EU Chiefs Aim To Set Trump Aside And Close Bumper India Trade Deal

 January 26, 2026 

By EurActiv

By Alice Bergoënd

(EurActiv) — After two decades of talking, a trade accord between the EU and India couldn’t come at a better time for the bloc’s beleaguered leadership.

Fresh from fending off threats from Donald Trump over recent weeks, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa should sign a long-awaited trade deal with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an EU-India summit in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Its signing – should last minute chinks around climate policy be resolved – come as the EU seeks to diversify its trading partners amid rising trade tensions with the US.

“We are showing a fractured world that another way is possible,” von der Leyen said on Sunday of cooperation with India.

The accord will provide access to a market of around 1.5 billion people, with India emerging as a key strategic partner for Europe as the world’s largest democracy.

Top negotiators have already said the agreement, once dubbed the ‘mother of all deals’ owing to the size of India’s market, has been “extremely difficult” to close.

Art of the deal

Under the agreement, India is set to cut tariffs on cars imported from the EU, down from rates as high as 110% to potentially to 40%, Reuters reported over the weekend.

This would create major opportunities for European car manufacturers such as Volkswagen or Renault which have been struggling of late. Tariff reductions under the pact could also benefit sectors including automotive components, chemicals, and plastics, while the text is also expected to improve market access for EU wines and spirits.

“This is very good news for producers given the size of the market and the excise duties currently in place,” one EU diplomat told Euractiv.

In turn, India should benefit from easier exports for sectors such as textiles, jewellery, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and IT services.

As ever, the EU won’t get everything it wants.

New Delhi and Brussels clashed over the sustainability commitments within the deal.

While human rights and commitments around the Paris Agreement should be included in the deal, they are unlikely to be designated as ‘essential elements,’ an EU diplomat told Euractiv. This means that a breach would not allow the deal to be suspended, unlike for the EU-Mercosur agreement.

India also requested exemptions from EU climate laws, such as the carbon border tax (CBAM), which was refused. The issue appears unresolved.

“Both sides are working intensively to address the remaining challenges,” von der Leyen told The Times of India over the weekend.

Some sensitive areas will remain outside the deal, including agricultural products like dairy. Plans to protect traditional foods under the Geographical Indications (GI) system have been postponeduntil India finalises revisions to its own GI legislation.

Once signed, the agreement will still need to be ratified by the European Parliament before entering into force.

• Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro contributed reporting.

  

Meta, Google Under Fire for Letting ICE Run ‘White Nationalist-Inspired Propaganda’ to Recruit Agents

“The impact of an unqualified army of ICE agents being unleashed across the country has been severe,” wrote Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal.


Videos are displayed on screens as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds a major hiring event on August 26, 2025 in Arlington, Texas.
(Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jan 23, 2026

A pair of House Democrats on Thursday demanded that the tech behemoths Google and Meta stop allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use their platforms to bolster the Trump administration’s efforts to recruit agents for its mass deportation campaign and lawless assault on communities across the United States.

In letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Reps. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote that they are “alarmed by recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has partnered” with the tech giants “as part of a large-scale campaign that uses white nationalist-inspired propaganda to recruit immigration enforcement agents.”

ICE, the lawmakers wrote, has “taken to Google’s platforms to draw in more applicants using advertisements that use white nationalist themes.” As for Meta, Balint and Jayapal pointed to a recent Washington Post story showing that DHS “spent $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram” last year.

“Since August, the agency has paid Meta an additional $500,000 to run recruitment advertisements on its platforms,” the House Democrats wrote. “In the first three weeks of the government shutdown last year alone, ICE spent an astounding $4.5 million on paid media campaigns.”

DHS, which oversees ICE, has repeatedly used white nationalist-linked rhetoric in social media posts and recruitment ads. Investigative journalist Austin Campbell reported for The Intercept earlier this month that “the Department of Homeland Security’s official Instagram account made a recruitment post proclaiming, ‘We’ll Have Our Home Again,’ attaching a song of the same name by Pine Tree Riots.”

“Popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, the track features lines about reclaiming ‘our home’ by ‘blood or sweat,’ language often used in white nationalist calls for race war,” Campbell noted. “It isn’t new to see extremist right-wing ideology perpetuated in online culture. What is new is seeing it echoed in official messaging from a federal law enforcement agency with the power to detain, deport, and use lethal force.”

