ICE is disappearing people.
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All of this is why I get uncomfortable with a certain kind of focus on the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the mistaken narrative that focus can create.
Don’t get me wrong: we •should• focus on those murders. We should mourn them. Alex was one of the nurses who cared for my father-in-law when he was in intensive care at the VA. My wife remembers how gentle he was, what a good listener. They were my neighbors. Please remember them both.
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Please remember them. Remember them, and then remember what they died for: fighting a much larger danger. Remember what they were fighting, •see• it, and •act•.
Do not let their deaths be in vain by making their deaths the only thing you see.
/end
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The KKK but with a budget the size of Russia’s military. Running mass detention camps.
Think about that for a minute.
Think about what it could mean, what it •already is•:
https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss
16/
@inthehands
From the wonderful post https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss you cited:
"…nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.""…the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II."
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@inthehands
From the wonderful post https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss you cited:
"…nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.""…the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II."
@inthehands
"…we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean." -
Please remember them. Remember them, and then remember what they died for: fighting a much larger danger. Remember what they were fighting, •see• it, and •act•.
Do not let their deaths be in vain by making their deaths the only thing you see.
/end
@inthehands Well said! #iceout
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@inthehands Well said! #iceout
@Pollinators @inthehands
I will emphasize some of your points when I call my Senators. -
ICE is disappearing people.
This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.
https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/
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@inthehands just what #campofsaints Steven Miller
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Not just more of the same.
Note that this eye-popping graph only includes ICE, and not CBP, which saw a similar explosion.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump
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That's a graph of the funding of Trump's personal army. Welcome to fascism.
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That's a graph of the funding of Trump's personal army. Welcome to fascism.
Theoretically, if they got rid of all the immigrants, I wonder what they would do with all the money?
I guess they would just return it and the budget would shrink and everybody would go home.
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It was the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that punctured the bubble of the comfortable and launched Minneapolis to the top of international news. I understand why that is: the whiteness of the victims combined with unbelievably damning, stomach-churning video were something that a whole lot of people who’d been tuned out simply could not ignore. And those murders alone are so horrific that either one •should• be sufficient to pop the bubble of comfort — but they’re just the tip of an iceberg here.
2/
Just the tip of the iceberg was enough to sink the Titanic.
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@inthehands for me, it's kind of... The Republicans & authoritarian leaning people in US govt have been preparing for this, laying the tracks etc, since W at least. And now they're running the trains. And so many people want to act like Trump is just the sole mover & actor doing this rather than admitting the complicity of those that laid the tracks (multiple decades of federal governments) and are running the train (current congress).
It's not that it's the same, it's just the expected extension of existing policy. Like first they pass the Patriot Act and it takes a while to normalize, but for the last decade you can expect your communications to be read by the government, and now the devices inspected during govt interactions and not long after you can be arrested for just trying to have secrets on your phone.When I look at the Republican budget, I see the anti-democracy billionaire bigots, foreign & domestic, who ran interference for Trump's ilk for decades to achieve this apotheosis for a #MadKing.
GOP budgets reward their rich fascist donors. Only.
We know the names of some of those funding democracy backsliding, but not all.
Go after the money:
Citizens United, courtesy Koch's ownership of a corrupt SCOTUS lets anyone, literally anyone, buy an ...
1/
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When I look at the Republican budget, I see the anti-democracy billionaire bigots, foreign & domestic, who ran interference for Trump's ilk for decades to achieve this apotheosis for a #MadKing.
GOP budgets reward their rich fascist donors. Only.
We know the names of some of those funding democracy backsliding, but not all.
Go after the money:
Citizens United, courtesy Koch's ownership of a corrupt SCOTUS lets anyone, literally anyone, buy an ...
1/
2/
....American election, from the fossil fuel industry to oligarchs in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK, Brazil, China, Russia, and OPEC.
Koch Network & the consequences of Citizens United.
These folks never explain how removing women's civil rights is going to reduce the price of gas.
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/26/david-koch-donald-trump/
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/dark_money_jane_mayer_on_how
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
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I also see that misguided narrative in the people who still (but increasingly rarely) dredge up stats about how many Obama- and Biden-era deportations there were, thinking it’s some kind of mic drop, thinking that deportations are the whole of the evil here, an evil we can just tally up with a bean counter.
And to be clear: those deportations •were• inhumane and evil. US treatment of immigrants has been morally intolerable since long before I was born. I need you to know that I know that when I tell you that this is a whole other level.
9/
@inthehands What you say is true. Chump just ratcheted it up some notches. But the terrible treatment of immigrants has always been in the US.
-
2/
....American election, from the fossil fuel industry to oligarchs in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK, Brazil, China, Russia, and OPEC.
