‘A British ICE’ – Far-right fantasy or creeping reality?

Olivia Barber 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward


The UK already has its own version of ICE. Reform UK and the far-right dream of taking that sinister approach even further

When Reform UK politicians recently voiced support for Donald Trump’s Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), it was a double-take moment. Was the UK already becoming Trump’s America?

The comments were made after ICE kidnapping and arresting children (including a two-year-old baby!). Last month, enforcement agents in Minneapolis fatally shot two unarmed civilians in a matter of weeks. Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who was volunteering as a legal observer to ICE’s operations was shot dead on 7 January. Weeks later, and just a mile down the road, masked federal agents killed Alex Pretti, who had been protesting ICE’s presence in the city after Good’s killing.

Rather than condemning the scenes, Joseph Boam, a Reform councillor in Leicestershire shared an “I stand with ICE” Homeland Security graphic, which he deleted shortly after. Reform’s London mayoral candidate, Laila Cunningham told GB News that the UK needs “a strong border force, like ICE”. Reform councillor Mick Cockerham went further, saying that ICE techniques should be used on “woke interfering lefties”. He said this in response to London mayor Sadiq Khan warning that Reform would bring ICE to the UK. Meanwhile, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has said if her party won power, they’d launch a US-style ICE force and deport 150,000 undocumented migrants per year.

The rhetoric is hardline, signalling that many politicians are raring to import policies straight from Trump’s playbook. However, it is not only the far-right adopting this kind of messaging. The Labour government has been publicising its Home Office raids on TikTok and tweeting deportation figures, showing just how tough it wants to appear on immigration. The question now is, will the far-right go further and turn its Trump-style ICE fantasy into a reality?

The UK already has its own ICE (sort of)

“While what is happening in the US is a more violent version or more extremely violent version of the kind of immigration politics we have here, we do have some of this politics here already,” Senior policy and research officer at Refugee Action, Ben Whitham tells Left Foot Forward.

Whitham later sends me a link to a blog post written by Right to Remain, which talks about the UK’s own ICE (Immigration Compliance and Enforcement) teams. The UK’s ICE teams were set up in 2012 as a distinct law enforcement command to the former UK Border Agency. The Home Office’s ICE teams carry out raids in workplaces and people’s homes. Right to Remain points out that under Labour, ICE teams have become far more active.

According to Home Office figures, “Between 1 July 2024 and 31 December 2025 Immigration Enforcement teams made more than 12,322 arrests of people in illegal working visits, an 83% increase on the same period immediately 18 months prior.”
Raids as photo opportunities

In 2026, we’re living in a reality whereby immigration raids are seen as political opportunities to chase the anti-migration vote. Whitham says that “successive governments of both main parties have used those immigration raids as photo opportunities for politicians, to demonstrate that they are tough”.

He says that the raids are used in a “very performative” way “to say we’re out there in the street raiding workplaces and locking people up and deporting people”.

Jake Atkinson, a spokesperson for the Stop Trump Coalition, is quick to make the same point: “We should make no mistake that when people look at what’s happening in the US, this is already happening here.”

“We have our own version of ICE,” he says, again referring to the raids that the Home Office carries out in people’s homes and communities.

Atkinson also warns that the expansion of police use of facial recognition under Labour, as well as the crackdown on civil liberties, repeat protests and erosion of migrants’ rights is creating “an increasingly authoritarian state”.

He adds that Starmer is giving someone like Farage, “who already wants to strip back human rights and holds more radical positions, the infrastructure to enact a vision they want to replicate from the US”.
The far-right fantasy

While the UK’s approach to immigration is not a million miles away from what we’re seeing in places like Minneapolis or the apartment raids in Chicago, Whitham does not expect similar scenes in London or Manchester anytime soon.

He says that “to some extent, this is about that sort of far-right fantasy of power and violence, that they want to see on our streets.”

Whitham explains that Reform and Kemi Badenoch want to use that “imagery to mobilise among their supporters and potential supporters, a sense of being able to wield really brutal power and do further harm to marginalised communities in the UK”.

“That far right fantasy would be a lot harder to realise in the UK,” he explains. Whitham points to the fact that the UK does not have a federal system nor powerful enforcement agencies like ICE that are heavily influenced by the President.
Gun culture

In addition, both Whitham and Atkinson noted key differences between the UK and the US in terms of law enforcement and gun culture. Police fatally shoot around three people per year in the UK. In the US, more than 1,000 people a year are killed by police.

However, Atkinson warns that it is “not out of the realm of possibility” for UK police to start using lethal force against unarmed members of the public, as we are seeing in Minneapolis.

