The chaos, cruelty, and overreach of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation obsession has been on full display in our communities in recent days, with militarized, masked ICE agents swarming courthouses, worksites, and entire neighborhoods in cities including Minneapolis, San Diego, and L.A. in order to abduct contributors, spouses, parents, and even children.
Miller’s lifelong maniacal preoccupation with vilifying immigrants reached new autocratic heights this past weekend, when the Trump administration used peaceful community pushback to ICE raids in L.A. as an excuse to deploy California National Guard against Americans protesting the senseless arrests of immigrant day laborers vital to the local industries and the economy. The state has since sued the Trump administration, arguing that he “illegally acted to federalize the National Guard.”
Not only is the Trump administration’s escalation an attack on our values and personal freedoms, Miller wants to instigate disorder, in order to push through the big, ugly budget bill that would turbocharge his nativist fever dreams and make ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the nation. And what we have already seen has been enough of a terrifying preview of what that would look like.
1/2 Today in Minneapolis, ICE/FBI raided a taco restaurant, yes, you read that correctly, a taco restaurant, dressed in full battle gear—long guns, body armor, the whole damn militarized show. Do they think they’re in a war zone? This is about instilling terror, rooted in racism. It won’t work.
— Jennifer ✨Get In Good Trouble (@thejenniwren.teamlh.social) 2025-06-03T22:42:47.525Z
Last week in Minnesota, federal agents dressed up in full tactical gear to surround a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis. But as has been the case in many cities across the nation, angered community members have stood up for their immigrant neighbors. Pastor Ingrid Rasmussen confronted the Minneapolis Police Chief over his department assisting with crowd control during the operation, highlighting just one of the ways that local entanglements with ICE can harm communities. “You stand in my church,” Pastor Rasmussen. “You’re not listening to me. You stand in my church. You promised a better relationship.”
“They had a white van, a black van and a tank. For a raid, that’s pretty excessive,” another demonstrator said. “And then coming into a brown community and doing this, because we have all kinds of immigrants, not just Latinos.”
WATCH: “You stand in my church. You promised me.”A Minneapolis pastor confronts the chief of police about helping ICE
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2025-06-04T13:03:22.457Z
Excessive doesn’t even begin to describe the administration’s aggression in L.A., where Trump and Miller hijacked California National Guard troops in a deliberate provocation against peaceful demonstrators nauseated over the targeting of local workers. Miller has been screeching at ICE officials to arrest more workers, including demanding they raid Home Depots and 7-Elevens, continuing to prove it’s not about community safety, it’s about numbers. When community members dared to push back over the arrests, Trump and Miller deployed troops to the city, using immigration as their excuse to assault our freedoms.
In its rush to invade L.A., the Trump administration also sent troops with “no federal funding available for food, water, fuel and lodging,” a source told the San Francisco Chronicle. Since then, Trump has also moved to activate hundreds of U.S. Marines against the American people.
Just to recap, Trump has taken the extraordinary step of federalizing 2000 member of the California National Guard — over the objections of the state’s governor — in response to a protest that currently involves A FEW DOZEN PEOPLE AT A HOME DEPOT
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2025-06-08T02:50:10.977Z
None of this should be surprising. Last year, Miller, who is actually the one in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, openly boasted about plans to deploy National Guard troops and federal officers in states he views as the opposition. “In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military,” Radley Balko wrote at The Watch last year. “Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants.” But first, they needed an excuse – no matter how unjustified – to enter communities.
Further examples of state-sanctioned violence and the tactics of autocratic regimes have also been on display. For peacefully observing immigration enforcement activity – a perfectly legal act – SEIU California President David Huerta was violently arrested, detained, and now faces federal charges.
This is police and ICE brutality and we cannot sit back and just let it happen.Not in Los Angeles.
— Isaac G. Bryan (@ib2real.bsky.social) 2025-06-06T22:27:43.549Z
“What happened to me is not about me; This is about something much bigger,” he said. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.” Public pushback to his arrest from labor unions, advocates, and the public has been strong and unified.
