‘In the name of security’

The pretext of “in the name of security” confounds me (“Minnesota officials recommend weapons screening at state Capitol”). Often employed in total irony, “security” has become the catchall for 21st Century distrust “of the people.” Have we ever been more scared of ourselves?

‘Welcome, welcome … please proceed through the metal detector.’ The discord of the latter against the former is to me like fingernails across a blackboard. Shall we place Minnesota town welcome signs under FLOCK cameras? A penny for your thoughts, but a pound of flesh for your data. Identify yourself here, identify yourself there – “Welcome, Welcome.” Papers, please.

In ICE we seem to have a Lt. Calley searching for his My Lai. The contempt for the other is palpable. The “other” of course is now us. We ought remember that anywhere “security” has been applied small it has ultimately ended up big; your neighbor is a dangerous person writ large. Who’s to blame? I have witnessed all the finger pointing. I’ve read all the accusations but what I never read is the dystopian genesis of modern “security,” nor its slippery slopes that have caused masked agents to march in our streets.

Distrust – the outright contempt — of practically everyone is this century’s massacre upon our own nation.

Julia Bell, St. Paul

 

I don’t understand how we tolerate this

Like many Minnesotans, I have been deeply shaken by the fatal shooting during a recent federal enforcement operation in Minneapolis, and by the subsequent expansion of ICE activity in our communities. I am writing not to argue policy, but to ask a human and moral question that I cannot stop asking:

How are we tolerating this?

How are we watching parents taken from their homes, children left behind in shock and confusion, neighbors disappearing overnight — and not being disturbed enough to demand something better?

I am trying, sincerely, to understand how people of good will — people who care about family, order and the rule of law — can witness scenes of armed agents taking someone away in front of their children, or read about a woman killed in the course of enforcement, and not feel compelled to say: This is not how a humane society should function.

Do supporters of our current system know anyone outside their own social or economic circles who is being affected? Do they know what it looks like when a child comes home from school and their parent is simply gone? Do they know what it does to a community when people are afraid not only of being taken, but even of leaving their own homes — afraid to go to work, to school, to the doctor, or to church — and when enforcement actions are disrupting staff and children in our schools?

This is not a theoretical debate. This is lived trauma.

I find myself thinking about Anne Frank’s words describing how people simply “disappeared,” how neighbors were taken away and ordinary life tried to go on around that absence. I am not equating our moment with hers — history is not that simple — but I am troubled by how familiar the pattern feels: people removed, families silenced by fear, the rest of society slowly learning not to look too closely. That is not a comparison meant to accuse, but a warning meant to awaken.

I understand that immigration is complex. I understand that law matters and borders matter. But the way we enforce the law also matters. The means we choose shape who we become. A system that relies on fear, force and family separation as routine tools cannot be called orderly or just — only cruel.

What troubles me most is not disagreement. It is indifference.

It is the sense that many people have become so accustomed to this machinery of enforcement that they no longer see the human cost, or no longer feel responsible for it because it is being done “legally,” “federally,” or “by someone else.”

But moral responsibility does not disappear just because harm is bureaucratized.

Minnesota cannot legally order ICE out. I understand that. But we can refuse to normalize what is happening. We can refuse to accept that this is the best we can do. We can demand accountability, transparency, restraint and, above all, humanity.

And I am deeply grateful to all who are standing up in protest — peacefully, courageously and publicly — to insist that our neighbors’ lives and families matter, and that we can do better than this.

I am not asking everyone to agree with me about immigration policy.

I am asking how anyone can watch families be torn apart, children traumatized, communities destabilized, and now people killed — and not feel called to say: This must change.

If we cannot feel that, then something far more dangerous than any immigration crisis is happening to us.

Jane White Schneeweis, St. Paul

 

What would Bishop Whipple do?

Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822–1901) came to Minnesota in 1860 as the first Episcopalian bishop for our state, a position he held until his death. He was a humanitarian and a man of conscience. As such he quickly became a strong advocate for the Dakota and Ojibwe people, protesting the way these Native Americans were being mistreated by the government and cheated by others. He quickly learned their language and was referred to as “straight tongue” by some Dakota.

The short-lived (Aug. 18 to Sept. 26) Dakota War of 1862, along the Minnesota River from New Ulm toward the western border, erupted primarily because the Dakota people were starving when arrogant Indian Agents would not advance credit after the annual annuity payments from the federal government were delayed. Certainly, Bishop Whipple acutely felt the terrible deaths of the more than 300 settler men, women and children cruelly killed by the Dakota in the uprising. He also certainly prayed for them and their loved ones.

Immediately upon the completion of the war, 392 Dakota men were tried in front of a military commission headed by Colonel Henry Sibley. With some “trials” lasting no more than five minutes, 303 of these men were sentenced to death by hanging.

