Pocketed $1,408,500,000. The NYT opines (not paywalled):

He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

The Trumps and their business partners have disputed some of these estimates, but we find the estimates to be more credible than the Trumps’ claims.

Trump's crypto scheme is the favored

way of bribing to get favors worth

a lot more than what donors paid

When I refer to MAGA's kleptocracy, this is an example of what I mean. 

How presidential power is being stretched into a dictatorship

A NYT article (not paywalled) lays out what Trump is doing to normalize his MAGA dictatorship. The images summarize the article's content. 

When Even Foreign Affairs Says the U.S. Is Authoritarian: Regime Change

This is a long essay in which I pull together many of the real-time blog pieces I've written here and elsewhere over the past year. Drawing on recent expert statements—statements that, as stark as they are, do not go far enough—I reach a definite conclusion: we are now both (a) in a civil war and (b) living under an authoritarian state.

I am not alone in saying either: leading scholars and foreign-policy analysts have recently made both claims. My own contribution, if such it is, is to argue that we are much further along—and possibly beyond the point of peaceful democratic restoration—than even these assessments suggest.​

It's a long read. I ask those of you who have followed my chronicling of our years-long decline from liberal democracy to indulge me. This essay focuses especially on the past five months, during which that decline has crossed into consolidation. I hope it helps readers piece together what may seem like separate, even isolated events occurring at whiplash speed, and to see the patterns and connections that reveal an authoritarian regime now gripping the levers of power and law in the United States, 2026.​

Thank you for reading.

 

When Even Foreign Affairs Says the U.S. Is Authoritarian: The Architecture of Regime Change

In December 2025, Foreign Affairs published an article by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt titled "The Price of American Authoritarianism," arguing that the United States is now an authoritarian country, not a functioning democracy, and that whether it remains so depends on how institutions and citizens respond in the coming months and years. This is a striking development. Foreign Affairs is arguably the most influential foreign-policy magazine in the United States, long a venue where the foreign-policy establishment talks to itself, from George Kennan's anonymous "X Article" in 1947 to Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" in 1993, and contributions by figures such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin Powell, David Petraeus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stanley McChrystal, and Henry Kissinger.

That three of the most prominent scholars of democratic backsliding—the authors of How Democracies Die—now say, in this flagship establishment journal, that the U.S. is already an authoritarian regime, not a functioning democracy, marks an important threshold. Whether this condition can be reversed, they argue, depends on how citizens and institutions now respond. Yet this conclusion has barely pierced mainstream coverage, which still tends to describe Trump's second term as unusually hard-edged populism rather than a completed regime change.

Days after Levitsky's article appeared, political scientist Barbara F. Walter—who worked on the CIA's Political Instability Task Force studying civil wars and served on the advisory board analyzing insurgency risks—published a January 14, 2026 essay titled "Stop Waiting for the Midterms to Save Us." Walter argues that the United States is not merely trending toward competitive authoritarianism but is already in the most dangerous phase: the 6-12 months before a potentially unfavorable election, when autocrats move most aggressively to rig the system, weaponize state power, and sabotage institutions so that even if they lose seats, they retain control. She warns that while Americans wait for November 2026 to "save us," Trump's team is working to ensure those elections cannot hurt them—through loyalist appointments to election offices, preemptive fraud narratives, and institutional changes designed to be irreversible.

The first weeks of 2026 have thrown this system into stark relief: an ICE agent killing a U.S. citizen on camera with video evidence contradicting official accounts; Special Operations forces abducting Venezuela's president; a single executive order withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international organizations and climate/IHL regimes; open threats to "own" Greenland despite Danish warnings that would mean the end of NATO; systematic use of lethal force by immigration agents resulting in at least 25 shootings and six deaths with zero criminal prosecutions; and a New York Times interview in which Trump declares that the only limit on his global powers is "my own morality. My own mind." The question is no longer whether the United States is drifting toward authoritarianism. The question is whether we are willing to see—and name—the regime we already live under, and the bipartisan paths that brought us here.

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1. The Silent Judicial Coup

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt reassure readers that, unlike in Hungary or Turkey, "courts in the U.S. remain robust and independent." That may have been true in 2017. It is not true in 2026. In 2025, a little-noticed Supreme Court decision—Trump v. CASA—quietly rewrote how federal courts can respond when a president breaks the law.

Before CASA, if a district judge concluded that a federal policy was unconstitutional, they could often issue a nationwide (universal) injunction: a temporary order stopping the government from enforcing that policy against anyone while the case moved up on appeal. The administration attacked these orders as "judicial overreach" and argued that lower-court judges should only be allowed to block a contested policy as to the specific people who had sued. In Trump v. CASA (2025), they got their wish. In a 6-3 emergency ruling on the Court's "shadow docket"—without full briefing or oral argument, via an unsigned order with Justice Barrett providing the rationale over a sharp dissent by Justice Sotomayor—the Court held that universal injunctions exceed the constitutional power of lower federal courts. From then on, district judges could no longer halt a policy nationwide; they could offer relief only to named plaintiffs or to members of a carefully certified class.

In plain terms: if a president announces an unconstitutional mass-deportation or surveillance program today, a judge can still help the people who manage to sue—but can no longer simply hit a "pause button" for everyone else while the case is litigated.

L.G.M.L. v. Noem shows what this looks like in practice. In August 2025, advocates discovered that the administration planned to put at least 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children on planes over Labor Day weekend and send them to Guatemala, without giving them the hearings and protections Congress guaranteed them under federal law. Lawyers scrambled: they filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night, just hours before the first flights. At 4:22 a.m., the federal judge on duty, Sparkle Sooknanan, issued an emergency order stopping the government from deporting the ten children named in the case.

Later that day, after an urgent hearing, Judge Sooknanan expanded her order. She said the government also had to pause removals for a larger class of children: unaccompanied Guatemalan kids in federal custody who did not yet have final deportation orders. On September 18, she turned that temporary order into a preliminary injunction, finding that the administration's supposed "reunification" plan likely violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by simply ignoring the process Congress had laid out for unaccompanied minors.

