The scenes out of Minneapolis have been horrifying. The city at times has seemed unrecognizable. ICE agents roam the streets, drag people from their homes, pull them from vehicles, detain them, even kill them.
When an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renée Good, a mom and US citizen observing federal agents, it felt like an inflection point. Within days, protests emerged around the city, state, and country demanding that ICE agents leave their communities. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in even more troops to Minnesota as Gov. Tim Walz has mobilized the Minnesota National Guard while calling for protesters to demonstrate peacefully.
ICE and other immigration agents are operating in ways we’ve never seen before in this country. But their tactics and weapons are also not entirely new.
Investigative journalist Radley Balko is a writer and reporter who can connect those dots—and someone I’ve been following for years. He’s written extensively about the militarization of police and how it’s tied to America’s long-running war on drugs. But even he describes what he’s seeing today as one of his “worst fever dreams.” “Law enforcement leaders around the country are horrified by what they’re seeing,” Balko told me on this week’s More To The Story. “Nobody thinks that how Trump is using law enforcement right now is appropriate or consistent with the principles of a free society.”
For this week’s episode, Radley and I talked about the latest from Minneapolis; his recent podcast, Collateral Damage, all about the US’s drug war; and whether the attack on Venezuela could lead to even more migration to the US from South and Central America.
I hope you give it a listen.
—Al Letson