Against vehement and almost universal public sentiment, Bishop Henry Whipple opposed this blatant miscarriage of justice and was instrumental in getting President Lincoln to review the trial transcripts. Although the Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln took the time and made the effort to conduct a review and ultimately reduced the list of condemned to 39. On Dec. 5, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men (one additional man was reprieved) were hanged in Mankato. This was and is the largest one-day mass execution in our country’s history. The Dakota people were stripped of their land, and most were forcibly removed from the state. Bishop Whipple continued to befriend and advocate for the Dakota and Ojibwe people in Minnesota for the rest of his life.

If he were living today, I know that Bishop Whipple would befriend and advocate for those who are currently being so cruelly persecuted by federal agents in the Twin Cities. Bishop Henry Whipple would be appalled and saddened by the fact that citizens and non-citizens are being detained under dreadful conditions in the building that was named in his honor. He would also be disgusted by the “leaders” of our federal government who act and speak with such forked or crooked tongues.

Joseph C. Brotzler, South St. Paul

 

For decent and lawful enforcement, but not this

Earlier this month a neighbor of my friend in St. Paul was picked up and detained by ICE.  The spouse of a teacher at the school where I volunteer was also picked up and detained by ICE.  Both were born in America and have no criminal history.  They are NOT illegal immigrants and NOT the “worst of the worst” of illegal immigrants purportedly being targeted by ICE agents at the direction of President Trump.

I don’t believe President Trump has ICE in Minnesota to enforce immigration law as their primary mission. I believe ICE is in Minnesota to terrorize and traumatize our citizens because President Trump hates Rep. Ilhan Omar and Gov. Tim Walz (based on the president’s many vicious public insults of Omar and Walz). Disagreeing with your political opponents is one thing, terrorizing their constituents is quite another.

I am not defending unlawful immigration, but President Trump’s blatant prejudicial violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution to punish political enemies and terrorize law-abiding American citizens is, very simply, wrong.  I am an advocate for decent and lawful enforcement of immigration law and putting an end to President Trump’s targeted traumatization of our fellow Americans.

Eric Lillyblad, Forest Lake

 

The risk

My family has realized that no one, especially innocent people, is immune from the ongoing negative interactions and complications caused by the ICE presence in Minneapolis. I want to present the fear, daily-life routines needing to be changed and adjustments we are dealing with, realizing that many have it much worse. The major fear of course is what if ICE detains a family member who is only going about their daily routine and who is not able to  provide a clear presentation of their actions.

We have been alerted to the risk that one of our family members faces based on a learning disability that makes it difficult for her to deal with complex issues requiring lengthy explanations. Several years ago my husband and I decided to complete our family with a  fourth child, who would be a special needs child adopted from Korea. She was able to graduate from high school and works in food service at a vibrant parochial school on Randolph Avenue in St. Paul.

Her limitations make it difficult for her to comprehend and address complex issues and reply in a perceived timely manner. If her bus or Lyft transportation is detained by ICE because of other passengers or because many of the drivers appear to be Muslim or because she looks Asian or for any reason and she would be questioned, she would be at great risk to be taken to a facility for “further interrogation” because she would not have been able to explain that she is a U.S. citizen or answer rapid questioning. So for now we are driving her ourselves or keeping in close phone connections if she takes her usual method of getting to and from work.

Jane Greeman, Woodbury

 

Not on the basis of need

I have lived in St. Paul for 95 years and have never seen a situation that local and state authorities could not handle. Because they have not been invited, ICE needs to leave Minnesota.

ICE is assigned to various neighborhoods, not on the basis of need, but as intimidators and fear mongers. The fact that they have no badges with numbers displayed and have  masks or face coverings should not be tolerated as both prevent accountability. The face coverings and the anonymity would not be necessary if they were doing honest work.

Donald Ausemus, St. Anthony

 

Send out the Fraud Stoppers

This bizarre Minnesota historical ‘fraud’ event, all blamed on Walz and the Democrats, has hit the international news, including my distant Norwegian relatives and friends.  Equally amazing is how confidently the fraudsters thought this would be a ‘piece of cake’!  The fraudsters ‘ASSUMED’ they could easily get away with it, AND they almost did!

There is too much public ignorance and distrust about where these Grant moneys go and why?  This Grant money fraud has been going on in every state and for many decades!  The fraudsters were quite aware of how easy this would be to pull off, and they almost got away with it!

Now is the time to consider organizing the ‘FS’, Fraud Stoppers citizen project of citizen volunteers who would be trained and then assigned by local governments to go out and monitor what those grants were for and “document” they were being accomplished as contracted!  Also, this would educate the public about how their money was being spent AND that these Grants were good ideas, or perhaps not done well and needed to change?