The ruling mattered enormously for those children. Some were literally taken off planes and brought back into federal custody because of it. But notice what it did not do. It did not stop the administration from trying similar mass removals for children from Honduras, El Salvador, or elsewhere. It did not protect Guatemalan children who were not yet in the specific kind of custody covered by the order, or who entered the system after the class was defined. Under the post-CASA rules, the judge could not simply say: "This kind of secret weekend airlift is illegal for any unaccompanied child, so you must stop doing it, full stop."

Even at its best, then, the case functioned as emergency triage for a specific, defined group at a specific moment, not as a broad brake on executive behavior held to violate the constitution. That is now the norm. CASA and the shadow docket have turned federal courts from institutions that could once stop a lawless program in its tracks into institutions that can only carve out narrow pockets of safety for those lucky enough to reach them in time. A judiciary that can no longer issue broad, promptly enforceable injunctions is not the robust bulwark Levitsky's comparative story presupposes.

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2. Gaza, NAS, and Bipartisan Authoritarian Machinery

Biden's Complicity: Gaza and the Authoritarian Blueprint at Home

Even as early warnings of genocide emerged in late 2023 and early 2024—including the ICJ's January 2024 provisional measures finding it "plausible" that Israel's acts could constitute genocide—U.S. policy under Biden did not change. Instead, Biden doubled down, and in doing so constructed both the material support for genocide abroad and the legal and rhetorical machinery for authoritarian repression at home.

The majority of civilian deaths in Gaza occurred under Biden's watch. Washington continued large-scale arms transfers and diplomatic cover, with Biden vetoing ceasefire and accountability resolutions at the UN Security Council and pressuring the International Criminal Court.

Biden's rhetoric and policy choices directly enabled the violence:

• He repeated debunked atrocity propaganda, including claims of "beheaded babies" from October 7, which Israeli officials later retracted but which Biden never corrected.

• He backed Israel's claim that hospitals had to be bombed due to "Hamas tunnels," a justification that has since been thoroughly debunked.

• He defunded and worked to dismantle UNRWA based on contested and largely unsubstantiated allegations of "Hamas infiltration," despite the agency being the primary humanitarian lifeline for Gaza.

• He publicly cast doubt on Palestinian death tolls, stating "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed"—dismissing figures that independent analysts and international organizations have repeatedly validated.

• Neither Biden nor Vice President Harris allowed Palestinian Americans to speak at any campaign events, a decision that contributed to Trump's ability to visit Dearborn and be received with naive optimism by traumatized Palestinian voters, some of whom supported him in the 2024 election.

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant in late 2024; the Biden administration rejected the Court's jurisdiction and worked to shield Israeli officials from accountability.

NAS, Title VI, and Biden's Authoritarian Blueprint

But Biden's most consequential contribution to the current authoritarian moment was not only his material support for Israel's campaign—it was his construction of the domestic repression machinery Trump now wields. This is the "boomerang effect" that Walter and Levitsky miss: the war-on-terror and "New Antisemitism" (NAS) frameworks developed to suppress dissent over Gaza have become the template for broader authoritarian control.

Biden:

• Left Trump's 2019 executive order adopting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism on the books, rather than reversing it upon taking office. The IHRA definition treats core political positions—describing Israel as an apartheid state, calling for a binational or single democratic state, comparing Israeli policies to racism—as examples of antisemitism, even though IHRA has never been enacted into U.S. law and remains non-binding.

• Repurposed Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights issuing letters and guidance that effectively encouraged universities to treat much pro-Palestine speech and organizing as potential Title VI violations, on the theory that they created a hostile environment for Jewish students. These "Dear Colleague" letters and informal OCR communications threatened universities with loss of federal funding if they did not better "protect Jewish students" from the "hostile environment" allegedly created by Gaza solidarity activism.

• Established a White House antisemitism task force led by Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, which worked closely with organizations like the ADL, AJC, ISGAP, Hillel, and AIPAC to promote the NAS framework and prime administrators to see Palestine solidarity as a compliance risk and potential ground for sanctions.

Crucially, systematic reviews of Title VI complaints and incident reports found that the vast majority of cases involved speech, protest chants, disruptions, and "atmosphere," not adjudicated patterns of physical attacks on Jewish students by Gaza protesters. By contrast, multiple documented incidents involved violence against Gaza protesters, including Jewish members of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace: chemical "skunk spray" attacks at Columbia, baton charges and rubber bullets at other encampments. In other words, a legally and rhetorically inflated antisemitism panic—tied explicitly to Gaza and NAS—was used to normalize police repression and administrative sanctions against a  nonviolent student movement.

Democratic officials at state and local levels were among the most aggressive in crushing pro-Palestine protests:

• New York Mayor Eric Adams ordered brutal crackdowns on peaceful encampments at Columbia and CCNY, lying that they had been "infiltrated by professional pro-Hamas terrorists." All arrested students were later released without serious charges, but many faced university discipline, and foreign students were detained and later deported by the Trump administration under Title VI/NAS-related charges.

• Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator John Fetterman framed Gaza protesters as antisemitic extremists and called for aggressive enforcement, priming the ground for federal intervention.

• High-profile House hearings in December 2023 dragged university presidents from Harvard, Penn, and MIT into McCarthy-style inquisitions over their handling of "antisemitic" protests. All three ultimately lost their jobs—even though, by that point, their own administrations had already suspended or derecognized pro-Palestine groups on their campuses.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA)—which would codify the IHRA definition into federal law—passed the House with broad bipartisan support in 2024, demonstrating that the NAS infrastructure was a bipartisan project, not a MAGA invention.

Biden himself acknowledged his own foreknowledge that the bombs he supplied Israel would be used to bomb thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. "In his January 17, 2025 farewell interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, Biden recounted an exchange approximately 10 days after the October 7, 2023 attack, in which Netanyahu demanded heavy bombs and made clear he intended to use them in civilian areas."  He quoted himself saying, "YOU CAN'T BE CARPET BOMBING THESE COMMUNITIES."

Biden recounts that Netanyahu explicitly compared his intended campaign to Dresden and Hiroshima, arguing: "You killed thousands of innocent people. Because you had to in order to win a war." When Biden objected—"you can't indiscriminately bomb civilian areas, even if the bad guys are there. Even the bad guys there, you can't take out 2, 10, 12, 1500 people, innocent people, in order to get the one bad guy"—Netanyahu countered that reaching Hamas tunnels required "tak[ing] out the places... under which they got to the tunnels."

