Newsletter January 2026
F*ckin’ b*tch! Racism, misogyny and homophobia: the toxic ingredients of ICE violence
For the past year, Trump’s masked presidential militia, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), has been detaining and deporting immigrants of color, whether documented or not. Ten of thousands have been shipped to countries they’ve never lived in or have no connection to, sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center or Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) concentration camp in El Salvador, imprisoned in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” in appalling conditions, or held in children’s camps in Texas.
In an escalation that began in June 2025, Trump has systematically unleashed these ICE deployments in “blue” (Democratic) cities and states. Cities that have enacted “sanctuary” laws and policies to protect immigrants from the federal government’s unlawful actions have been prime targets.
ICE was created when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2002 in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. DHS and ICE have been mired in controversy ever since. ICE’s initial mission (“to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities”) made it a tool for state abuse from the very beginning. Muslim, Arab and South Asia citizens and immigrants were singled out as potential terrorists, and repeatedly experienced discriminatory treatment at the hands of federal immigration authorities and law enforcement. “Rather than first seeking to identify suspected terrorists, the government initiated harsh law enforcement actions against whole communities with the hope that some of those caught might be terrorist suspects,” wrote the Immigration Policy Center back in May 2004. A pattern was established; arrest and detain first, ask questions later.
Today, ICE’s mission has shifted to “protect[ing] America from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.” Conflating illegal immigration with threats to national security and public safety is obviously wrong, especially since immigrants are known to commit crimes at a much lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.
Tom Homan, a career DHS official appointed to head ICE at the beginning of the first Trump administration, led this revving up of ICE’s profile and activity. He pledged to “take the shackles off ICE,” and famously warned undocumented immigrants: “You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” Family separation became official Trump policy in an attempt to deter and punish migrants. Latin American and Muslim communities were early and consistent targets.
In Trump’s second term, the Administration sought and obtained a vastly increased budget for ICE in the so-called One Big Beautiful Budget Bill Act adopted by Congress in July 2025. From $6 billion/year just 10 years ago, ICE now has $10 billion/year plus an additional $75 billion over four years at its disposal--more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Another $45 billion can be spent on immigration detention facilities. The second Trump Administration gave ICE a goal of deporting one million people a year, making arrests and deportation (rather than processing cases and welcoming immigrants) the overwhelming focus of the U.S. immigration system under Trump 2.0.
The result? ICE has for months been assaulting U.S. residents in the name of immigration enforcement, allegedly against the “worst of the worst” criminals. Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), Charlotte (North Carolina), Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City have all been subjected to ICE violence and unlawful conduct. The recent execution-style murder by ICE of Minnesotan Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse with the Veterans Administration, is only the latest horror.
It’s worth noting that under U.S. law, undocumented presence in the U.S. isn’t in and of itself a crime. Violations of immigration law, such as overstaying a visa or working without authorization, may subject someone to deportation, but they are not considered criminal offences.
But never mind that! The Trump Administration is now openly using ICE not only to round up foreign criminals, but also any and all migrants of color, whatever their status. Moreover, the Trump regime have increasingly used ICE to intimidate and attack so-called “domestic terrorists,” that is, any kind of opposition to Trump policies, notably anti-fascist and anti-ICE activism – which is speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Remember that Trump had issued an Executive Order in September 20025 entitled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, that he obviously intended to use to curb political speech and activism. Greg Bovino, a senior officer in the U.S. Border Patrol, commanded the Trump administration's ICE crackdown in major cities: "What we see when folks get swept up, as you say, oftentimes it's as agitators, as rioters, and now I call them anarchists," Bovino told reporters on January 20, 2026, “not ordinary citizens, Ma, Pa America."Yet the people bravely and peacefully opposing ICE actions across the U.S. look precisely to me like “ordinary citizens.” They have elevated peaceful resistance to an art, observing and filming of ICE violence and illegality and warning neighbors with whistles, CB radios and car alarms. Other approaches have relied on ridiculing and shaming ICE and expressing disgust and disapproval with signs, songs and costumes. Alex Pretti himself was calmly filming ICE agents and helping a woman who had been thrown to the ground when he was pepper sprayed, beaten and shot ten times. Merely hours after Pretti was killed, Minnesotans were out on the streets again. Commentators have noted that the Trump Administration has no doubt been surprised at how strongly Americans disapprove of its attacks on migrants.
Bovino, in a press conference on January 25, a day after Pretti was murdered, issued this threat in response to these civic actions: “Calling law enforcement names like Gestapo, or using the term kidnapping. That is a choice… there are actions and consequences that come from these choices… I think we saw that yesterday.” Disgusting.
The brew of racism, misogyny and homophobia propelling ICE violence is worth analyzing.
