Polling from mid-2025 showed 62% of Democratic voters felt a change in party leadership was needed. These voters are shown to feel that current leaders are not doing enough to fight against Trump’s creeping (if not galloping) authoritarianism. This divide is likely to expand in the face of an underwhelming response to the occupation of Minneapolis and the clearly recorded execution of two of the city’s citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Although the brutal and highly documented nature of these murders uniquely shocked many Americans, they were not the first unjust casualties of ICE’s sprawling and expanding operation. Since last July, 15 other agent involved shootings fit a similar profile to that of Good’s killing – that is, officers shot at a vehicle which they claim was ‘weaponized,’ with the DHS immediately supporting the stories of the officers. In 2025, 32 deaths in ICE custody were confirmed, with many families alleging these deaths could have been prevented with basic medical care that had been repeatedly denied.

ICE has capitalized on the permission they have been given by the supreme court to detain based on racial characteristics. In January, the number of people in detention passed 70,000 for the first time. Among those detained, 74% have no criminal conviction, with ‘criminal’ encompassing anyone who illegally crossed the border and accounting for crimes as minor as traffic violations. Within detention facilities, conditions are described by detainees and observers as squalid, overcrowded, and abusive.

Likely emboldened by the ‘absolute immunity’ the Vice President has granted them via press conference fiat, agents break windows to pull people from their cars, tear gas students at school, and dress up like seal team six to perform warrantless illegal raids on the homes of peaceful activists. The ACLU has filed a suit in which dozens of affidavits allege physical and verbal abuse of American citizens in the course of being detained.

These recent developments have surged support for ICE abolition to 76% of Democratic voters. In response to this growing enthusiastic consensus, House and Senate leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer released a list of demands seeking reform around the edges – mask bans (that the LAPD has already confirmed they will not enforce), an end to (explicit) racial profiling, and use of force standards (that would be redundant to the existing standards agents already habitually violate) to name a few. Their additional demand for an end to warrantless raids and timely access to an attorney for detainees would be significant protections – if these rights weren’t already guaranteed by the 4th and 6th amendments, respectively. Passing laws that ask habitual lawbreakers to follow the already existing laws would seem on its face to be a pointless and futile miming of a representative democracy that no longer functions.

At a time where the opposition party should be capitalizing on the lawlessness and unpopularity of their opponents, they instead would seek to capture, neutralize, and scale back the reasonable demands of their base. It reads similar to Trump’s Gaza ‘ceasefire’ and shuffling of leadership in the Minnesota invasion – less of an actual material change, more a performance to portray the story as ‘over’ and chill growing momentum behind demands that would actually threaten or even sincerely impede power. The 80 billion additional dollars granted to ICE by the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is not just legitimized by this meek starting position, but made untouchable by any ‘reasonable’ opposition.

This recurring pattern within our capitalist duopoly is often referred to as the ‘ratchet effect’ – that is, Republicans yank us to the right on an issue (like taxation, immigration, or militarism) and Democrats lock the rightward shift into place as a new ‘center.’

This normalization is also apparent when they frame ICE’s recent murderous and terroristic actions as the failure to properly perform their job, when in fact, murder, terror, and suppression is the job. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was designed as a rights violating machine from the start – the department’s various agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), were tasked with ‘securing’ the ‘homeland’ by way of surveilling and suppressing Arab, Muslim, and other ethnic and dissident populations while we waged brutal destabilizing war against a litany of majority Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. As with our wars of conquest and domination, both parties have (until recently) upheld the facade that DHS’s motivation was merely to enforce laws and keep Americans safe, and that any violation of rights or profiling of certain populations was an unfortunate coincidence.

The enforcement of this front is becoming increasingly one sided as Republican leaders and many in their base view even performative compassion as weakness. They no longer crave carefully justified acts of domination against their perceived enemies, they want the real thing – full throated and unashamed. Abroad we see this in sabre rattling at every country within arms reach, as well as a secretary of state affirming that we deposed Maduro to maintain domination over the resources in “our” hemisphere. Gone is the pretense of humanitarian motivations that was maintained for Iraq and Afghanistan under the old, neoliberal world order.

