Klaus Marre 06/17/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
To better understand how ICE terrorizes US communities, it’s important to know how it affects children when they see masked goons round up people on the streets, leaving care-giving adults in fear. Our recent series documented just that.
According to the FBI’s definition, by carrying out “violent, criminal acts” to “further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature,” ICE is the best-funded domestic terrorist organization in the United States.
Now, if you argue that this definition stems from the previous administration, here is another one from Donald Trump’s first term in office.
It says that domestic terrorism involves “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States.” That certainly applies, even though ICE agents routinely get a pass for committing all manner of crimes against the civilian population of the United States.
And we’re not just talking about the Americans who were directly killed or injured but also the immigrants who died in custody or through negligence.
The key is that these acts are defined as intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” and there is no doubt that this is what’s happening.
After all, ICE isn’t exactly shy about what it is doing.
To be fair, there is a problem with using the Trump administration’s own domestic terrorism definition. That’s because it also states that those dangerous acts are intended to “influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion” or “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”
While there is plenty of kidnapping going on, and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the beginning of the year might be viewed as assassinations, ICE is not trying to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; it is carrying it out by using those tactics.
Which is why Republicans in Congress just gave ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol another $70 billion through the end of Trump’s term to limit the Democrats’ ability to curb the power of these lawless agencies if they manage to win the midterms.
So, by definition, the president’s immigrant hunters are engaging in a form of domestic terrorism; it just happens to be government-sponsored, which means that nobody is getting prosecuted for any of it — at least not for the next couple of years.
However, it is important to remember that there are different kinds of terror.
Today, we don’t want to talk about the specific crimes that masked federal thugs are committing to intimidate regular Americans and immigrants — the ones we primarily know about because brave patriots have recorded them.
We also don’t want to talk about the atrocities being committed behind closed doors in detention centers, or the neglect suffered by those kept there.
We don’t want to talk about citizens being wrongfully whisked away.
Instead, we want to talk about the kind of terror that one of our interns reported on in a four-part series documenting the impact that “Operation Metro Surge” had on students in Minnesota at the start of this year.
We are doing this for two reasons: The first is that we are very proud of our Mentor Apprenticeship Program and the work that the young reporters do when they come to us to learn about journalism. The second is to remind people that this government terror reaches far beyond the immigrants who now live in fear for themselves and loved ones, or the protesters who are roughed up, followed, held at gunpoint, or arrested.
In talking to students, teachers, a superintendent and a child psychologist, what our intern found is that living in a state resembling an occupation by an outside force was extremely traumatizing for many of these children.
And we don’t just mean the dozens of kids who were detained or their friends and family members.
This trauma also extends to students who were familiar with the places where Good and Pretti were killed by government agents, or who got to know the smell of tear gas.
Teachers told stories of younger children being frozen in fear when ICE was nearby and others who were puzzled about not hearing Spanish being spoken in the hallways of their schools anymore.
These kids don’t view their own government as a positive force in their lives. Instead, they experienced it as an army of masked and weapon-wielding goons trying to intimidate them and their communities — similar to what they learned about foreign dictatorships in their world history classes.
Or, as one of the students interviewed for the series said, “It feels like we’re advocating for and fighting for the exact same things that generations before us have been fighting for.”
We urge readers to read the entire series — not only because it is important but also because it ultimately inspires hope.
You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 here.
What our reporter found is that many students in Minneapolis, along with their teachers and school administrators, took action to stand up to the brutality of the Trump administration.
They marched in sub-zero temperatures, carried whistles to alert their peers to the local presence of ICE, shared tips of how to behave when confronted by government agents, and, in general, were there for each other.
Perhaps most importantly, they realized that even an overwhelming government force that seems intent on intimidating their communities is not all-powerful.
Because, in the end, the people of Minneapolis, through protests and recording ICE’s misdeeds and efforts to terrorize them, built up enough pressure to force the administration to scale down Operation Metro Surge.
It wasn’t a perfect victory because there has been precious little accountability on the ground and in Washington, DC, for those crimes. ICE is still getting a blank check, and its terror campaign has moved on to new targets — less visible, because of the backlash.
Still, in the end, the students and adults covered in the series didn’t just learn a valuable lesson, they also taught one to everybody else: Nothing is inevitable – and resistance is not futile.
- Klaus MarreKlaus Marre, a former congressional reporter, is a senior editor for US politics at WhoWhatWhy. He writes regularly here, and you can also follow him on Bluesky and Substack.