In their letters on Thursday, Balint and Jayapal demanded that Meta and Google “cease further enabling this conduct,” arguing the companies are “complicit” in the Trump administration’s dangerous onslaught against US communities.

“The impact of an unqualified army of ICE agents being unleashed across the country has been severe,” they wrote.

‘Endless Monster Behavior From ICE’: Family Arrested While Rushing Child to Oregon ER

Parents who are legally applying for US asylum were prevented from getting emergency medical care for their 7-year-old daughter.


The Crespo-Gonzalez family—father Yohendry, mother Liseth, and 7-year-old daughter Diana—pose for a photo.
(Family photo shared by Oregon state Rep. Ricki Ruiz)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 23, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Advocates sounded the alarm Friday over federal agents’ arrest last week of a family of legal asylum-seekers apprehended just outside a Portland, Oregon hospital where they had rushed their 7-year-old daughter for emergency medical treatment.

Yohendry De Jesus Crespo and his wife Darianny Liseth González de Crespo—Venezuelans with pending asylum claims living in Gresham, Oregon—were rushing their daughter Diana to Adventist Hospital in Portland on January 16 as the child suffered an unstoppable nosebleed.

According to the Oregonian, Diana never got to see a doctor, as three unmarked vehicles and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded their family car in the emergency room parking lot.

“The parents pleaded to let their 7-year-old daughter... be released so she could receive urgently needed medical care, but that request was denied,” Oregon state Rep. Ricki Ruiz (D-50) said on Facebook.



Friend Ana Linares said the family was arrested, driven to a facility in Tacoma, Washington, and then sent to Texas, where they are being held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center near San Antonio.

The facility, which is run by ICE and private prison profiteer CoreCivic, is accused of providing inadequate medical care for children, as well as poor sanitary and health conditions. Detainees also report being served moldy or worm-infested food.

Ruiz said the child “remains ill, reportedly suffering from a fever, and has not received basic medical care.”

The family’s arrest—which took place less than 1,000 feet from where a US Border Patrol agent shot a Venezuelan couple earlier this month—appears to be the first time in Oregon that immigration enforcers have detained an entire family unit.

Heather Pease, a spokesperson for Adventist Hospital, told the Oregonian that “no law enforcement agency contacted us” about arresting the family, “and we did not coordinate with any agency.”

“Adventist Health Portland is here for our community, open, available, and ready to provide care when it’s needed most,” Pease added. “Patient care remains our priority, regardless of circumstances.”

It is unclear why the family was arrested. Neither parent has any known criminal record. Linares said the couple—who met in the Panamanian jungle while making their way to the United States—waited to enter the US legally and applied for an appointment. They were assigned a 2028 immigration court date to plead their asylum cases.

“They are good people, not criminals,” Linares told the Oregonian. “They were looking for stability. They wanted to help their families in Venezuela.”

The Trump administration’s deadly mass deportation blitz has targeted children—among them US citizens, including a 3-year-old cancer patient—for detention and deportation.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, federal agents seized at least four children from Minnesota public schools over the past two weeks, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, who were sent to the Dilley lockup.

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, a record 73,000 people facing deportation are currently being jailed by ICE, including 6,000 family units.

Some of the nearly 5,000 children who were separated from their parents or other relatives during Trump’s first term have also yet to be reunited with their families.

Child welfare advocates worry that Trump administration pressure to increase arrests and the commodification of migrants by for-profit prisons and other private profiteers is incentivizing the arrest and detention of immigrants, including children.

Asserting that “the immediate health and well-being” of Diana Crespo “must be the top priority,” Ruiz said on Facebook, “We urgently call for the child to receive appropriate medical care without delay and for the family to be afforded due process and access to legal counsel.”

“Situations involving children require heightened care, compassion, and coordination,” he added, “and we expect all responsible agencies to act swiftly and humanely to ensure this child’s health and safety are protected.”

Federal Agent Tells Maine ICE Observer She’s Going in ‘Nice Little Database’ for ‘Domestic Terrorists’

“Ironically these kinds of threats do more to radicalize opposition to ICE,” said one observer.


