US witnessed many ICE-related deaths in 2026. This is a Power 98.7 podcast. Now we’re talking. Subscribe to Power 98.7 podcasts in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s more on Power987.co.za. Nine minutes past 11. You’re in Power Perspective with your host Tessa Dooms in the final hour of the show. We do have with us Professor Patrick Bond who wasn’t, it wasn’t too long ago that we spoke to you, Professor Bond. So thanks so much for coming back, but we thought you were well placed given that just last night you were at a vigil on this very matter. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Patrick Bond: Thank you very much, Tessa. I hope the connection’s okay. I’m in the Bay Area in Berkeley, California.

Tessa: Fantastic. You find yourself in the U.S. at a time that it must be a really, really, really interesting, if not disturbing, set of social conditions. Just talk us through how people are responding in the U.S.A. as just, you know, regular citizens, as activists, to what they are seeing and hearing coming out of Minnesota. Well, thanks.

Patrick: Yeah, this is definitely Minnesota, Minneapolis, and its sister city, St. Paul, across the river, that’s the hot spot. And it’s because Donald Trump decided to put the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, plus Border Control. The Border Control are the ones that really used the guns and did the shooting last Saturday. And the main victim, Alex Pretti, was the second of two white supporters, solidarity supporters of, typically, immigrants from Mexico, from Asia, from Africa, from Haiti, who are being deported en masse. It’s an extraordinary rate. They’re trying for 800 a day at the moment, and they’re just picking up anybody with different skin. There’s no question that there’s racial profiling. Language, obviously, the Spanish speakers are very vulnerable. And Alex Pretti, and before him, Rachel Good, who was also one of the white Minneapolis residents who are part of a sort of anti-xenophobia network to protect their neighbors, to protect workers who are in and around their communities. And so now this has created some ruptures because of race politics being so important in this country, but also because there’s now a sense that particularly with Alex Pretti, who did have a handgun, that now the terrain in which – although he didn’t brandish his handgun, it was tucked away in his waistband, it was taken by the police just before he was killed, and there were 10 shots in five seconds on Saturday as these border control and the ICE agents were pushing him away. His very last words were, ‘are you okay?’, to a woman he was trying to help who’d been pepper sprayed. And he’s a kind of classic case, 37 years old, just like Rachel Good, killed a couple of weeks before in this.

Tessa: Renee Good.

Patrick: Sorry, and I think it’s Rachel, but I may be wrong. So her situation was with a large car and the allegation was that she was moving her car up. Within the question of Alex Pretti, it was his basically directing traffic. He was an emergency room nurse for the Veterans Administration. And here’s another complication because veterans, that is the military, who are generally working class, often people of color, and they are without other health insurance, typically. So they really need these Veterans Administration hospitals to be very well-functioning and equipped, especially for some of the traumas, both physical and psychological, that they got when they were in the US’s imperialist war machine. It’s a very complicated situation. And they would typically be Trump supporters if they’re veterans because he, as you know, is promoting much more militarism. And he wants a $1.5 trillion budget, but that hasn’t stopped him – and actually, before he was fired in June, Elon Musk, our own homeboy from Gauteng – to actually cut the budgets and cut the services. And so the Veterans Administration hospital users, where I was, last night, at a VA hospital, people were very angry – there were about five, 600, and this was going on all over the US with vigils – that these VA hospitals are under austerity and that the nursing services, the health services in general for ordinary working-class people, are under extreme pressure tests that they’ve literally doubled the health insurance costs under their so-called managed care. It’s more or less like ours, but the managed care companies own much more of the health system than in South Africa, where they’re separated. And those managed care companies – the biggest one, Kaiser Permanente here in California – are very exploitative. And so people just can’t afford healthcare. And literally doubling is what’s happened as Donald Trump cut corporate taxes. Part of that savings in the big, beautiful bill, you might remember, last June, was to cut the health insurance. So it’s a very tense time where I think Trump has realized he’s gone too far. And he went and talked to the Minnesota governor and said, ‘okay, maybe we’re going to fire the one guy who’s sort of most notorious.’

Tessa: The border management chief.

Patrick: That’s right. And so that particular guy has gone into sort of early retirement. And they are bringing another fairly nasty fellow in. But these guys are really, I think, just at the surface level, at the top, probably responsible for sending signals of extreme brutality. And they are really stormtroopers. They’re quasi-fascistic. Police going around looking, breaking down doors, taking people out in their underpants. This is, by the way, in a place where it’s about 20 degrees below zero.

Tessa: It’s snowing in Minnesota at this point. Just talk to us, Patrick, about why race matters in the killings of Pretti and Good. And if they weren’t white, if they weren’t white suburban gun carriers, would the response from the public, because we’re seeing mass protests, all of those things, if they weren’t all of those things, but were American, because the fact that they’re American citizens who’ve been killed in these immigration raids was, of course, alarming. But if they weren’t all of those other things, do you think the response would have been the same?

