A Comparative Look at ICE and the minneapolis police department

On January 7th, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer brutally murdered Renée Good while she pulled out of her driveway. Just seventeen days later on January 24th, Alex Pretti was executed in broad daylight on the ground. Both of these extrajudicial killings happened just a few miles away from where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd; Chauvin pressed down his knee on Floyd's neck for roughly the same amount of time it might take to drive to either of the locations where Good or Pretti were murdered.What happened in Operation Metro Surge is not new. What happened in Operation Metro Surge is not new. It is not unique to ICE, and it is not the SS or the SA: it is as American as apple pie. ICE is an unmasking of terror that police and other agencies have been committing against minorities for years. Many of the criticisms leveled against ICE can be leveled, and I will level them against the police force.

[Comments] made by members of the Minneapolis Police Department MPD reveal the ugliness of the police force and its ideological motivations to 'uphold' the law, but the lack of accountability and continual offenses by different--and sometimes, the same--officers make clear that these are systemic flaws.

Police forces throughout the nation hold ideological biases and ties to the far right, just as ICE currently does. It's just that ICE says the quiet part out loud. While the situations around the murders were indeed very different with George Floyd, the prejudice that ICE and the Minneapolis Police Department cultivated is one and the same. It has become increasingly clear, if not utterly obvious, that ICE has used far-right dog whistles to recruit the vilest of our society. These dog whistles include, "Which way Western Man?" (a reference to a neo-Nazi book of the same name), "Defend the Homeland," and more. This hatred also festered within police departments, as the MPD was a hotbed of racism. According to the Investigation of the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department made by the Department of Justice and US Attorney's Office in 2023, in the response to George Floyd's death and the BLM protests, several officers were recorded saying things like, "We are going to make sure you and all of the Black Lives supporters are wiped off the face of the Earth." This officer was not fired. In 2015, an officer who stopped four Somali teenagers began by threatening, "If you f*** with me, I'm gonna break your leg before you even get a chance to run." When one teenager told him he was racist, the officer responded, "Yep, and I'm proud of it." He added, "Do you remember what happened in Black Hawk Down when we killed a bunch of you folk? I'm proud of that... We didn't finish the job over there... if we had... you guys wouldn't be over here right now." This officer was rightfully fired but only after the recording went viral. Clearly, this policing and harassment of the Somali community in Minneapolis is not a new phenomenon with ICE. These comments made by members of the MPD reveal the ugliness of the police force and its ideological motivations to "uphold" the law, but the lack of accountability and continual offenses by different--and sometimes, the same--officers make clear that these are systemic flaws.

This is not an issue restricted to Minneapolis, as police officers have had connections to hate groups like the Klan and use their status as police to try to recruit other officers throughout the nation. Very rarely are their actions ever punished by the courts, as the police department tends to either ignore or fire them. 

Thus, seeing how Minneapolis police behaved and other police officers throughout the nation hold explicitly racist views, it is clear that ICE is simply a new development of this very old problem in the United States. The struggle to abolish ICE is simply a new front to abolish/defund the police. It is an echo from the outcries of Black Lives Matter, of the outcry against police brutality in the urban North in the 1960s and 1970s, and of local police collaboration with the Klan throughout US history.