The racism is the most obvious. In Minnesota, ICE initially targeted the Somali community after a far-right YouTube agitator, 23-year old Nick Shirley, claimed to be uncovering fraud in daycare services run by Somali immigrants. (He didn’t, and the significant fraud that existed was uncovered in 2020, with more than 90 culprits charged and sentenced since then).
The Somali community is 100,000 strong in Minnesota. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somalia-born U.S. citizen who criticizes Trump vigorously, has been subjected to repeated attacks by Trump. On January 13, Trump posted a warning on his Truth Social account: “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” On January 19, he called for Omar’s jailing or deportation in a typically unhinged rant on Truth Social. The Congresswoman represents Minneapolis.
When other Minnesotans came out to support and defend their Somali neighbors by filming and following ICE and delivering food to those afraid to leave their houses, Trump unleashed more ICE agents (now numbering at least 3,000) across the state. He also threatened to illegally deploy the U.S. military by invoking the Insurrection Act. Trump’s Justice Department issued subpoenas to investigate Governor Tim Walz (who was Kamala Harris’ VP candidate), Minnesota Attorney-General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and others for their vocal opposition to ICE’s operations.
ICE rapidly moved beyond Minnesota’s Somali community. Across the state, armed and masked ICE agents are sweeping up, brutalizing, beating and detaining other non-white folks in defiance of the law and the U.S. Constitution. ICE agents ram their cars into people’s vehicles, smash their car windows, bust down the front doors of their homes, tear gas them, handcuff them and grab them off the street, all without warrants and usually without even knowing who they’re seizing. Racial profiling is the main tactic, one the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court authorized on an emergency basis (via the infamous shadow docket, where consequential decisions are made before a case has been argued in full) in September 2025 in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a concurring opinion in Vasquez Perdomo, claimed that citizens and legal immigrants had nothing to fear from racial profiling: “Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” Activists now call these racially motivated ICE stops “Kavanaugh stops.”
And that’s of course not at all what’s been happening! Stops are neither brief, nor are people promptly free to go. Thousands of U.S. citizens (including indigenous persons!) and lawful immigrants (permanent residents, visa holders and asylum claimants) have been abducted and detained, often violently, despite asserting their right to be in the country. Children, teenagers and the elderly have been taken. A U.S. citizen grandfather of Hmong origin was escorted out of his house wearing only a blanket, underwear and a pair of Crocs in minus 23C (minus 10F) weather. A 12-year old Venezuelan boy legally in the U.S. was grabbed in Minnesota and sent to a detention center in San Antonio, Texas. Liam Ramos, a five-year old Ecuadorian boy whose entire family was legally in the U.S., was coming home with his father when he was detained and flown to a detention center in Texas: yes, a five-year old! A two-year old Ecuadorian girl whose family is seeking asylum was detained and moved to Texas before being finally released. Non-white off-duty local police have been stopped and asked for their papers. Anyone not looking white is at risk of a Kavanaugh stop.
Some folks have disappeared into detention and cannot be found. Several have died in custody, some clearly murdered by DHS agents. The vast majority (75%) have no criminal record.
These actions by ICE blatantly violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures, a constitutional protection which applies to anyone on U.S. soil, citizen or non-citizen, documented or undocumented. ICE has also, since May 2025, quietly promoted a policy claiming their agents can enter a home without a judicial warrant – in complete violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Arrest and detention on the basis of race aren’t new in the U.S. So-called “fugitive slave patrols” once prowled the U.S. to grab Black people, since by definition Black people must have been runaways. Were you a free Black person? Slave patrols didn’t care – they simply deported you back to the South to be re-enslaved. Later on, Jim Crow segregation laws continued to allow law enforcement to stop and question Black persons for any number of reasons, or no reason at all, other than being Black. Meanwhile, the federal government kidnapped Indigenous children to send them to residential schools far away from their communities. And until 2014, New York City, where I live, had an official policy of “stopping and frisking” Black and brown persons without probable cause and without a warrant. It’s an entrenched American custom that quickly rears its head whenever allowed by courts or legislatures.
Misogyny and homophobia complete the picture.
ICE agents are almost all male, and they perform aggressive, hyper-dominant masculinity. Although not part of the military, they use military-style gear, including helmets and military grade weapons. They wear camouflage and masks, are not identified by name and badge number, drive unmarked cars, and routinely use tear gas and pepper spray in their interactions with peaceful protesters, observers and bystanders. They speak in intimidating tones and escalate to violence and threats quickly. Unfit and undisciplined, they evidently consider peaceful observers and protesters as legitimate shooting targets. “It’s like Call of Duty [military video game],” an agent can be heard saying on a TV reporter’s mic while shooting rubber bullets at “ordinary citizens,” barely an hour after Pretti was killed. “So cool, huh?” An agent next to him urges others to “Take your shot! Take your shot!”