An activist stands outside across from what appears to be an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) SUV in Portland, Maine on January 23, 2026.
(Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jan 23, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A masked federal immigration enforcement agent was caught on camera this week telling a legal observer in Maine that she was being put in a database for purported “domestic terrorists.”

At the start of a video that spread across social media on Friday, the masked agent appears to be scanning a license plate number before walking toward the woman recording him.

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The woman informs the agent that it’s legal for her to record and then asks him why he’s trying to gather information on her.

“Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” the agent responds.

At this point the woman starts laughing incredulously at him.

“For videotaping you?!” she asks him. “Are you crazy?!”



Democrats on the US House Homeland Security Committee were quick to denounce the actions of the agent on the video.

“Big government Republicans have unleashed a secret police state on peaceful American citizens,” they wrote in a social media post. “This should shake every American to their core.”

Other critics, however, noted that it isn’t just Republicans who have been supporting the right-wing police state. Seven US House Democrats, including Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), voted with the vast majority of Republicans on Thursday to give US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) an additional $10 billion.

“Corporate Democrats are complicit with the full breakdown of our constitutional rights,” commented Sunrise Movement.

Greg Krieg, media director at political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies, took particular aim at Golden for shoveling more money to ICE despite documented evidence of agents violating Americans’ civil liberties.

“Thank you Jared Golden, special man who understands Maine better than anyone on the planet, for telling us how much people actually like this horseshit,” he wrote sarcastically.

Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said the agent’s behavior crossed a line that should be condemned by Americans of all political persuasions.

“I hope the vast majority of freedom-loving Americans are uncomfortable with the idea,” he wrote, “that masked police are now telling people engaged in First Amendment-protected activity that they are ‘domestic terrorists’ who will be added to a secret government database.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, predicted that federal agents’ aggressive taunts against legal observers would backfire politically against the Trump administration.

“Ironically these kinds of threats do more to radicalize opposition to ICE tactics than they do to stop people from recording ICE,” he observed.

Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle News, also thought the optics of the Maine video were terrible for Republicans.

“It’s hard to overstate how unpopular this crap is with normie Americans,” Saul wrote. “On top of the gross civil rights violations, that Trump is letting these goons loose in Maine, a state where Democrats could actually pick up a Senate seat in nine months, it’s political malpractice.”

FBI Agent Resigns in Protest as Trump DOJ Investigates Renee Good—Not the ICE Agent Who Killed Her

The FBI has focused its investigation on Good’s ties to activist groups as ICE agents have increasingly threatened people for filming and observing their operations.

Candles are lit outside the US Embassy in London in memory of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the United States.
(Photo by Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jan 24, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office became the latest official to resign over the federal law enforcement agency’s handling of the investigation into an immigration agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month.

As the New York Times reported Friday, FBI agent Tracee Mergen, acting supervisor of the office’s Public Corruption Squad, resigned after senior FBI officials in Washington pushed her to end a civil rights probe into the killing. The agency is focusing on investigating Good and her wife, who were legally observing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instead of determining whether ICE agent Jonathan Ross used excessive force..



An FBI source told CBS News that Mergen “would not bow to pressure” from the agency’s leaders.

Starting immediately after Good was shot three times at close range by Ross, who was one of several agents who had approached her vehicle and, according to eyewitnesses, shouted conflicting orders at her, Trump administration officials have described Good and her wife as “domestic terrorists.” They have accused her of trying to run over Ross, a claim that has not been supported by detailed analysis of footage of the killing.

Federal prosecutors have refused to allow authorities in Minnesota to conduct a probe into the killing, and Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced days after Good was killed that the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division would not be investigating—which would ordinarily be a standard step in a shooting involving a federal law enforcement agent. That decision led four top officials in Dhillon’s office to resign in protest.

Six federal prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in Minnesota also stepped down after the DOJ made clear that Becca and Renee Good—not Ross—would be the focus of an investigation.




As NBC News reported Friday, the DOJ also directed the US attorney’s office and FBI agents to investigate whether Good could have been criminally liable in her own death. Agents had drafted a search warrant to obtain her car, but they were told by aides to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to redraft the warrant to search the car for evidence of an attack on Ross. A federal judge rejected the warrant.

Like many residents of Minneapolis, Chicago, and Charlotte, North Carolina have in recent months as thousands of ICE agents have descended on US cities and detained immigrants and citizens alike, the Goods were observing and filming ICE operations on January 7 when Renee Good was shot.