Biden then says: "He made a legitimate argument, his perspective"—and continued arms transfers. In other words, Biden admits on camera that Netanyahu told him the bombs would be used to kill hundreds or thousands of civilians per target, that Biden objected on legal and moral grounds, and that he then provided the bombs anyway while characterizing Netanyahu's war-crimes rationale as "legitimate." This is not an oblique acknowledgment discovered through investigative reporting. It is a sitting president's own televised account of knowingly providing material assistance for indiscriminate attacks on civilians—the textbook definition of complicity that Schabas and other legal scholars have warned could result in criminal liability for U.S. officials.

Yet  Biden never publicly acknowledged that his simultaneous crackdown on Gaza solidarity at home—using Title VI, IHRA, and NAS—was constructing an authoritarian blueprint that Trump would inherit and radicalize.

2025: The Genocide Consensus Solidifies

It was in 2025—after Biden left office and Trump returned—that the professional consensus on genocide crystallized with unprecedented force and clarity, making Biden's complicity and the authoritarian machinery he built impossible to ignore.

In April 2025, William Schabas—perhaps the most influential living authority on the Genocide Convention and himself from a family of Holocaust survivors—told Middle East Eye that South Africa's case against Israel is "arguably the strongest case of genocide ever brought before the [ICJ]," citing not only patterns of conduct but "explicit statements and clear indications of policy" by senior Israeli officials. In an August 2025 interview with the European Center for Populism Studies, Schabas warned that third-party states—including the United States, Germany, Canada, and others—risk legal responsibility as accomplices to genocide under Article III of the Genocide Convention if they provide "material assistance of a significant nature." "To the extent that they are providing material assistance," he said, "they can be held responsible as accomplices to genocide." This warning applies directly to Biden's decisions as well as Trump's.

In July 2025, Omer Bartov—an Israeli-American historian, Holocaust scholar, and former IDF soldier—published an essay in the New York Times titled "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It." Bartov argued unequivocally that Israel's campaign in Gaza constitutes genocide, warning of a "systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable" and to destroy the institutions that allow a group to sustain itself physically and culturally.

By August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution declaring that "Israel's policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II" of the Genocide Convention. In September 2025, a UN-commissioned human rights report reached the same conclusion, finding that Israel's actions in Gaza met the legal threshold for genocide. The IAGS resolution and UN report were followed by formal determinations or warnings from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, and a growing list of international humanitarian organizations.

Even some of Israel's own defenders began to break ranks. By summer 2025, Eyal Benvenisti—an Israeli international lawyer who had defended Israel at the ICJ's initial hearing in January 2024—published an article in Just Security warning that Israel was committing crimes against humanity, describing a planned " a humanitarian city" in Gaza as "a euphemism for a large concentration camp for the civilian population," and urging Israelis not to report for IDF duty. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote in Haaretz in April 2025 of that the war against Gazan civilians was one of "exterminationist" war crimes.

This was not a marginal view. By mid-2025, it had become the consensus of leading genocide scholars—many of them Israeli, Jewish, or from Holocaust survivor families—alongside major international human rights organizations and a growing segment of legal experts. U.S. public opinion shifted dramatically as well: by late 2025, approximately 70-75 percent of Democrats and 25-30 percent of Republicans described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, according to multiple polls.

Trump's Escalation: Two Wars Become One

Trump has gone even further than Biden on both fronts. Abroad, he has sanctioned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and UN officials including Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, openly given Netanyahu "carte blanche," and floated proposals for the U.S. to "administer" or "develop" Gaza. At home, Trump inherited the NAS/Title VI machinery Biden built and expanded it into a comprehensive authoritarian toolkit:

• Adding Title IX gender regulations targeting "woke" ideology to the existing Title VI framework, creating a unified legal instrument to discipline universities, museums, and cultural institutions for "un-American" ideology.

• Backing Project Esther, which formally labels a dense web of campus groups, NGOs, and community organizations as a "Hamas Support Network," institutionalizing Biden-era smear campaigns as official domestic-terrorism designations.

• Signing executive orders attacking the Smithsonian for promoting "un-American" narratives and threatening federal funding for institutions that teach "divisive" history, redefining what it means to be "American" in explicitly nationalist, exclusionary terms.

• Mass-detaining and deporting Palestinians—including green-card holders whose status Secretary of State Marco Rubio has summarily revoked using Cold War-era laws combined with the Alien Enemies Act.

The result is a war on two fronts that are now functionally merged:

A) Genocide abroad: Continued arms transfers, diplomatic cover, and active obstruction of international accountability mechanisms, with both Biden and Trump administering policies that Schabas and other legal scholars warn could result in findings of U.S. complicity in genocide.

B) Authoritarian crackdown at home: The war-on-terror framing that cast Gaza protesters as terrorist sympathizers is now applied to immigration enforcement critics. Renee Good,the U.S. citizen killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross,  was immediately labeled a "domestic terrorist"; her widow is being investigated by DOJ. ICE operates as a paramilitary force with 25 shootings and zero prosecutions. The same NAS/Title VI machinery built to suppress Gaza solidarity is now used to redefine "American" identity and target dissent across the political spectrum.

What Levitsky's otherwise powerful analysis of Trump's war on universities omits is this genealogy. Trump 2.0 has not invented the legal tools he now uses to cow higher education, museums, and cultural institutions. He is wielding and radicalizing Biden-era NAS and Title VI/IHRA machinery forged in the crucible of Gaza. Any account that treats the current moment as the work of one party, acting on a blank slate, fails to see how liberal and centrist actors helped build the infrastructure of today's authoritarianism, even if they did not intend the result. The "boomerang effect" is complete: tools developed to shield a genocidal campaign abroad have returned home as instruments of authoritarian control.

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3. Threat Inflation and Intelligence Inversion: The Tren de Aragua Case

In March 2025, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a wartime statute unused since World War II—claiming that Venezuela's Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang had "thousands" of members who had "unlawfully infiltrated the United States" and were "conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions." He declared that TdA was "aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime," and that Venezuela had become a "hybrid criminal state" invading the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called TdA "a foreign arm of the Venezuelan government" and "a highly structured terrorist organization," not a street gang.