ICE and DHS recruitment posters are cartoonish in their appeal to machismo. Cowboys, muscle men, Mad Max, Star War images abound. Many posters depict U.S. soldiers in the American West during the genocide of Indigenous peoples, while a post glorifies Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas.
Nazi imagery is also common. Bovino, who is a little man (said to be 1m 62 or 5 feet 4 inches), wears the kind of long coat and cross-body leather strap prized by Nazi officers, with tear gas canisters dangling from his flak jacket. He also has a tendency to Sieg Heil.
This can perhaps help explain the not insignificant numbers of ICE agents who, behind those masks, appear to be Black or brown men themselves. Some are evidently immigrants. Are they hoping to escape racial targeting by becoming the Black or brown driver on the plantation, the one who rules over other enslaved persons? By showing that they too can perform white supremacy? Perhaps. But performing dominant masculinity is no doubt also a draw for men who might otherwise be considered “beta” -- subordinate or second rate. Minnesota-based sociologist Nicole Bedera, co-founder of the anti-violence consulting group Beyond Compliance, explained in a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio that her research shows agents join ICE to obtain approval, status and power, and to affirm their masculinity in public.
In that context, violence against women has become an increasingly visible feature of ICE actions. Numerous videos show shocking displays of unprovoked attacks by ICE agents on unarmed civilians, including many women. A Latina woman brutally shoved to the ground by an ICE agent in front of her children in the hallway of an immigration courthouse in New York City, as she begged agents not to take her husband away. A pregnant woman handcuffed and dragged by one arm by ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis. A Latina child care worker aggressively dragged out of her workplace in Chicago, in front of parents and children, even as she yells that she has papers. ICE breaking the car window and cutting the seat belt of a brown woman in Minneapolis, hauling her out as she screams “I’m disabled!” Another video, taken in Minneapolis by a bystander, shows a handcuffed, small stature detainee wearing a peach colored jacket entering a single person porta-potty followed by an ICE agent. (ICE claims the detainee was male, but why would an ICE agent enter a porta-potty with any detainee, male or female?)
Then there’s ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting Renee Good dead in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026.
The many videos filmed by observers at different angles don’t leave doubt as to what happened: a brutal gunning down at point blank range of a woman peacefully observing ICE activity while sitting in her car. She is shot by Ross as she turns her wheels right and moves her vehicle slowly away from the other ICE agent to her left, who is demanding she get out of her car. The New York Times, in a careful review of all the footage available, concluded that Ross was never in danger of being hit by her vehicle, and had therefore no reason to open fire.
Bizarrely, Ross himself shared with far-right media the video he took with his own phone while circling Renee’s SUV and shooting her. As Ross approaches her car, we can see a calm Good say to him: ““That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross goes around the back of the SUV and films the Goods’ license plate. Becca Good, Renee’s wife, who is standing behind the car, says to him: “It’s OK. We don’t change our plates every morning. It will be the same plate when you come talk to us later. That’s fine.” Becca Good is obviously referring to the ICE practice of switching license plates so their vehicles are harder to track by civilian observers. With the Goods’ large black dog placidly looking out the back window as backdrop, Becca says to Ross, in a mocking tone: “I’m a U.S. citizen, former fucking veteran, disabled veteran. You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”
Ross, who meanwhile has moved to the front left side of the SUV, shoots Renee multiple times, and the SUV barrels down the street and crashes into a pole. We can hear Ross, as he films the SUV moving away, loudly exclaim: “Fuckin’ bitch!”
Becca is seen running in despair towards the SUV, where Renee is covered in blood and an airbag has deployed. Looking perfectly calm, Ross is filmed telling other ICE agents to call 911 while he walks to his own car and drives off. A physician who offers to check on Renee and perform CPR is denied access by ICE agents, one of whom is heard saying to the pleading doctor: “We don’t care!”
It’s heartbreaking and enraging.
Merely hours after Renee’s killing, Trump and his minions were already busy laying down a narrative that is all too familiar to women everywhere: she asked for it.
Almost immediately after the killing and before any investigation could be conducted into the events, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and a spokesperson for ICE, stated in a post on X that “one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them – an act of domestic terrorism”. Multiple ICE officers were hurt, she insisted, when numerous videos showed no such thing. Donald Trump repeated these claims in an inflammatory post on Truth Social that same day, adding the obvious lie that Renee Good had in fact run Ross over (“the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”). He repeated these lies in a later interview with the New York Times.
At a press briefing that evening, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused Renee Good of “domestic terrorism.” The magic words again. Good, Noem said, had been “stalking and impeding” ICE agents “all throughout the day” (it was 9:30 AM and she had just dropped off her son at school) before “weaponizing her vehicle” to “attempt to run down a law enforcement officer,” “an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to agents.” Noem even claimed Ross was injured and hospitalized after the event, when he was seen walking normally and driving away.
Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the lies, calling Renee a “deranged leftist,” described the interaction “classic terrorism” and insinuated that protesters are engaging in “domestic terror techniques.” Even more shockingly, Vance, a Yale-trained lawyer, went so far as to claim that ICE agents have absolute immunity for their actions – which they do not.
The night of Renee’s murder, Fox News provocateur Jesse Watters made clear to his audience exactly why she couldn’t be considered a victim, but someone who had brought this upon herself. Watters led his segment by describing Renee as a “self-proclaimed poet from Colorado, with pronouns in her bio.” Watters noted that she “left behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” There you have it. Of course, Watters didn’t mention that Renee had in fact received a prize from the Academy of American Poets, and that the father of her son was an Afghanistan war veteran who had since died. She deserved to die because she was a lesbian, an artist, a lefty, someone who was divorced from a man (rather than his widow).
All those characteristics, but especially lesbianism and divorce, are anathema to the Christian right. As for the rest: earning a living as a poet? She was obviously an anarchist and communist. Using pronouns (she/her)? She must have been a proponent of “gender ideology” and an ally of trans persons. Remember that Trump, on the first day of his second term, issued an executive order entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government that declared that “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” The entire American system, no less!
Defying authority and patriarchal control, not being subject to male authority in one’s family, mocking an ICE agent for his corpulence and his lack of manliness (“big boy”) and suggesting he go buy himself lunch: unforgivable. A British friend calling from London who had just seen Ross’ own video, asked me how on earth Ross thought this would exonerate him. I told him: “because the video makes clear that Renee and Becca are lesbians, and that they’re not afraid and not submissive.” They had it coming.
As Jill Filipovic recently noted in her Substack newsletter Throughline, white Christian evangelical thinking recognizes only two kinds of women: the obedient, submissive wife and mother, and the disobedient, unruly communist anarchist—the Trads and the Terrorists. Or, from an earlier era of feminist analysis, the Virgins and the Whores. As Filipovic writes, “There’s a lot of right-wing vitriol aimed at white women, Karens, and “wine moms” these days… it’s hard to ignore the undercurrent of betrayal in conservatives’ anger. There is the sense that white women were supposed to be theirs. And so there is additional rage when these particular women don’t obey.”
I can safely say that many women have heard that “fuckin’ bitch!” at one point or another in their life. When we refused to dance with a guy or to accept a drink from him. When we didn’t want to have sex with him. When we told him we were breaking up or divorcing him. When we objected to his behavior. That menacing tone is impossible to forget: “You deserve what’s about to come!”
A few days after Renee’s murder, the Trump administration announced it would be focusing its investigative efforts not on Ross but on Renee herself, her widow Becca, and local activist groups. This was so scandalous that six federal prosecutors resigned rather than comply.
Being brown, Black, a defiant woman, an Indigenous person, a lesbian, a trans person, a migrant, a progressive ally… In America, that is enough to be stripped of your rights and of your humanity. It was always thus, mind you. But it is ramping up in Trump’s America. Even Pretti is now blamed by Trump officials for his own death for lawfully carrying a handgun, despite the fact he never brandished nor unholstered it. So much for the right’s sacrosanct Second Amendment and right to bear arms.
Thankfully, the solidarity, courage and compassion shown by “Ma, Pa America” in the face of this latest onslaught has been heartwarming and inspiring. White people, including many white men, are showing up in large numbers, whether in Minnesota, Maine or Oregon. They are actively resisting: organizing rapid-response teams to help their neighbors with food and rides, keeping watch on schools and daycares, pushing local institutions to stop cooperating with ICE, filming ICE actions and engaging in protests despite the real dangers.
Margaret Killjoy, an independent journalist on Skywriter, wrote this on January 22 from Minneapolis: “I’ve been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I’ve never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here…. When I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE’s crimes…. I’ve never seen a population more united.” The fact that “wine moms” and older women are leading the resistance has to infuriate and emasculate the ICE Rambos.
Reporting from Minnesota, the Atlantic’s Adam Swerver saw the far-right’s assumptions shattering during the ICE surge : “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority.”
We can overcome if we don’t falter. We won’t know whether or when we’ll succeed--unless we keep actively and non-violently standing up for our rights and those of our neighbors, each in our own way. As I write this, Trump has removed Bovino from his role at ICE, although he’s sending in nefarious Tom Homan instead. Hopefully, the restraining order sought by Minnesota’s government two weeks ago will finally be allowed to rein in ICE. The U.S. Senate is now considering blocking funding for DHS unless reforms are enacted. The courts and Congress can help, but they’re not going to save us. Ordinary citizens have to keep the pressure on.
If you’d like to help in Minnesota, here is a list of vetted groups doing the brave and tireless work on the ground: www.standwithminnesota.com
In feminist solidarity for justice, freedom and yes, happiness. A luta continua!
FG