Filming ICE is legal as long as doing so does not interfere with agents’ operations. Yet officers have increasingly threatened people for observing them and claimed that doing so is an act of domestic terrorism.

One agent in Portland, Maine on Friday told an observer she would be included in a “nice little database” and “considered a domestic terrorist,” after she filmed ICE operations.

Volunteers for neighborhood ICE watches in Maine told the Portland Press Herald that ICE agents have shown up at their houses and issued warnings not to follow them.

The threats, and the FBI’s insistence on investigating Good’s alleged ties to what it calls “activist groups,” come months after Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo expanding the DOJ’s definition of domestic terrorism to include “impeding” law enforcement officers or “doxxing” them.

That memo followed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a document signed by President Donald Trump shortly after the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” The memo exclusively focuses on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include details about the DOJ push to investigate Good for criminal liability after her death.

Independent Autopsy Provides ‘Strong Evidence’ Against ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good

“Our legal team will continue its unwavering and proactive advocacy for Renee’s life and her family,” said lead attorney Antonio M. Romanucci, whose firm commissioned the autopsy.


“It was murder,” reads a sign held at a vigil for Renee Good outside the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany on January 11, 2026.
(Photo by Christophe Gateau/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jan 22, 2026
COMMON DREAM\S

“As a lawyer, I’ve been waiting for this,” New York University law professor Ryan Goodman said early Thursday after attorneys for Renee Good’s family released findings from an independent autopsy conducted as part of a civil investigation into her death.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Good in Minnesota two weeks ago. While the Trump administration has tried to paint the 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three as a “domestic terrorist,” and argue that the ICE agent was acting in self-defense, videos, eyewitness accounts, and analyses of the shooting have fueled calls for Ross’ arrest and prosecution.



‘ICE Out for Good’: Weekend Rallies Nationwide After Killing of Renee Good


The independent autopsy provides “strong evidence against Agent Ross, given what it means about [his] second or third shot through [the] left-side window” of Good’s vehicle, Goodman wrote on social media. Those shots make the “easiest criminal case of a willful killing.”

The Chicago-based law firm Romanucci & Blandin said in a Wednesday statement that it commissioned a “highly respected and credentialed medical pathologist” to conduct the autopsy at the request of Good’s family, and the expert found:There were three clear gunshot wound paths to Renee’s body;
One gunshot wound struck the left forearm, causing soft tissue hemorrhage;
One gunshot wound traversed the right breast without penetrating major organs;
One gunshot wound entered the left side of her head near the temple and exited the right side of her head;
The breast and left forearm wounds were not immediately life-threatening; and
A fourth wound was a graze wound consistent with a firearm injury, but with no penetration.

“We believe the evidence we are gathering and will continue to gather in our investigation will suffice to prove our case,” said lead Attorney Antonio M. Romanucci. “The video evidence depicting the events of January 7, 2026, is clear, particularly when viewed through the standards of reasonable policing and totality of circumstances. Additionally, our legal team will continue its unwavering and proactive advocacy for Renee’s life and her family.”

The firm noted that “the results of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office autopsy have not yet been released to the family or legal team.”



The Washington Post highlighted that “Romanucci, one of the firm’s founding partners, was on the legal team that represented the family of George Floyd after he was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. That legal team also commissioned an independent autopsy that contradicted aspects of the Hennepin County medical examiner’s autopsy.”

The day after Good’s death, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, announced that the probe into the fatal shooting “would now be led solely” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, several officials with the US Department of Justice (DOJ), including prosecutors and others in the Civil Rights Division, have recently resigned over the case.

The DOJ has refused to open a civil rights investigation into Good’s killing but is investigating Minnesota officials for alleged conspiracy to impede the thousands of federal immigration agents sent to the Twin Cities. On Tuesday, the department subpoenaed Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, state Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Saint Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.

“This Department of Justice investigation, sparked by calls for accountability in the face of violence, chaos, and the killing of Renee Good, does not seek justice,” Walz said in a statement that mirrored those of the other targeted officials. “Minnesota will not be intimidated into silence and neither will I.”

‘This Is a Dangerous, Dangerous Moment’: AOC Warns Trump, Noem Laying Groundwork for Insurrection Act

“Mayor Frey is executing on the municipal laws passed by duly elected officials, by the people of Minneapolis,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “That is what it means to live in a democracy.”