Domestically, DHS’s social media and marketing materials frequently use language and imagery of Manifest Destiny, Naziism, and ‘great replacement’ hysteria. They send in camera crews to document and market their own crimes and abuses so that followers may revel in the cruelty. Within the ranks and in their presentation to the world, their mission to ethnically purify the homeland through acts of terror against dissidents and minorities is embraced without shame.

Why, then, does Democratic party leadership still insist upon treating unaccountable racial purification death squads as if they are a legitimate and necessary police force, with a mission to protect the community? If they sincerely care for our lives and our rights, should the first step not be to press the ‘off’ switch on this life destroying, rights violating machine?

Working class, compassionate Americans seek no less than abolition because the issue with ICE is not one of training. We demand abolition because we value multiculturalism, we love our immigrant neighbors, and it breaks our hearts to see them harmed, living in fear, and feeling rejected by our country. Many of the immigrants being terrorized are citizens – including 95% of Minnesota’s Somalian population. Among the non-citizens, many are living here legally only to be kidnapped outside the doors of routine court appointments.. Even still for those who are undocumented, we do not see what amounts to a paperwork issue as a heinous crime deserving of brutality. If we don’t send death squads after people with overdue parking tickets or expired drivers’ licenses, then why would they be an appropriate solution to an expired student visa? ICE’s policies are not sensible from the perspective of law, order, justice, or safety – only racialized terror.

Those within the establishment would tell you that Americans are broadly supportive of reductions in immigration, and that being ‘soft’ on the matter in the current climate is a political suicide. Often cited is a poll from 2024 that showed 54% of Americans supported mass deportations.

This number may seem like a consensus, but in fact it is surprisingly low for a culture that has had to entertain baseless conspiracy theories about our immigration system spewed by Donald Trump for almost ten years without substantive opposition or challenge. Despite Trump’s baseless ravings, The facts remain: immigrants, undocumented or not, commit significantly less crime than native born citizens. Undocumented people are not resource drains and in fact are a massive net positive for the tax base – they pay vast sums into programs that they are unable to benefit from, like social security and unemployment insurance. There is not any credible evidence that countries are emptying prisons or mental asylums into the United States, nor of a coordinated effort by any noteworthy gang or foreign organization to ‘invade’ us by way of our immigration system. There is a similar lack of evidence that immigrants are being systemically imported to influence election results. Non-citizens cannot vote and have not been shown to even attempt to vote illegally to any meaningful degree as a population. The border has never been, under any modern administration, a turnstile that simply allows any and all people to waltz through, nor would it be at risk of becoming this way if ICE and even CBP were abolished tomorrow.

Our real takeaway from the 54% figure should be that in spite of one side having free reign to invent reality while the other entirely ceded and played into their make believe framing of the issue, consent could still only be manufactured by a narrow margin. This consent has also totally collapsed as it comes into contact with reality and the cruelty required to enforce a policy of mass deportation is actually put into practice.

While it is true that our country has a sizable non-citizen population that needs to be dealt with, the most humane and cost effective solution to an epidemic of otherwise law-abiding undocumented people should be documentation – not concentration camps. The fact that this extremely reasonable position has long held virtually no representation in the halls of power is in part to blame for our country’s collective spiral into delusional fixation on immigration the root of all the evil in our society. Every heavily armed proudboy decked out in tactical gear, every tear gas canister, every private prison getting paid by the bed represents tax dollars that could go toward actually processing peoples’ applications at a fraction of the cost in money and pain. Given a path to become legally documented, most undocumented people would gladly follow the legal process to do so. They are, in fact, more likely to show up for their court hearings than the population at large. It is our own system, not their unwillingness to be a part of our society, that keeps immigrants in a purgatory where they have few rights or protections.

Undocumented workers are indispensable for capitalist elites because they can be paid less than minimum wage, they cannot collect benefits, and they have little recourse against any abuse due to their being outside the system. In agriculture alone, non-citizens represent 66% of the workforce. The zeal with which ICE is enforcing mass deportations has exposed this forgotten basement of our economy, causing labor shortages that have been publicly lamented by the farmers.