Hundreds of internal U.S. government records obtained through FOIA requests and published by WIRED in partnership with Property of the People tell a starkly different story. Intelligence taskings, law-enforcement bulletins, and drug-task-force assessments from throughout 2025 show that agencies spent much of the year struggling to determine whether TdA even functioned as an organized entity in the U.S. at all—let alone as a coordinated national security threat.

Internal tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite "intelligence gaps" in understanding how the group operated on U.S. soil: whether it had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflected any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether U.S.-based incidents pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous, profit-driven criminals. The documents warn that key estimates—such as the number of members operating in the U.S.—were often inferred or extrapolated by analysts due to a lack of corroborated facts.

A May 2, 2025 national intelligence tasking order, issued by managers overseeing counterterrorism, cyber, narcotics, and transnational crime, underscores the breadth of these gaps, citing unresolved questions about whether TdA had access to weapons beyond small arms, relied on bulk-cash shipments or cryptocurrencies, or was supported by corrupt officials overseas. It flagged a lack of insight into how TdA might respond under pressure or shift tactics in response to intensified U.S. enforcement.

Regional drug-task-force assessments were even more cautious. A July 2025 Northern California HIDTA bulletin acknowledged that available intelligence failed "to meet the Department of Justice definition of a drug trafficking organization," adding that TdA subsets "appear to operate independently of each other and do not appear to operate as part of a larger coordinated effort." TdA members were "not known to have assigned roles," and "leadership formation has not yet been identified." A separate assessment covering North Texas and Oklahoma identified Mexican cartels as the dominant narcotics threat, while characterizing TdA activity as "street level."

Customs and Border Protection produced more aggressive assessments, quickly ascribing TdA with both the "capability and intent" to carry out attacks inside the United States and ranking it among the "most capable" foreign terrorist groups—above Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps—while acknowledging it had no knowledge of any "specific or credible threat." A longer CBP assessment warned readers on its interagency network that its findings relied on "analytical judgments that are not fact, knowledge, or proof," and might not always distinguish in print between assumption and fact.

The same report acknowledges significant uncertainty about TdA membership figures. Over a 22-month period, CBP's own detection methods identified no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. To reach the "thousands" figure cited by Trump, analysts relied on a "sample set of interviews," extrapolating that "upwards of 3,000" TdA members must have crossed the border during that period—an estimate based on the assumption that roughly "one-half of one percent" of all Venezuelan migrants who entered the U.S. through the southwest border had ties to TdA.

Most significantly, a classified National Intelligence Council assessment—representing the consensus view of most U.S. intelligence agencies—found no evidence that TdA was directed by the Venezuelan government. When asked about the findings, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dismissed the assessment as the work of "deep state actors" acting in conjunction with the media.

This pattern mirrors the Gaza case: when expert consensus contradicts the administration's narrative, the experts are attacked, sidelined, or ignored, while more compliant agencies produce inflated threat assessments built on acknowledged speculation. The Alien Enemies Act invocation—premised on the claim that Venezuela is directing TdA as a state proxy—has already been found unlawful by at least one federal court precisely because the government's own intelligence does not substantiate the factual predicate. Yet mass deportations under the Act continue, with at least 137 Venezuelan deportees whose whereabouts are unknown despite judicial and congressional scrutiny.

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4. State-Sanctioned Violence and the Feedback Loop: ICE's 25 Shootings in One Year

Barbara Walter's framework for understanding incipient insurgency emphasizes that autocrats use violence strategically: "isolated incidents" escalate and are used to test boundaries and terrorize potential resisters. Each act of violence that goes unpunished signals to enforcers that more is permitted. Since January 2025, ICE and CBP agents have been involved in at least 25 shootings, resulting in six deaths and multiple severe injuries. Not a single agent has been criminally charged. This is not a series of tragic but defensible split-second decisions. It is systematic state-sanctioned violence.

The Pattern: Shoot, Claim Terrorism, Suppress Evidence, Drop Charges

Of at least 25 ICE and CBP shootings documented since January 2025—six of them fatal—agents have claimed in at least thirteen cases that civilians "weaponized" their vehicles to justify lethal force. The government has charged multiple survivors with assaulting or attempting to murder federal officers. Yet as of January 2026, not a single one of these prosecutions has resulted in conviction. Charges have been quietly dropped in multiple cases; in the one case that went to a jury trial, the defendant was acquitted on all counts. Meanwhile, zero agents have been criminally charged, despite clear legal authority for state prosecution and repeated calls from legal scholars and lawmakers.

Use-of-force experts and federal guidelines make clear that shooting into a moving vehicle is justified only when there is gunfire from the vehicle or a truly unavoidable collision—and even then, officers are trained to move out of the path rather than shoot, because disabling the driver creates an uncontrolled hazard. If any of these 25 shootings met that threshold, the administration would have released full footage, won convictions, and used the cases to vindicate its agents. Instead, it has suppressed bodycam evidence, dropped charges, and refused to investigate agents—the behavior of a regime that knows its claims cannot survive scrutiny.

Consider what the Trump administration did with the Charlie Kirk assassination attempt: an attack by a disturbed individual with no connection to Democrats was immediately weaponized to blame Democratic "rhetoric," threaten lawsuits against media critics, and demand the firing of late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. The administration used it for months as proof that "Democrats are the real violent extremists," playing footage on loop at rallies and in campaign ads.

If even ONE of the 25 ICE/CBP shootings involved genuine attempted murder of an agent, the administration would release full bodycam footage immediately, play it on Fox News every hour for weeks, show it at Trump rallies, and use it to justify every subsequent shooting and aggressive enforcement action. It would become the centerpiece of the 2026 midterm campaign: "Democrats want to abolish ICE—the agency protecting our heroes from terrorist car attacks!"

We have the opposite: bodycam footage suppressed, charges quietly dropped, one jury acquittal, and administration officials smearing dead citizens and investigating their families. This is not absence of evidence—it is evidence of absence. The Trump administration knows how to exploit real or imagined threats. The fact that they hide footage and drop charges proves they know the shootings cannot be justified.