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) talks with reporters outside the US Capitol after the last vote of the week on January 9, 2026.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jan 25, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that President Donald Trump has “considered” invoking the Insurrection Act a day after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Border Patrol agents’ killing of Alex Pretti had plunged the US into a “dangerous, dangerous moment” in which the White House appeared to be “laying the groundwork” to use the law to deploy the US military for domestic law enforcement.

Noem and other top White House officials, said Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have been suggesting that leaders like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—both Democrats who have demanded federal agents leave the city and state—are “breaking the law” by following local ordinances that protect immigrants and citizens from immigration enforcement.

‘Unnecessary, Irresponsible, and Dangerous’: ACLU Slams Trump’s Insurrection Act Threat



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Noem has claimed that the two leaders are “'inciting,’ that their resistance and difference from this administration, that their political difference in policy from this administration—she is equating disagreement with incitement,” the congresswoman told CNN Saturday.



She suggested the narrative appears aimed at convincing Americans that actions taken by local and state leaders could result in Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and sending the US military into cities, if he doesn’t agree with the leaders’ policies.

Like Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have in recent days, Noem on Saturday accused the mayor and governor of “encouraging” violence against “our citizens and our law enforcement officers.”

“The Minnesota governor and the Minneapolis mayor need to take a long, hard look in the mirror,” Noem said. “They need to evaluate their rhetoric, their conversations, and their encouragement of such violence.”

She added that Walz “encouraged residents and citizens and violent rioters to resist.”

Over a week ago, Leavitt also accused Walz of “inciting the harassment” of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and said the governor should “pick up the phone and say that he will cooperate with the president and federal government in making Minnesota safer.”

Leavitt held up a photo of people she claimed were undocumented immigrants who had come into the country under the Biden administration and committed violent crimes, but analyses by the libertarian Cato Institute has shown nearly three-quarters of people booked into ICE detention in recent months had no criminal convictions.

The press secretary also accused Democratic governors and mayors of holding state and local law enforcement “hostage” with ordinances barring them from cooperating with ICE.

On CNN, Ocasio-Cortez said that while framing their attacks as though they are targeting Frey and Walz, Noem and Leavitt have actually been “taking issue with the people of Minneapolis and the people of Minnesota, who have duly elected their own elected officials to enact their will. They may not like it, but that is what the people of Minnesota and the people of Minneapolis want. They want people’s civil liberties and civil rights protected.”

“Mayor Frey is executing on the municipal laws passed by duly elected officials, by the people of Minneapolis,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “That is what it means to live in a democracy, and that is precisely what they are trying to threaten and undermine in this moment.”

On Fox News Sunday, Noem said that the question of whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to deploy the US military to American cities for domestic law enforcement purposes, is “up to the president” before repeating claims that Pretti was to blame for his own death.

The killing was caught on video by witnesses who saw him holding a cellphone as he tried to help a woman who’d been pushed to the ground by an agent, being pepper-sprayed, and then being thrown to the ground and surrounded by several officers, at least one of whom shot him 10 times after another agent had taken his legal firearm away.

Noem claimed, as she and other Trump officials did immediately after Pretti was killed, that he was “confronting” the officers and “impeding” their operations—assertions that are directly contradicted by videos of the incident.

Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN that following the fatal shooting, the administration has been “asking the American people to not believe their eyes, to not believe their ears, and to not believe what they are seeing right before them... They are asking you to instead hand over your belief to anything they say.”

This was murder. It is time to rise against Trump

He’s coming after all of us.

Robert Reich
January 24, 2026 


People demonstrate after federal agents fatally shot a man in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

I don’t have all the details yet but it appears that Trump’s goons have murdered another American in Minneapolis.

This is the third shooting involving federal agents in the city this month, including the murder of Renee Good, 37, on Jan. 7.

The person who was killed was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old man, an American citizen who lived in Minneapolis.

At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. The video appears to show a group of masked agents mobbing someone, pushing him to the ground, then shooting him multiple times, even as he lies motionless.

The Department of Homeland Security says he threatened agents with a gun, but footage shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him.

The people of Minneapolis, who braved sub-zero weather yesterday to protest Trump’s army of occupation, are not deterred.