Patrick: No, indeed. There were nine shootings already this month, of which the two in Minnesota, of the white citizens, have got the awareness level up at a very high pitch, because the media is very, very race conscious in the sense, you know, this is particularly because, you know, the U.S. is moving towards majority status of the minority groups, African-Americans and even now the leading group of Hispanic people of Latin American descent. And that is making for Trump and his MAGA, his make America Great Again support base, an extreme form of kind of a class paranoia, because the translation, like we’ve seen in so many places, even South Africa, the translation of xenophobia is often working class people feeling desperate and saying, okay, we’re not going to fight the bosses in the system, we’re going to fight the Others, the people who look different. And those are immigrants. And there are a great many immigrants who are doing the dirty work, picking the fruit in the summertime and the seasons or doing the cleaning, the lowest paid jobs. But for white Americans, there’s a general sense that their living conditions are under threat. They have had virtually no increase in salary and wages for typical households since the early 1990s. And that’s what Trump has taken advantage of. And as I say, because of the fact that Alex Pretti was carrying a gun, which they think is perfectly fine, they have a sort of a second amendment in the constitution saying you can carry guns, and because he was working for veterans, for the army, this is actually a situation that Trump realizes that the lies that his own top people are telling him, including the Department of Homeland Security cabinet minister, who may lose her job: this is a bit of a crisis for the Trump regime. And he’s down to about 40% popularity. In other words, that MAGA base, it’s very substantial. And yet, if they don’t have lower interest rates – they want to take over the Federal Reserve to make the economy go a little bit faster – well, the November elections coming up, they’ll lose the House of Representatives and the Senate. And I think that’s why this is created, not just on that international front with so much chaos, Trump walking away last week from his attempt to take over Greenland by force, his threats to Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, now in abeyance, and now I think he is being really disturbed by this rising fascism. It’s in his interest, you know, Tessa, to actually have a full on insurrection that would allow him to declare martial law. There’s an Insurrection Act. And I think a lot of what he’s doing is posturing towards preventing the November elections from happening, maybe even overthrowing the rule in the constitution that you can only have two terms as president. So he could, you know, take a third term. So we’ll have to see how desperate he becomes. And the biggest question still out there is, will the Epstein files, Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile, will that implicate Trump as well? So all kinds of distractions, we can expect.

Tessa: Yeah, I mean, talking about his response and seemingly starting to walk back some of the vim and vigour around these migrations, or at least what is what seems to be at the face of it about migration was I was stunned when he said that Rene Good’s parents are Trump supporters, and that makes her death very, very sad. And I thought, that’s a wild thing to say out loud. That’s saying the quiet part out loud in such an extraordinary way that he became sad about her death when he realized her parents are Trump supporters. But this does also take us, Patrick, to the point where we have to ask what is behind all of this, because of course, the immigration wars, as I’m calling them now, are not, you know, are not just at surface level about one thing. They’re not just about borders. There is a bigger, broader set of ideas that are also behind these. And we’re seeing it in different contexts. When it comes to the US, you’ve made reference to the election that is coming up. What have you heard, if anything, about the claim that the Trump administration is trying to use immigration as a bargaining chip to affect the election in Minnesota, particularly wanting Minnesota government to turn over the voter registration roll in exchange for stopping ICE. So they’re willing to stop ICE and not have the migrants deported if they can get control of the voters roll. How true is that? And if it is, what is its implication? What does it tell us about the day they’re behind the scenes?

Patrick: Yes, you’re right. And first, thanks for correcting me. Renee Good, not Rachel Good. ‘Say her name’ is obviously very important in all of this. So Renee Good and that whole spirit of community solidarity is something that will continue. It will continue to grow. And I see it growing in these mutual aid networks, for example, that here in the Bay Area, San Francisco, turned out such a big support base for Alex Pretti in his memory on a very rainy night last night. Now, the potential that Kristine Noam, this Minister of Home Affairs, the internal sort of Interior Minister, Home Affairs Minister, but really policing the borders, that’s her job, Homeland Security, that she could get the voter rolls, that is actually something she put down in paper. She wrote for that, we will withdraw our troops from your cities. Now, Minneapolis is one of the more liberal places, but the other hotspots include a little bit here in San Francisco. I think it’s a tougher place because Big Tech actually does want peace and quiet here. But L.A., they had the same confrontation, Chicago. But these are sites in some of the states where they’re not going to really win Senate battles. But it will be very important for them when they want to gerrymander the House seats. Those are within the state, an area. And the term gerrymandering means that you just change the district boundaries so that you can suit your own supporters that they would have just over a majority in areas.

Tessa: We were just talking about gerrymandering and its possibilities in South Africa with demarcation board last night. So it’s interesting that we’re talking about gerrymandering two nights in a row.