The Killing of Renee Good

On January 6, 2026, in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, after she parked her SUV perpendicular to the street, blocked an ICE convoy for several minutes, and attempted to drive away. Within hours, Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good a "domestic terrorist" who had "weaponized her vehicle" and tried to run over agents. Noem repeated this characterization at a press conference the next day.

Multi-angle forensic analyses by CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post tell a different story. By synchronizing home-surveillance video, bystander footage, and Ross's own phone recording, CNN showed that as Good turned her wheels to the right and accelerated, Ross moved to the left side of the SUV, drew his weapon, and fired three shots into the driver's window as the vehicle passed, with his feet clearly on the pavement and his body outside the car's path. The New York Times's forensic video analysis likewise concluded that "the vehicle appears to be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire," and that synchronized clips show "the agent is not being run over. In fact, his feet are positioned away from the SUV." Use-of-force experts interviewed on CNN noted that DOJ policy instructs officers to move out of a vehicle's path and de-escalate, and that firing from the side into a car moving away is very difficult to square with a claim of imminent mortal danger.

Despite this evidence, the administration has not retracted its account. Trump, Vance, and Noem continue to call Good a "domestic terrorist." The Justice Department has declined to investigate Ross while redirecting investigative energy toward Good's widow and her community ties to activist groups—a punitive investigation into the victim's family rather than the shooter. Six federal prosecutors resigned rather than carry out these directives.

Hours after the killing, masked ICE and CBP agents led by CBP head Craig Mivino entered Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis at dismissal time, tackling students, pepper-spraying bystanders, and handcuffing two staff members, prompting the district to cancel classes for the rest of the week. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, drawing on a months-long Senate investigation of ICE/CBP force, described the agencies as being turned into a "nationwide paramilitary force with vast resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims," and said the Minneapolis events "smack of a cover-up," noting that DHS was blocking state and local police from investigating the shooting.

The Martinez Case and Agent Impunity

In October 2025 in Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, five times after agents claimed her car had rammed and boxed in their vehicle. Martinez was charged with forcibly assaulting a federal officer. But in November, the Justice Department moved to dismiss all charges, and in December a federal judge denied a request to release body-camera footage from the incident.

At a November hearing, defense counsel confronted Exum with his own text messages sent shortly after the shooting:

• "Cool, I'm up for another round of **** around and find out. Lmao"

• "I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys"

• "Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao."

Exum admitted he turned his bodycam on only after the shooting, leaving it on the passenger seat because he believed he would be a "target" if people saw it recording. Despite this record of apparent gloating and evidence manipulation, Exum has not been charged. Martinez, shot five times by an agent who joked about his "15 mins of fame," faced terrorism charges that were quietly dropped when it became clear the government could not prove its case.

Blinded Protesters: "Less-Lethal" Weapons as Instruments of Terror

At a January 10, 2026 protest in Santa Ana against ICE and the Good killing, Homeland Security officers fired "less-lethal" projectiles into protesters' faces at close range:

• Kaden Rummler, 21, lost vision permanently in one eye after being shot point-blank while holding a loudspeaker. Doctors found plastic, glass, and metal fragments in his skull and stomach that could not be fully removed, creating ongoing risk of metal poisoning.

• Britain Rodriguez, 31, was shot in the face at the same time; he also suffered severe eye damage and temporary blindness in one eye.

DHS claimed protesters were throwing rocks and fireworks; local police said they were only aware of traffic cones being thrown. DHS has characterized Rummler's permanent blindness as a "cut" and described the protest as a "riot." No DHS officer has been investigated.

The Jedeed Hiring Scandal: How ICE Became a Paramilitary Force

In January 2026, journalist Laura Jedeed published an account of applying to ICE as an experiment. Despite being an openly anti-ICE writer with a public record of criticism, completing zero background-check paperwork, and likely failing a drug test, ICE's online portal showed her as having passed all checks and assigned her a start date of September 30, 2025. The portal displayed: "EOD: Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!"

When DHS called her report "such a lazy lie," Jedeed posted video receipts from ICE's own system corroborating her account. DHS has not responded. Jedeed revealed a detail she had initially withheld: "Jedeed is a Syrian surname; my family immigrated in the 1980s. This detail delayed my military clearance for several months back in 2005." If ICE had actually run a background check, this would have been flagged. It wasn't.

ICE doubled its workforce from 10,000 to 22,000 agents in under a year, cutting training from 13 to 6 weeks. Current and former ICE agents interviewed by TIME expressed concerns about the Good shooting and broader operations. One said, "I'm embarrassed." Another noted that Ross had a prior vehicle incident that should have disqualified him from fieldwork. The agency's explosive growth, collapse of vetting standards, and elimination of accountability mechanisms have created precisely the conditions Barbara Walter describes as characteristic of regimes moving from "incipient insurgency" toward open authoritarian violence: under-trained, ideologically selected enforcers deployed without oversight, who learn through repetition that lethal force brings no consequences.

Why This Time Is Different: The Missing Floyd Effect

After George Floyd's killing in 2020, video evidence sparked a national uprising, forced institutional responses, and led to a murder conviction. After Kent State in 1970, a presidential commission called the shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable"; while no one was convicted, there was public contrition and investigation.

In 2026, we have:

• Clear video evidence of unjustified killings (Good, forensic analysis by three major outlets)

• Systematic lying by top officials (Trump, Noem, Vance) that persists despite debunking

• Zero federal investigation of shooters

• Active persecution of victims' families (Good's widow investigated, six prosecutors resign in protest)

• One jury acquittal when a "weaponized vehicle" case actually goes to trial

• Multiple dropped charges when prosecutors realize they can't win

Yet there is no Floyd-style response. No mass protests, no institutional crisis, no resignations of senior officials, no criminal charges.

Why? In 2020, Democrats were in opposition and believed the system could be restored. In 2026, after Foreign Affairs has declared the U.S. already authoritarian, Democratic elites appear to have internalized that serious confrontation is "futile or electorally suicidal" in a competitive-authoritarian context. They fear retaliation (investigations, funding cuts, terrorism charges), donor pressure, and normalization fatigue. Polling shows public disapproval of ICE and the Good shooting, but not the collapse that would force a systemic response.