HAPPENING NOW: 📍Washington, DCWe are rallying in solidarity with our union brother and @seiuca.bsky.social President David Huerta. From Massachusetts to California, we call for his immediate release and for an end to ICE raids that are tearing our communities apart. #FreeDavidEndRaids
#FreeDavidEndRaids
In further unprovoked violence at the hands of authorities, a video widely shared on social media appeared to show an officer intentionally targeting an Australian news crew and injuring a reporter. During subsequent protests, police also arrested a CNN reporter live on air. It’s again worth remembering that Trump has steadily attacked the media since descending the escalators of Trump Tower a decade ago:
Watch the slow motion: it appears to me that the officers discuss the photographer and reporter before the one on the end fires on them (it looks to me like he's aiming at the camera, not the reporter, but you decide)
Meanwhile, ICE’s sweeping arrests have targeted young people like Georgia college student Ximena Arias-Cristobal and Massachusetts high school student Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, neither of whom have any criminal record at all and are valued members of their communities. Both have since been released by federal judges. “Nobody should be in here,” Gomes da Silva said about conditions in detention. “Most people in there are all workers. They all got caught going to work. These people have families.” CBS News reported that “he served as a translator for the other men in the room and cried when he informed them that their paperwork said they were being deported.”
@nbcnews The attorney for #Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, the #Massachusetts teen who was detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice, spoke ahead of his release on bond. @NBC10 Boston
Other contributors targeted by ICE include immigrants who are trying to follow the rules by attending their immigration court dates only to be abducted and separated from their families. This was a deplorable trend that began during the first Trump administration to immense pushback from judges, prosecutors, and other legal experts, who warned that such arrests trampled on public safety and trust in the judicial system. Instead of heeding such warnings, the second Trump administration has given a greenlight to continue this shameful practice.
The results are now headlines like “Children zip-tied at San Antonio immigration court in new crackdown.” MySA reported that “[t]he children — two boys and a girl who appeared to be between the ages of 9 and 12 years old — were detained and zip-tied, along with adults who appeared to be relatives, after an immigration judge had dismissed their case, according to Carolina Rivera, an immigration attorney who serves as a federal advocate and liaison for CLINIC.”
Three children. Ages 9 to 12. Zip tied at immigration court.Their cases had just been dismissed.They should no longer have been subjected to deportation proceedings.Instead, ICE zip-tied them.This is not law enforcement.This is cruelty by design.Please watch, share, and don’t look away.
— Eliza Orlins (@elizaorlins.bsky.social) 2025-06-02T03:13:22.286Z
Video obtained by @thecity.nyc earlier today as courthouse arrests continue, a federal agent appears to point a taser at court watchers during the arrest of another person leaving immigration court at 290 Broadway.
— Gwynne Hogan (@gwynnefitz.bsky.social) 2025-06-09T17:12:44.162Z
Meanwhile, THE CITY reporter Gwynne Hogan said that a federal agent in New York City appeared “to point a taser at court watchers during the arrest of another person leaving immigration court at 290 Broadway.” Agents also arrested a Queens, NY pastor who, like SEIU California’s Huerta, was simply trying to observe these courthouse arrests, Hogan further reported. Rep. Dan Goldman (NY-10) condemned ICE’s masked arrests as “Gestapo-like.”
“This is Gestapo-like behavior, where plainclothes officers wearing masks are terrorizing immigrants who are doing the right thing by going to court, following up on their immigration proceedings, and trying to come into this country lawfully,” Rep. Goldman said. “These are routine appearances, they’re updates, they’re administrative, there is no reason for anyone to have expected anything unusual to happen today, and yet they’re ripped away from their families, from their communities.”
“I’m also, as a Jew, very familiar with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, and other forms of secret law enforcement in Russia and elsewhere, that used fear and intimidation under the cover of night, under the cover of masks, in order to terrorize people that they did not like,” Rep. Goldman continued.
Of course, Trump’s unhinged immigration arrests and unjustified provocation in California should worry all Americans. Trump has already warned that he’s seeking to send U.S. citizens to foreign gulags. “Trump’s troop deployment is a warning sign for what comes next, legal scholars fear,” POLITICO reports. “Trump has cited a provision of U.S. law that allows the president to use the National Guard to suppress the ‘danger of a rebellion.’”
But as America’s Voice Research Associate Yuna Oh has previously said, while under the pretext of going after immigrants, Trump has been quite clear that his designs for directing the military against the American people are much more expansive. And this shouldn’t be a surprise.
Trump says anybody who protests the military parade on Sunday will be met with “very heavy force”
“In a rally in Iowa early last year, he already promised to use the military to ‘get crime out of our cities’ and ‘replace local law enforcement in democratic cities to squelch protests.’” She continued: “There is a much bigger ploy the right is aiming toward. Mass deportation is a vehicle used to bring authoritarian power and process to the US, turning the power of the federal government to the challenge of ethnic purges.” Following the administration’s provocation in L.A., and Trump’s subsequent promise this week to use force against the American people if they continue to protest his actions, we’re seeing the ploy in action.