Patrick: And that, gerrymandering, is probably the most effective way that Trump has made it possible to win large swaths of what are called the red states, not red for communism, it’s the red for the Republican Party. And that means in the crucial swing states are seven of these 50 states that go one way or the other. And you kind of have to win big chunks of the swing states of these to win the national election. But also for the House, the very crazy redistricting. That’s one way. The other way is intimidating voters who typically, if they were an African American or they were other ethnic groups, they’d vote Democrat. And so then another part of the objective that Trump will proceed with is denying them their voter rights. So we’re going to see quite a bit of that very nasty local politics and the Republican Party is very good at it. And the Trump support, even if it’s at 40% still in November, I don’t think it will be. It’ll be probably lower as more degeneration occurs in lives of ordinary people. Inflation doesn’t come down. Tariffs don’t create new jobs. And the health insurance premiums that have just doubled will be very painful. And as a result, I think Trump will resort to ever more disastrous policies, like declaring an insurrection and putting democracy into abeyance and saying, this is what we need. And they certainly, as you can tell from the way they go in, they went into Caracas, Venezuela in a similar way: they’ve got massive military firepower. And we saw in Minneapolis how quick they are to pull the guns, to shoot. In the case of Alex Pretti on Saturday, 10 shots in five seconds. And he was simply trying to direct traffic and help people who’d been pepper sprayed as an emergency services nurse. It’s left, I think, a great many people who had thought there was at least some degree of civility, just shocked, plus Rene Good’s murder and the seven others that typically would be people of Mexican or Latin American descent. So we need to be very careful that this doesn’t end up becoming something all over. The World Cup is going to be held here. And now, openly, leaders of the world are saying, should Donald Trump be allowed to do that? The Germans and even FIFA say, what’s going on? You’re going to let in the fans? If we have fans from an African team, you’re going to let them in? Because most of Africa is off limits for tourist visas. And will they be safe while they are there?

Tessa: As we begin to wrap up the conversation, though, I do want us to talk about the parallels and the things that we may need to pay heed to in terms of our own domestic situation. I mean, I remember the first time I heard the hashtag or saw the hashtag Put South Africa First. I immediately went: this is our version of Make America Great Again. The parallel was not lost on me. Immediately. It was during the first, the tail end of the first Trump presidency. And you started to see that kind of rhetoric or language use. And it hasn’t been lost on me, as well, that we’ve seen similar kinds of fights that have come up from the Tea Party movement, for example, starting to take root into the South African context. Something that struck me – and thinking about who gets shot in this process, matters – is that, you know, even for those people who, you know, take issue with the impact of migration and particularly illegal migration. Do you think that there is anything to be said from those people about the fact that their own citizens disagree with them and their own citizens are willing to put their bodies on the line to show their disagreement for these migration enforcement tactics that are being used? Does that bring people closer together in terms of realizing that maybe my stance on this needs to be reconsidered because my own countrymen disagree with me? Or does it harden the stance that says, if my countrymen disagree with me on this and they put their bodies on the line, then maybe they should, you know, expect to be shot?

Patrick: Yes, that’s exactly the rhetoric that’s coming from Washington, namely that there’s a left-wing terrorist network to support illegal immigrants. You heard that with particularly the drug wars. That was something that about 45 years ago, when I was a student here doing graduate work in the east coast of the US with President Ronald Reagan starting the drug wars. There’s obviously a repeat of that at the moment with the rationale of taking the leader of Venezuela and putting him in jail. I doubt they’re going to really find anything, by the way. And I think that’s going to be part of Donald Trump’s brilliance. He was such an entertainer, and I must be frank, the greatest con man in world history, that he’ll conjure up anything under the sun. They are creating all sorts of messages about Rene Good trying to run over a driver or that Alex Pretti was somehow a terrorist who was going to shoot down a bunch of the officers there. So we can expect a lot of fibs. And luckily, a lot of very good people on the streets doing mutual aid, trying to do anti-xenophobic work. I hope we do get lessons in South Africa, because I think we’re going to need much the same back home.

Tessa: Yeah, I mean, those things have just made me really reflect on, you know, how do we start having conversations here that bring us a lot closer to each other? And so that this antagonism or hostility when it comes to migration, that we can’t have conversations that aren’t, you know, full blown heated, for me is really concerning. Because if we do end up in a situation where the state turns on us, surely we should be able to pull together as opposed to pull apart. It just, you know, for me, it feels like this is the time before we get to that point that we actually need to start talking to each other a lot more as the citizens about where we stand and where we can find each other.

Patrick: That’s right, Tessa. I think a year ago, that was part of the discussion about Stilfontein, wasn’t it? It was communities with immigrant mine workers. And the absolutely brutal way from the presidency that, you know, starvation, starve them out, smoke them out, was the open call. And when we also had a president who, 2012, sent some emails that suggested that the police should be, you know, using concomitant action against the dastardly criminals. These were just workers on a wildcat strike [against Lonmin at Marikana Mine]. There is a degree that we’ve inherited from apartheid, from the terrible conditions of extractive industries of big mining, a degree of profound brutality that we have to work on all the time.

Tessa: Well, let’s see where all of this goes and how the state responds at this point, Patrick, because I think that in terms of Donald Trump’s administration, they have been known, as you’ve pointed out before, to backtrack if it is not politically expedient for them to continue down a path. So let’s see if the kind of pressure that they’re seeing does turn into some kind of turnaround. But if not, I will also see, I guess, in the next few months, how committed they are to this path towards the November elections. But thanks so much, Patrick, for your time.Email