When asked directly whether there is precedent for federal agents killing citizens with fabricated justifications that survive forensic debunking, mainstream systems default to silence—because acknowledging that truth would mean acknowledging regime change.

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5. Coast Guard, Posse Comitatus, and Court-Baiting

The judiciary's practical inability to restrain executive lawlessness extends beyond CASA to direct defiance through relabeling and jurisdictional gaming. On December 23, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Illinois that the president's deployment of federalized National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities "likely lacked authority" under 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and violated the Posse Comitatus Act because there was no "rebellion" or equivalent trigger and the activities were clearly law enforcement, not mere "protection."

The administration's response was not compliance but circumvention. Within days, troops were withdrawn from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland—then immediately redeployed under different labels: "logistical support," "infrastructure protection," or via Coast Guard units (which are technically exempt from Posse Comitatus). This forced new rounds of litigation, a tactic legal scholars call "court-baiting": doing what the Court forbade under a slightly different legal wrapper to exhaust judicial capacity and erode the Court's effective authority without a single headline moment of explicit defiance.

The administration has also asserted that even if a deployment violates Posse Comitatus, the president cannot be prosecuted because directing the military is a "core constitutional function" covered by absolute immunity—a new doctrine that shields precisely the kind of domestic military use the PCA was designed to constrain.

Meanwhile, in September 2025, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that expanded immigration agents' power to stop people based on what critics call racial profiling. The 6-3 decision stayed a lower-court injunction that had restricted ICE agents in Los Angeles from making stops based solely on race, ethnicity, language, or job type. While the Court reaffirmed that the Fourth Amendment requires "reasonable suspicion" for immigration stops, by lifting the injunction it allowed agents to use race, language (Spanish), job type (car wash, construction), and location as factors in a "totality of the circumstances" analysis.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent warned: "We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job." The practical effect is a two-tier Fourth Amendment: most Americans retain protection against stops unless police have individualized suspicion of them specifically committing a crime; Latino/Hispanic Americans and immigrants can be stopped based on broad demographic profiles that describe millions of innocent people, as long as agents invoke "immigration enforcement."

The system is already in a condition where the Supreme Court's capacity to restrain the executive is practically hollowed out by speed, relabeling, and venue shopping, even though the executive has not yet openly said "we will ignore the Court." The judiciary can identify illegality but cannot stop it.

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6. Venezuela, Treaties, Greenland: "My Own Morality" as the Only Limit

The same personalist logic that animates domestic paramilitary operations and court-baiting appears in Trump's approach to foreign policy. In his January 8, 2026 interview with the New York Times, Trump was asked whether there were any limits on his global powers as commander in chief. He replied:

"Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me… I don't need international law."

Pressed on whether his administration needed to abide by international law, he offered a perfunctory "I do," then immediately added, "It depends what your definition of international law is," making clear that, in his view, he is the arbiter of when such norms apply.

Venezuela: Decapitation and Occupation

In early January 2026, U.S. special-operations forces carried out a lightning operation in Caracas to remove President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to New York for trial, without congressional authorization and in obvious violation of the UN Charter's prohibitions on the use of force and interference in another state's political independence. The administration has moved to seize effective control over Venezuela's oil revenues. Senator J.D. Vance boasted that the United States will "control the purse strings" and sell Venezuela's oil "indefinitely" to recoup its "investment." Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller asserted that international law is "largely irrelevant" to great powers and that the U.S. has the right to "govern and control Venezuela" as a matter of strength.

66 Treaty Withdrawals

Almost simultaneously, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from 66 international organizations and treaty-based bodies, including 31 UN entities and 35 other institutions, many of them central to global climate, health, and environmental cooperation. The White House framed these as "wasteful" or "anti-American" organizations that infringed U.S. sovereignty, and did not return to the Senate to seek repeal of prior consent for the underlying treaties. This is a sweeping, unilateral retreat from the post-1945 institutional order that previous administrations of both parties built.

Greenland: The End of NATO?

On Greenland, Trump insists that "ownership is very important," that Greenland "must become part of the United States," and that "ownership gives you things… that you can't get from just signing a document." Asked whether acquiring Greenland or preserving NATO is a higher priority, he concedes "it may be a choice." The Danish prime minister has warned that any U.S. military attempt to seize Greenland would mean "everything stops… the end of NATO," because it would amount to an attack on an ally's territory.

Taken together, Venezuela's decapitation, the mass treaty withdrawals, and the Greenland threats are not isolated foreign-policy disputes. They are the external face of the same personalist regime that deploys ICE as a paramilitary at home, that treats Gaza as a zone beyond law, and that has repurposed civil-rights law into an instrument for disciplining universities. They enact precisely the worldview Trump described to the Times: law and multilateral constraint are subordinate to his "own mind," and power, not rules, is the decisive fact.

7. Beyond "It's All MAGA": A Fuller Accounting

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt are right about several crucial points. They correctly describe the United States today as a competitive authoritarian regime, not a healthy democracy. They emphasize the importance of broad, cross-ideological coalitions to defend the remaining spaces of electoral and civic competition. And they warn, rightly, that if Trump consolidates further control over the security state and bureaucracy, subsequent elections may become increasingly hollow.

But the analysis needs to go further in three ways.

First, on institutions: The judiciary is not the robust bulwark their comparative narrative assumes. Trump v. CASA and the Supreme Court's shadow-docket practices have radically narrowed courts' ability to issue broad, timely injunctions, transforming even heroic litigation into case-by-case triage. Trump v. Illinois found Posse Comitatus violations, yet the administration simply relabeled deployments and forced new litigation. Vasquez Perdomo created a two-tier Fourth Amendment that licenses racial profiling in immigration enforcement. The judiciary has, in effect, participated in its own partial disarmament, obviating the need for an overt purge. Courts can now identify illegality but cannot stop it.