The farmers are unable to simply raise wages until their demand for labor is met because the work is grueling and seasonal – citizens will simply not take these jobs at a wage the farmers can afford to pay. This exposes a fundamental issue with our supposed free market economy. If undocumented populations were granted the same rights, privileges, and opportunities as citizens, they also would not take these jobs. A desperate workforce who lack options is in fact a necessary ingredient for the machine to function. The fact that farmers overwhelmingly voted for a man who promises a campaign of terror against the undocumented, while relying on the labor of the undocumented, would seem contradictory until you consider the profits that can be reaped from a population driven further into the margins of our society. This only becomes a problem to the capitalist elites when Christian Nationalist elements motivated by sincere, rather than cynical, white supremacist ideology actually follow through on deporting too much of their cheap and exploitable labor force.

Apartheid systems allow capitalists to produce super profits by extracting wealth and labor from out groups, with which they may bribe party loyalists. When the working class feels disaffected by the systemic undermining of their quality of life by an increasingly rapacious and monopolistic capitalist class, political elites may shield themselves by diverting this rage toward these disposable groups. Capitalism and colonialism should be understood as inexorably intertwined for this reason.

Fascism is also therefore not a departure from our American roots, but the embracing of them. It is capitalism, a system dependent on exploitation and the ideologies which enable exploitation, removing the mask of performative liberal democracy. It is a cult of tradition, where the tradition is state sanctioned murder, theft, and terror justified by delusions of racial and cultural superiority. It is state and corporate power in open incestuous collaboration to achieve these goals by way of convincing the population they represent a return to past glory.

The ideologically committed fascist in fact understands our history and the role of our state more than the standard liberal or conservative. American capitalism was always fueled by colonial exploitation, not innovation. Rather than acting like stark material inequalities are a mysterious and unfortunate accident like liberal elites, fascists romanticize these inequalities as just, natural, and worth explicitly preserving with violence. The fascist romanticizes America’s legacy not as one of plucky enterprise, but more accurately one wherein the average, white, able bodied man could expect land, work, a decent standard of living, and a wife who was culturally consigned to domestic servitude and materially prevented from having her own wealth. They understand that this promise was always fueled by westward expansion into a deep well of land, resources, and humans to exploit, as well as various violently enforced ethnic, gender, and identity based apartheid systems.

The fascist seeks meaning, identity, and adventure through the endless conquest of an othered outsider. These outsiders can include oppressed groups, sincere alternatives to the dogma of endless growth or the competing imperial ambitions of other capitalist nation states. The fascist in their zeal for conquest against the colonized, both in other nations and within the homeland, provide the capitalist with land, resources and humans to burn for firewood. In exchange the capitalist provides the fascist with a share of the profits, a cultural zeitgeist that reinforces their ideology, and through the state (with which he is totally intertwined under fascism) a monopoly on violence which allows the fascist to act out sadistic cruelty within the boundaries of the law.

ICE and its war on left-leaning cities should be understood as a reward to Trump’s most loyal followers, both the ones yearning for the chance to inflict harm upon the out-group themselves and others who consume that harm as content. It is much less harmful to the power, wealth, and status of the capitalist elite to provide weak sadists the chance to feel illusory strength through the identification with state power than it would be to provide healthcare, fund social programs, or end unfettered corruption. For that reason, capitalists will always ultimately align with fascist movements, and will always be inherently colonial.

Capital serves to pacify those who abhor cruelty and exploitation by flattening, obfuscating, and gamifying colonial exploitation. It converts theft, injustice, and atrocities into palatable numbers on a spreadsheet like an insatiable mother bird digesting a worm into a fine, textureless paste that we all need to survive. Most of us would not kill an innocent family and take their possessions to enrich ourselves, but we would purchase products made cheaper by exploitation, or have a 401k tied to companies that create excess value through colonial relations. The capitalist converts all of us who seek to meet our basic needs into co-conspirators, and makes a hypocrite out of any who acknowledge capital as the ground flesh and blood of fellow humans and other living beings.