Send out the Fraud Stoppers, ‘FS’, NOW!

Mark Nupen, Anoka

 

Better late than never: One year into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the world has reached an inflection point, as Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, made explicit in his speech at an economic summit in Davos. Having tried and failed to appease Trump’s imperialist bullying, middle powers such as his own country must and will instead “act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

Acting together, Carney said, will take the form of “variable geometries.” Countries, whether traditional friends or foes of the United States, may form ad hoc coalitions to pursue specific interests, trade pacts to replace commercial links to the U.S. that Trump has damaged or severed, cooperation in new or existing multilateral forums or even new military alliances.

Predictable results

This reaction to Trumpism is exactly what international-relations theory predicted. In the 1980s, the realist scholar Stephen Walt, nowadays at the Harvard Kennedy School, formulated the “balance of threat” hypothesis of world affairs. It said that states tend to form alliances to counter countries that are simultaneously mighty and hostile.

At the time, Walt’s insight addressed a shortcoming in conventional wisdom, which stipulated that a balance of power was the default tendency in world politics. That theory fit the 19th century, for example. The problem was that it couldn’t explain the Cold War, when one of the superpowers, the United States, attracted rather than repelled many middle and small powers, with no counterbalancing to speak of. The dissonance became even starker after the Cold War, when the U.S. became a hyperpower and still kept adding allies, totaling about 70.

What made the U.S. historically unusual, of course, is that for about eight decades it was a controversial but largely benevolent hegemon of the international system, one that provided global public goods such as open trade, international law and a modicum of order. To countries from Canada to Denmark and South Korea, America looked powerful but protective rather than threatening.

Flipped

Trump, as you may have noticed, flipped that stance into powerful and menacing. Not only is he fond of what Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, the top national security advisors to Trump’s predecessor, call “flamboyant violence” — force for show rather than long-term strategic advantage, as in Venezuela recently. Trump also threatens middle powers that are close allies, such as Canada and Danish Greenland, with annexation — even if this week he seemed to tone down his tariff assault against Europe over Greenland.

The enigma of the past year was that this new phenomenon of an aggressive America did not cause a balance of threat. Aside from the autocrats of China and Russia, who either stared Trump down or strung him along, most leaders from Europe to the Middle East and Asia tried to flatter and kowtow to the American president. They’ve gifted him golden crowns, luxury jets and crypto deals; nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize; or simply fawned as though trying to win an Oscar. The leader of NATO went so far as to call Trump “daddy.”

I asked Walt whether he was surprised that his balance-of-threat theory didn’t kick in for a while. Not really, he told me, because “reacting against the U.S. as a threat is costly,” and the countries that Trump has offended or economically harassed are numerous enough to pose a “collective-action problem.” It’s only now dawning on allies that “accommodation isn’t working” because Trump is a “predatory hegemon,” and “there is no such thing as a lasting deal with a predatory hegemon.”

The rebalancing has begun

Now, though, the penny has dropped and the rebalancing has begun. Some countries are forming new security pacts, as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan recently did.

The European Union and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, accelerated talks about a mega-deal after decades of being stuck.

India, whose leader used to be chummy with Trump, is warming up ties to China and others.

And a whole succession of leaders from countries that are nominally still American allies — Britain, Germany, South Korea — are wooing rather than shunning Beijing to deepen economic cooperation. (China, incidentally, just clocked its biggest trade surplus ever, despite Trump’s tariffs, after more than replacing its lost exports to the U.S. with exports to the rest of Asia, Europe and other places.)

Carney’s Canada is a good example. He has been opening commercial and diplomatic doors from Europe to India. He even visited China, after a brief ice age in bilateral relations since 2018 (when Canada arrested a Chinese executive who was wanted in the U.S. and China retaliated by detaining two Canadians). Now Beijing and Ottawa have a “strategic partnership.” The goal, Carney has said, is to wean Canada from its big American neighbor.

Placating didn’t work

The hardest and slowest threat balancing is the military sort, because America’s preponderance in hard power is so overwhelming. “I don’t see a non-U.S. NATO forming an alliance with China,” Walt told me. But as countries in Europe and Asia re-arm, they may start thinking twice about buying their kit from the Americans, and may even consider building their own nuclear arsenals now that the U.S. “umbrella” seems leaky.

America First will sooner or later become America Alone, I predicted about a year ago. The world, after trying in vain to placate its predatory hegemon, now seems to have started the hard work of rebalancing.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

The siege of Minneapolis represents a fitting, if foreboding, capstone to the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. Since returning to office one year ago, Trump has pursued no goal more passionately or persistently than breaking the ability of blue jurisdictions and their leaders to resist him.