Second, on responsibility: The apparatus of repression Trump now wields did not spring fully formed from MAGA. Biden-era decisions on Gaza—continuing arms transfers despite IAGS, ICJ, and leading genocide scholars' warnings—the embrace of NAS and IHRA frameworks, the use of Title VI and Dear Colleague letters to police Palestine solidarity, and bipartisan participation in campus crackdowns and McCarthy-style hearings all pre-legitimated key tools and narratives. The war-on-terror framing that cast Gaza protesters as terrorist sympathizers is now applied to immigration enforcement critics: Renee Good labeled a "domestic terrorist," Tren de Aragua hyped as "invasion" despite intelligence showing fragmented low-level crime. Trump is accelerating and expanding a machinery that liberal and centrist actors helped construct.

Third, on scope: Foreign policy is not a separate theater. Gaza, Venezuela, Greenland, the 66 treaty withdrawals, and sanctions against the ICC and UN officials are not sideshows; they are arenas where the regime practices and demonstrates its contempt for law and its fusion of security and private economic interests. The same logic that justifies shielding an ally's genocide—and that leads William Schabas to warn that the U.S. and Germany themselves may face findings of complicity—also animates ICE's domestic killings, the criminalization of Gaza protesters, and the casual assertion that only one man's "own morality" can restrain American power.

Barbara Walter's warning validated: Her January 14 essay said "the next eleven months aren't about what happens in November—they're about whether we'll have free and fair elections at all." The evidence since then—the Good shooting and its cover-up, the Jedeed hiring scandal revealing ICE's collapse into an untrained paramilitary force, court-baiting on Posse Comitatus, the 66 treaty withdrawals, Trump's Alien Enemies Act invocation built on intelligence his own agencies say doesn't exist—shows she was right: the regime is not waiting for midterms; it is entrenching through violence, lies, and institutional sabotage.

The missing piece in both analyses: Neither Levitsky nor Walter fully integrates the speed and visibility of the collapse. We are not discovering authoritarian practices through investigative deep-dives years later; we are watching citizens killed on video, watching forensic evidence published in real-time contradicting official accounts that persist anyway, watching the president joke about canceling elections on the January 6 anniversary after pardoning all January 6 defendants, watching 25 ICE shootings with zero agent prosecutions and zero victim convictions—and watching institutional response collapse in real-time too.

When mainstream information systems are asked whether there is precedent for federal agents killing citizens with fabricated justifications that survive forensic debunking, they default to silence—because acknowledging that truth would mean acknowledging regime change. Democratic leaders issue statements but do not mobilize mass resistance or institutional confrontation, having internalized that in a competitive-authoritarian context, serious opposition triggers retaliation (investigations, funding cuts, terrorism charges) without guaranteed success.

What this means for strategy: A realistic strategy must start from a fuller picture: a personalist, kleptocratic, NAS-driven, post-legal regime operating across domestic and international domains, built on bipartisan foundations and now openly contemptuous of both international and constitutional law. Electoral coalitions and civic mobilization remain essential. But they will fail if they assume: (1) courts can constrain the executive; (2) video evidence and journalism still trigger accountability; (3) the opposition party will fight rather than issue statements; (4) the midterms will save us if we just wait patiently.

A realistic resistance must operate as if in competitive-authoritarian space: protecting local election infrastructure, building parallel institutions, preparing for contested results, documenting abuses in real-time for future accountability, and naming openly what establishment institutions will not—that this is no longer a democracy experiencing stress, but a regime that has already changed type. The question is not whether we can prevent democratic backsliding. The question is whether we can recognize, name, and resist the authoritarian regime we already live under, and whether enough institutions and citizens will act on that recognition before the 2026 midterms are rigged, delegitimized, or rendered irrelevant.

 

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Marimar Martinez Shooting (Chicago, October 4, 2025)

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Court documents and testimony regarding Agent Charles Exum's text messages and bodycam conduct (November 2025 hearing).

Santa Ana Protest Blindings (January 10, 2026)

Los Angeles Times. "Second man says Homeland Security blinded him at anti-ICE rally." January 16, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-16/second-man-says-homeland-security-blinded-him-at-anti-ice-rally

Fox LA. "Anti-ICE protester claims he's blind one eye after federal officer shot him with non-lethal weapon in Santa Ana." January 12, 2026. https://www.foxla.com/news/anti-ice-protester-claims-hes-now-blind-after-federal-officer-shot-him-nonlethal-weapon-santa-ana

YouTube. "O.C. protestor blinded by federal agent." January 13, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t5GfQgGI7w

Other ICE/CBP Shooting Cases

KOMO News. "Man acquitted of assaulting federal agents in Camano Island ramming incident." January 12, 2026. https://komonews.com/news/local/ice-arrest-convicted-felon-illegally-present-in-the-us-acquitted-of-ramming-4-ice-federal-agents

Fox News. "Alleged Tren de Aragua associate charged after Border Patrol shooting in Portland." January 11, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/doj-charges-illegal-immigrant-tren-de-aragua-ties-after-border-patrol-shooting-portland

Los Angeles Times. "ICE agent who killed L.A. man accused of child abuse, racism in prior lawsuits." January 16, 2026. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-16/ice-agent-los-angeles-shooting-court-records

Legal Analysis on ICE Shootings

"ICE Agents Can Be Charged With Murder." The American Prospect, January 6, 2026. https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

"Immigration Agents Are Shooting People. Is It Legal?" The Trace, January 11, 2026. https://www.thetrace.org/2026/01/ice-shooting-legal-prosecution-federal-agent/

Connecticut Public Radio. "What if an ICE shooting happened in Connecticut? A legal expert explains." January 15, 2026. https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2026-01-15/what-if-an-ice-shooting-happened-in-connecticut-a-ct-legal-expert-explains

ICE Hiring Scandal (Laura Jedeed)

Jedeed, Laura. "I Applied for a Job at ICE. They Offered Me One—Without a Background Check." Slate, January 2026.