Still, the monopolistic nature of capitalism means that the in group will continue to shrink as the demand for disposable populations increases. Trump’s aggressive posturing against Greenland is showing Europe that their whiteness does not save them from being treated as vassals in the same manner that we treat the global south. Cubans and Venezuelans, who supported Trump at high rates, are discovering that no amount of performative patriotism will save their families from racist ICE officers. American citizens who criticize the government are finding our opponents increasingly seeking to place our distaste outside the boundaries of the law, to name a few.

As we know, this is nothing new. For all of our belief in human rights and compassion, most of us have been trained by sinister ideologies to draw a circle in our minds around groups for whom these rights should not apply, to whom this compassion should not extend. We believe it is a matter of safety, criminality, or that the situation is nuanced. We live within a narrow spectrum of belief that reinforces the infallibility of existing power structures on both ends.

As previously mentioned, DHS was created to support the war effort at home. When, as part of this effort, places like Guantanamo Bay were created to torture people without trial, our government worked to place these people within that circle of nonpersons, calling them terrorists who do not deserve human rights. Even at the time, as someone who would have called torture wrong, I allowed myself to believe this label, ‘terrorist’ injected just enough nuance into the situation to give me doubt. I did not realize then that racism and ignorance had created a double standard within me – that word, terrorist, was always aggressively paired with images of dark skinned, bearded men who dressed, lived, and spoke differently than me. These ‘terrorists’ were portrayed as aggressive, fanatical and difficult to reason with, and for that reason our lofty values of human rights could not always so easily be applied.

When that word, terrorist, was used to justify the execution of two white, law abiding citizens in the streets of one of our own cities, that ability to separate oneself from the language used to justify state terrorism was shattered for many. For those who fit that description, the violence our system justifies has suddenly become intensely personal like never before.

That violence, though, has always been inherent – so inherent that we trained ourselves to accept shocking amounts of it as background noise. For those who considered ourselves compassionate and progressive,we may have shaken our heads when the headlines told us that 200,000 civilians were killed in Iraq, that 30 men were still being held in Guantanamo bay without trial or charges after 22 years, that 64,000 children have been killed or maimed in Gaza, that 2600 black people have been killed by police since 2000 and so on – but eventually most of us would keep scrolling, finish our coffees, and head off to work. In these moments, we drew our own circles – even if the death of these people is regrettable, we could accept it as a normal part of life to occasionally read about before moving on. We carved out our own place within a permission structure that has long existed, one which deems the deaths and dehumanization of certain people as the cost of doing business.

For those who feel that violence more personally in light of recent events, fear and anger toward your leaders is understandable. What you must also understand, if we are all to unite and defeat this evil, is that what you are feeling is nothing new. Many around the world and within our country can also remember the first time they witnessed someone like them be murdered and slandered. They recall watching one side of the political establishment celebrate while the other says a few hollow words without any real follow through. They remember losing their faith in the notion that the system has any interest in protecting them as people simply moved on, viewing these systems as a bit flawed, but tenable overall.

What we all need to realize, though, is that these systems are not tenable for humans or other living things. They exploit by design, dehumanize by design, and give the illusion of free thought by design while carefully using all of the tools at their disposal to manufacture narratives which enable the obscenity and excesses of power.

Once we have embraced a truly anti-colonial mindset, wherein we erase the lines between ourselves and the groups we are taught to passively or explicitly dehumanize, aggressively work inwardly and outwardly toward an actually universal sense of justice, and see our struggle as a struggle for the dignity of all, we are able to understand why the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good are so easily accepted by our ruling class.

Within their minds is an already airtight permission structure, built over decades, which justifies the deaths of certain disposable people, whether that justification is in the form of enthusiasm or mere toleration. To them, refusing to support the abolition of a slave catcher patrol that murdered two citizen dissidents is not a radical betrayal of their values, or any kind of departure from business as they usually conduct it.

It is, to them, a simple matter of widening the circle.

Widening the Circle

About The Author

CJ Sheen

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