Koch Network & the consequences of Citizens United.
These folks never explain how removing women's civil rights is going to reduce the price of gas.
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/26/david-koch-donald-trump/
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/dark_money_jane_mayer_on_how
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
3/
These folks' tax cuts come before the lives of Americans.
https://readsludge.com/2025/12/15/koch-network-fuels-republican-push-to-kill-aca-subsidies/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/27/koch-americans-for-prosperity-trump-tax-breaks
Dark Money
Jane MayerCaptured : The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy
Sheldon Whitehouse, Melanie Wachtell
Harvard Business Review PressDark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
David EnrichRockbridge Network
These folks never explain how attacking Somali immigrants is going to lower housing costs.
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Please remember them. Remember them, and then remember what they died for: fighting a much larger danger. Remember what they were fighting, •see• it, and •act•.
Do not let their deaths be in vain by making their deaths the only thing you see.
/end
It's kinda the same, in the way a hatching coccoon of a hideous bloodsucking monster is the same as its hideous bloodsucking larva. Same species, different stage.
It's been incubating. The larva was smaller, and not as often biting at white skin-- but it was a sign, proof, of awful things left unchecked and hungrily growing stronger. It's accelerating, getting bolder and testing where it has or hasn't built up enough political and social infrastructure to bring the hammer down in earnest.
And it has a great many nests and a great many stinging tentacles.
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3/
These folks' tax cuts come before the lives of Americans.
https://readsludge.com/2025/12/15/koch-network-fuels-republican-push-to-kill-aca-subsidies/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/27/koch-americans-for-prosperity-trump-tax-breaks
Dark Money
Jane MayerCaptured : The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy
Sheldon Whitehouse, Melanie Wachtell
Harvard Business Review PressDark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
David EnrichRockbridge Network
These folks never explain how attacking Somali immigrants is going to lower housing costs.
4/
For purported bigots, they sure take a lot of money from Asian oligarchs.
For apparent islamophobes, they sure like the cash of petrostate despots.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-gop-cabal-with-vance-and-thiel-plots-eternal-maga-rule/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/rockbridge-trump-vance-wiles.html
https://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/rockbridge-network-billionaire-conservative-donor-group/
https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10582591
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbridge_Network
The NRA & Konstantin Nikolaev
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-nra-spent-dollar30-million-to-elect-trump-was-it-russian-moneyhttps://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600
CoreCivic, Geo Corp
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/private-prison-behemoth-is-first-corporation-to-max-out-to-trump/ -
4/
For purported bigots, they sure take a lot of money from Asian oligarchs.
For apparent islamophobes, they sure like the cash of petrostate despots.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-gop-cabal-with-vance-and-thiel-plots-eternal-maga-rule/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/rockbridge-trump-vance-wiles.html
https://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/rockbridge-network-billionaire-conservative-donor-group/
https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10582591
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbridge_Network
The NRA & Konstantin Nikolaev
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-nra-spent-dollar30-million-to-elect-trump-was-it-russian-moneyhttps://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600
CoreCivic, Geo Corp
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/private-prison-behemoth-is-first-corporation-to-max-out-to-trump/5/
Everything about the attacks on Minnesota is intended to make money for a Republican donor, foreign or domestic.
https://theintercept.com/2025/07/10/corecivic-trump-big-beautiful-bill/
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The KKK but with a budget the size of Russia’s military. Running mass detention camps.
Think about that for a minute.
Think about what it could mean, what it •already is•:
https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss
16/
@inthehands It's the people's duty...
"...
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
..."
— Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence — -
All of what’s happening in Minneapolis is deeply rooted in US history. And in Minneapolis and St. Paul history specifically: Read about the Rondo neighborhood, for example. It’s no accident the the flagship lake in the City of Lakes was named after the vice president of the Confederacy until just a few years ago. Don’t get too excited about making saints of us all here.
It’s crucial for us to recognize that historical precedent. It’s also crucial for us to recognize the extreme new danger of the present moment.
15/
@inthehands Thank you, I didn’t know about Rondo. I have been there but didn’t know what I was looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_neighborhood
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I see that misguided narrative in the gutless business leaders who talk about “de-escalation” and “finding real solutions” — as if the problem is just that a few ICE murdered two people, not that all the ICE agents are an authoritarian secret police in the making.
I see that misguided narrative in the elected officials who decry ICE, but then talk about “better training” and “more oversight” — as if the secret police will become humane if they just get a few new rules to ignore and have to sit through a Powerpoint about them.
8/
Training a rabid dog, a rattlesnake, or an ICE goon could only ever be effective in making their bites worse.
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@Pollinators @inthehands
I will emphasize some of your points when I call my Senators.@knowattitude @inthehands Thank you.