Dozens of protesters at the site of today’s murder blew whistles and demanded that police arrest the federal agents. As rapid response networks immediately sent text messages about the killing to various neighborhood and immigrant network Signal chats, other protesters made their way to the scene.

Trump’s goons used tear gas and flash bangs against the crowd. As protesters began running away, ICE agents pursued them.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called the incident “sickening” and said Trump “must end this operation,” adding that “Minnesota has had it.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he saw a video of the shooting.

“How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” he asked, adding that “a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government.”

There are now 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, a city whose own police force numbers 600.

I expect Trump will use today’s protests to invoke the Insurrection Act, and send active military troops there.

But almost everyone in America is now aware of the brutality of Trump’s goons.

It’s becoming harder for Americans to tell themselves that Trump is only going after “hard-core criminals.” Or even “illegal immigrants.” Or even Latinos. Or Black people. Or communists or “radical left extremists.”

He’s coming after all of us.

He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.

All across America, we must rise up against this oppression as peacefully but as definitively as we possibly can.

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. 

His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

As ‘Loyal Agents of Nazis’ in GOP Murder Citizens, US Is at ‘Turning Point,’ Advocates Say

“Either the American people are able to wrest power from the current fascist leaders or those leaders will continue to radicalize, using violence and terror to dismantle democracy.”


People mourn at a makeshift memorial in the area where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal immigration agents earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026.
(Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jan 25, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


As hundreds of Minneapolis residents assembled in Whittier Park Saturday evening to demand once again that federal immigration agents leave Minnesota following the second fatal shooting of a legal observer in less than three weeks, one speaker demanded that the gathering must not simply be “another damn vigil.”

“This is a turning point,” said Edwin Torres DeSantiago of the Immigrant Defense Network.



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He spoke to the crowd hours after several federal officers were filmed surrounding Alex Pretti, 37, after he attempted to help a woman one of them had pushed to the ground, and fatally shooting him.

Torres DeSantiago’s words were echoed by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which did not mince words about the agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection who have for months roamed the streets of cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, arresting immigrants and US citizens and opening fire nearly two dozen times—killing at least six people including Pretti.

The federal agents recruited by the Trump administration with flyers imploring them to choose between their “homeland” and an “invasion,” said the Lemkin Institute, “are loyal agents of Nazis and white supremacists within the Republican Party. They are behaving as enemies both of the Constitution and of the American people and they must be treated as such.”

“The United States is at a crossroads: Either the American people are able to wrest power from the current fascist leaders or those leaders will continue to radicalize, using violence and terror to dismantle democracy and commit even greater mass atrocities,” said the organization. “History is clear about this.”

The warning came as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it would be investigating the shooting involving its own officers instead of the FBI. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS representatives had blocked them from accessing the crime scene late Saturday, even though officials had obtained a judicial search warrant.

The bureau joined the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in filing a lawsuit to prevent the “destruction of evidence” by DHS.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to order the city’s police department to “take control of the scene of the latest deadly ICE shooting, launch an independent criminal probe, and protect peaceful protesters at the scene from ICE violence.”

“Calling for ICE to leave is not enough. This shooting happened on a city street in the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis law enforcement and they must lead an independent investigation into what appears to be another horrific, unnecessary execution of a Minneapolis resident,” said Mitchell. “ICE should immediately end its deadly and disastrous siege of Minnesota and turn over all evidence and information about this shooting and the prior shooting of Renee Good to local authorities.”

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials continued pushing a narrative which was contradicted by numerous videos of the shooting and the moments leading up to it, claiming Pretti had “approached” federal agents with a gun. Footage shows Pretti holding only a phone, not a firearm, and one of agents involved in wrestling him to the ground after he was pepper-sprayed reaches into the scuffle empty-handed and then pulls out a gun before the multiple shots were fired.

Pretti was armed with a gun that he was carrying lawfully and had a permit for, local authorities said.

Despite the video evidence, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeated almost verbatim the claim she made earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in another incident that did not match the administration’s description in footage taken by bystanders: “Fearing for his life and the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, said without any evidence soon after the shooting that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” and Trump called Pretti a “gunman.”