In the process, he is straining the nation’s fundamental cohesion in ways that may escalate beyond his control.

Trump’s pressure campaign against blue states and cities is advancing along three major tracks.

Physical force

The most visible is his use of physical force against blue municipalities. In Democratic-run cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Charlotte and Minneapolis, heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents have swarmed neighborhoods and mustered for symbolic shows of force at prominent landmarks (such as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles and Michigan Avenue in Chicago), in a manner reminiscent of an occupying army.

Although immigrant communities have absorbed the brunt of this offensive, thousands of U.S. citizens and protesters have been swept up, too. Not since the segregationist Southern states deployed dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks against civil rights activists in the early 1960s has any government entity in the U.S. wielded force against its own citizens to this extent.

Looming over all of this is an even heavier club: the possibility that Trump might deploy the military into U.S. cities. After the Supreme Court stopped Trump from seizing control of state National Guard forces, he quickly pivoted to threatening Minneapolis with the deployment of active-duty troops under the Insurrection Act.

Funding

The second prong of Trump’s offensive against blue places is fiscal. The administration has sought to terminate federal funding to blue states and cities for virtually every major domestic purpose — including education, public health, infrastructure, transportation and law enforcement — unless they adopt a succession of conservative policies (on such issues as diversity, LGBTQ rights, abortion and, above all, complete cooperation with immigration enforcement) that they have rejected.

Courts have almost universally blocked these attempts as violating the underlying statutes establishing the federal programs. But the administration has responded by constantly devising new means of withholding money — for instance, by freezing child-care and welfare funds while they investigate fraud solely in five Democratic-controlled states. “They are forcing everyone who wants to uphold the rule of law to play a game of Whac-a-Mole with them,” says Jill Habig, founder and CEO of the Public Rights Project, a nonpartisan legal firm working with cities targeted by the administration.

Prosecutions

Trump’s third front has been prosecutions of blue-state officials. The administration has already arrested a judge, a mayor, a U.S. representative and a city comptroller, all in Democratic cities, for allegedly physically interfering with immigration enforcement, either at protests or in other encounters.

The criminal investigation into Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz raises the stakes by formally probing local officials over their words and policies — a step the administration threatened, but did not pursue, against Democratic Govs. JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom during the enforcement blitzes in Chicago and Los Angeles. This replicates a common tactic of authoritarian leaders: prosecuting dissenting local officials to signal to ordinary citizens that anyone who speaks out is vulnerable.

The intensity of Trump’s moves against the parts of the country that have resisted him is without exact precedent in American history. (The closest parallel may be President Andrew Johnson, who favored the South over the North when he ascended to the presidency following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at the Civil War’s end in 1865.)

Eric Schickler, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that presidents more typically try to woo the places that voted against them. “I don’t think we have seen anything like that — where a president openly views the duly elected leaders of a series of states as just enemies … and those territories as not entitled to revenues,” said Schickler, co-author of Partisan Nation, a 2024 book on how partisan polarization has distorted the constitutional system. “I can’t imagine Franklin Roosevelt saying, ‘Maine and Vermont didn’t vote for me in 1936, therefore sorry — you are out of the New Deal.’”

A deeper and darker dimension

Trump is inverting that electoral strategy: rather than courting blue places, he energizes his base by demonizing them. But his posture toward blue jurisdictions has a deeper and darker dimension. Trump and his top aides routinely describe Democratic officials as threats to the nation’s security and even survival — “the enemy from within,” in the president’s words. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last week accused Walz and Frey of “terrorism.” Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, echoing his earlier comments about California and Illinois Democrats, told Fox they had “deliberately, willfully, and purposefully incited this violent insurrection.” In fact, the overwhelming evidence on the ground is that ordinary citizens in Minneapolis have peacefully exercised their First Amendment right to protest government actions.

Susan Stokes, director of the Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, says it is likely no coincidence that Trump talked at length about his deployment of federal forces to Los Angeles and other cities at the press conference when he announced the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “They are creating an equivalence between their antagonists in American cities and their antagonists in foreign countries,” Stokes says. “All of whom are criminals, presumably, and are therefore the rightful objects of repression, imprisonment, prosecution.”

In their multifront offensive against blue states and cities, the president and his aides clearly believe they hold what military planners call escalation dominance — the unilateral ability to control the intensity of the conflict. But that’s a delusion.

Trump’s drive to subjugate blue places has triggered a progression of protest, violent repression and greater protest that will almost certainly intensify over time. “You are asking for a cycle that spirals out of control,” said Schickler. In all these actions, Trump is recklessly unraveling the threads that bind together America. The scariest part is that even he cannot know in advance when he’s gone too far to turn back.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.