Jedeed, Laura. "The Trump Administration Is Calling the Viral Story of My ICE Job Offer a Lie. Good Thing I Kept the Receipts." Slate, January 16, 2026. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-trump-administration-dhs-minneapolis.html

Yahoo News. "'Anti-ICE' Reporter Drops Proof That Agency Hired Her After DHS Called Her Story a Lie." January 15, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/anti-ice-reporter-drops-proof-145019148.html

Yahoo News. "DHS Picks Fight With Reporter Who Exposed ICE's Shoddy Hiring." January 14, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dhs-picks-fight-reporter-exposed-184408659.html

Polling on ICE, Immigration, and Trump

ABC News. "Majority of Americans say ICE agent's shooting of Good was unjustified or inappropriate." Poll results, January 15, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/majority-americans-ice-agents-shooting-good-unjustified-inappropriate/story?id=129253596

Axios. "Trump's immigration erosion worries his team." January 16, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/01/16/trump-polling-immigration-approval-rating-ice-noem

New York Times. "Opinion | 'Bad, Bad News for the G.O.P. Over the Long Haul'" (on ICE shooting polling). January 15, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/opinion/ice-shooting-trump-republicans-polling.html

Reuters. "Republicans split on Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows." January 15, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/republicans-split-trumps-aggressive-immigration-crackdown-reutersipsos-poll-2026-01-15/

Forbes. "Trump Approval Rating: Views Of Immigration Handling Plummeted After ICE Shooting." January 15, 2026.

The Hill. "46 percent in new poll support abolishing ICE, 43 percent oppose." January 13, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5687229-ice-trump-administration-support-poll/

Chicago Operations and Fourth Amendment Violations

ABC7 Chicago. "Family 'unlawfully' detained by ICE at Millennium Park now separated, court filing says." October 1, 2025.

CNN. "Chicago apartment ICE raid: Tenants detained for hours and separated from children." October 3, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid

Posse Comitatus, Military Deployments, and Court-Baiting

Trump v. Illinois, 25A443 (December 23, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court emergency order. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25a443_new_kkg1.pdf

The Hill. "Pritzker: 400 Texas National Guard headed to Illinois, Oregon." October 5, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5540091-pritzker-national-guard-illinois-texas-oregon/

Al Jazeera. "Governor slams 'Trump's invasion' as troops deployed in Illinois." October 6, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/6/governor-slams-trumps-invasion-as-troops-deployed-in-illinois

Democracy Docket. "Trump: 'We shouldn't even have an election.'" January 14, 2026. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-we-shouldnt-even-have-an-election/

POLITICO. "Judge limits warrantless immigration arrests in DC." December 2, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/02/immigration-arrests-order-dc-00674125

Fourth Amendment and Immigration Stops

Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, 25A169 (September 8, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court opinion. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf

SCOTUSblog. "Supreme Court allows federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in Los Angeles." September 15, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/supreme-court-allows-federal-officers-to-more-freely-make-immigration-stops-in-los-angeles/

SCOTUSblog. "'Roving patrols,' reasonable suspicion, and Perdomo." September 18, 2025. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/09/roving-patrols-reasonable-suspicion-and-perdomo/

UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. "SCOTUS Opens Door to Racial Profiling in Immigration Enforcement." September 9, 2025. https://latino.ucla.edu/scotus-ruling-opens-door-to-racial-profiling-in-immigration-enforcement/

American Immigration Council. "How the Supreme Court's Latest Decision Clears the Way for Racial Profiling in Immigration Raids." September 8, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/supreme-courts-decision-racial-profiling-immigration-raids/

PBS NewsHour. "Supreme Court ends restrictions on LA immigration stops set after agents swept up U.S. citizens." September 8, 2025.

Constitutional Accountability Center. "CAC Release: Supreme Court Ignores History in Favor of Its Own Rule for Warrantless Home Entries." January 13, 2026. https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/cac-release-supreme-court-ignores-history-in-favor-of-its-own-rule-for-warrantless-home-e

Democracy Forward. "The People's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court: 2025-2026." December 14, 2025. https://democracyforward.org/work/research/peoples-guide-scotus-25-26/

Venezuela, Treaty Withdrawals, Greenland

Sanger, David E., Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. "Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by 'My Own Morality.'" New York Times, January 8, 2026.

People. "Trump Says 'My Own Morality' Is 'the Only Thing' Stopping Him from Global Supremacy." January 8, 2026. https://people.com/donald-trump-says-morality-only-thing-stopping-global-supremacy-11881997

YouTube. "Trump Says His Only Limit on His Global Powers Is His 'Own Morality.'" January 8, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysZJUjhnt3M

Reuters. "US oversight of Venezuela may last years, Trump tells NYT." January 8, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-us-oversight-venezuela-could-last-years-nyt-reports-2026-01-08/

NPR. "Why is the U.S. pulling out of 31 U.N. groups? And what's the impact?" January 8, 2026.

Verfassungsblog. "Retreating from Internationalism: The Announced U.S. Withdrawal from Many International Entities." January 9, 2026.

White House Fact Sheet. "President Donald J. Trump Withdraws the United States from International Organizations that Undermine U.S. Sovereignty." January 6, 2026.

Earth.org. "US Withdraws From 66 Int'l Bodies, Including Key Climate Treaties." January 8, 2026.

Trump's Election Comments and Midterms

Popli, Nik. "Trump Floats Cancelling 2026 Elections, Then Insists He Won't." TIME, January 6, 2026.

People. "Trump Gripes About 2026 Midterms: 'We Shouldn't Even Have an Election.'" January 15, 2026. https://people.com/donald-trump-gripes-about-2026-midterms-saying-when-you-think-of-it-we-shouldn-t-even-have-an-election-118862

YouTube. "Trump Suggests U.S. Cancel November's Midterms Due to Poor Polling." January 15, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCqEWYYd54

Targeting of Political Opponents

Axios. "Trump slams 'radical left' after signing 'organized political violence' memo." September 26, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/26/trump-organized-political-violence-radical-left

Democracy Docket. "Trump Took Key Steps Into Authoritarianism This Week." September 25, 2025. https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/trump-authoritarian-push-comey-indictment-nonprofit-executive-orde/

Wikipedia. "Targeting of political opponents and civil society under the second Trump administration." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponents_and_civil_society_under_the_second_Trump_administration

Japan Times. "Trump's war on the left: Inside the plan to investigate liberal groups." October 9, 2025.

BBC. "Trump promised retribution—how far will he go?" September 27, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q74pxx871o

Los Angeles Times. "In Trump's 'domestic terrorism' memo, some see blueprint for vengeance." September 27, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-09-27/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-some-see-blueprint-for-vengeance