The shooting came days after seven Democrats in the US House joined Republicans in passing a funding bill for DHS without securing restrictions on ICE, despite growing national outrage over federal immigration agents’ operations and Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

The bill still needs to go through the Senate and is one of several funding measures that need to pass by January 30 to keep the government open.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement after Pretti was killed that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” said Schumer. “Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Democratic senators who had been expected to support the $64.4 billion in DHS funding, which includes $10 billion for ICE, said after the shooting that they would not do so.



“I cannot and will not vote to fund DHS while this administration continues these violent federal takeovers of our cities,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

This Nazi political theory explains ICE impunity

Bill Blum,

 Common Dreams
January 24, 2026 

A federal agent talks to a woman in a car in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Tim Evans

Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice.

Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump's America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”

Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the U.S. is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.

A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere — which operated according to set rules and regulations — and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.

To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”

But as the judiciary surrendered its independence through a combination of cooptation and intimidation, the “prerogative” system came to dominate.

“On any given day,” Huq explained:
… people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.

The case was closed with no further appeals.

Fraenkel largely attributed the theoretical underpinnings of the dual Nazi state to the work of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Often referred to as the “Crown Jurist of National Socialism,” Schmitt joined the party in 1933 and went on to serve as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.

Schmitt was an unrelenting critic of liberalism, decrying its weaknesses for embracing universal human rights and what he deemed its hypocritical and indecisive fixations on discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. As a counter to universalism, he promoted a “friend-enemy” concept of politics, insisting that all states necessarily distinguish between those whom it embraces as friends worthy of protection and those who are forever considered enemies, outsiders and invaders deserving of its wrath, retribution, and punishment.

As a complement to the friend-enemy concept, Schmitt promoted the idea of the “state of exception,” arguing that the sovereign in a well-functioning state must be vested with emergency powers to suspend the rule of law to maintain public order and ensure the survival of the nation. Soon after joining the party, he declared that the Enabling Act, which effectively made Hitler a dictator, had become the provisional constitution of Germany. He would go on to enthusiastically support the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews and other “enemies” of citizenship, and to defend Hitler’s right as sovereign to define the enemy as he saw fit.

All of this will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Since retaking the presidency, Trump has declared nine states of emergency on a range of issues stretching from the imposition of bloated tariffs on foreign goods to designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and proclaiming a national emergency at the southern border. The border proclamation, issued on Jan. 20, his first day back in office, cited the now-familiar charge of an “alien invasion” of “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and laid the groundwork for both his mass-deportation program and for giving ICE the largest budget of any police agency in the country.

ICE is now a formidable paramilitary force, having hired 12,000 new agents in the past year, more than doubling its size, and ramping up to hire more. It has been deployed into American cities on orders from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to root out the invaders. It has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.

Undocumented immigrants remain ICE’s primary target, but citizens like Good are also in jeopardy. Good’s case stands out because she was white, and her killing was caught on video. But she is not alone. While there are no official figures that specifically track how many citizens have been victimized by immigration agents, ProPublica reported last October that it had found more than 170 cases where citizens were detained during raids and protests. According to the report:

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

To date, not a single federal agent has been prosecuted for these incidents. Nor are any prosecutions likely.

In “normal” times, we could at least expect Agent Ross to face a rigorous Justice Department investigation. It is not true, to return to Vance's comments, that Ross enjoys absolute immunity under existing law. It has always been difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement officials, but no such immunity exists.

But these are not normal times.

Trump, who now openly directs the Department of Justice and the FBI, has precluded the possibility of any serious federal investigation. Nor can we count on a state investigation conducted in concert with federal law enforcement. The FBI has announced it will exclude Minnesota authorities from participating in any fake pro-forma probe of Good’s death.

Perhaps most regrettably, we cannot count on the Supreme Court to hold Ross and other offending agents to account. The Supreme Court has endowed Trump with the powers of the unitary executive, holding in Trump v. United States that the president may exercise his pardon power however he pleases to excuse anyone from any federal prosecution.

The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we — all of us — take in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Bill Blum is a former California administrative law judge. As an attorney prior to becoming a judge, he was one of the state's best-known death-penalty litigators. He is also an award-winning writer and legal journalist, and the author of three popular legal thrillers published by Penguin/Putnam as well as scores of features and book reviews published in a broad array of magazines and newspapers. His non-fiction work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, ranging from Common Dreams and The Nation to the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Weekly and Los Angeles Magazine.

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