“When Nigel Farage and others talk about importing an ICE-style taskforce to the UK, we need to understand that it opens the door to that possibility that we will see more armed personnel on the streets and that is intimidating to our communities,” he explains.

He adds: “That’s absolutely why people need to resist any further encroachment of this kind from the US.”
Resisting ICE

It might be a far-right fantasy, but it doesn’t mean that Farage, Badenoch and others on the right won’t try to bring Trump’s ICE to the UK.

“This should be a wake-up call,” Atkinson says. “We need to step up and meet the moment, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, it’s not enough for people to see it and be shocked.”

He adds that people who have been observing and monitoring ICE operations and warning their communities, as Good and Pretti did, have “saved people”. “It has given them the chance to get away and hide with their neighbours,” he says.

In the UK, people can help by getting involved in local community defence groups and anti-raid organisations. Atkinson also encourages people to work with migrant rights groups such as Praxis and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Migrants.

The Stop Trump Coalition has held protests in UK cities, including Leeds, London and Edinburgh to show solidarity with those resisting ICE in the US.
Politicians must stop appeasing the far-right

Alongside campaigning against raids and immigration enforcement activities, Atkinson says “we must demand that politicians stop appeasing the far-right here”.

Whitham explains that the rise of the far-right in the UK is partly due to mainstream political parties “relentlessly punching down at migrants as though they were the cause of our wider socioeconomic decline”.

Blaming migrants has been seen “as a cheaper, easier way of trying to address the deep crises we have rather than tackling them in a more substantial way,” he adds.

Yet, as recently as in his 2020 leadership campaign, Starmer himself said: “Low wages, poor housing, poor public services are not the fault of people who come here: they’re political failure.”

Whitham says: “We need to get back to that kind of understanding, which was always correct and true, but in office, the government has completely abandoned that.”

After all, if migration were really to blame for the cost-of-living crisis, low wages and a lack of affordable housing, then Trump’s ICE, and the hostile environment policies under the Tories and now Labour would have magically solved all of those issues by now, wouldn’t they?

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

Outrage as Reform UK threatens to defund university after student society blocks event

Olivia Barber

Today
Left Foot Forward


Reform's threat to strip Bangor University of millions in funding has been described as Trumpian

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Bangor University Debating and Political Society has refused to allow Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin and Jack Anderton from hosting a Q&A event with students.

The student debating society said they had refused Pochin and Anderton’s request to run a Q&A because they have “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia displayed by the members of Reform UK”.

In response, Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf has furiously threatened that under a Reform government, Bangor’s £30 million a year in state funding would be pulled.

Writing on X, Yusuf said: “I am sure they won’t mind losing every penny of that state funding under a Reform government. After all, they wouldn’t want a racist’s money would they?”.

Reform deputy leader Richard Tice MP added: “Simple. In line with our values, if Bangor Uni does not believe in free speech, then British taxpayers should not have to fund them.

“Perhaps remove all government funding and no student loans for Bangor students. The phone will ring very soon.”

GB News presenter Bev Turner also weighed in, describing the decision as “the most small-minded, petulant, unintelligent display of censorship from @bangor_staff” and tagging the President of the United States in her post.

Users on X have pointed out that the decision was made by the student debating society, not Bangor University itself.

Journalist Michael Crick said: “Hang on Mr Yusuf, this isn’t Bangor University as a whole, but the Political Society, probably just a few young students. They’re wrong to ban Reform UK but you shouldn’t threaten to take it out on Bangor University as a whole. You sound too much like that bully Trump.”

Another X user said: “Quite the statement from Reform. A Reform Gov would not fund a university who didn’t agree with them. Where’ve we heard that before? Nazi vibes. What scary times we live in.”

Claire Hughes, Labour MP for Bangor Aberconwy, said: “Fancy accusing Bangor University of “banning” Reform and issuing threats. All because a debating society turned them down…?

“Pathetic. We will fight them all the way.”

Reform Party UK Exposed wrote: “Stripping funding to a university due to the actions of a single university society is exactly the type of thin-skinned over-reaction that you would expect from Reform UK.”

Reform’s threats to cut funding mirror what Donald Trump is doing in the US. During his second administration, Trump has cut, frozen, or threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal research grants and funding from U.S. universities to “stamp out” “woke” and “radical left” ideologies on American campuses.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

Nigel Farage calls for an end to working from home

Fact Checker
Left Foot Forward 
Olivia Barber 

Today


'Richard Tice is a property developer with huge interests in inner-city office projects'

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Nigel Farage has again waged war on people’s ability to work from home and the focus on work-life balance, saying that people should return to the office.

In a speech at a Reform rally in Birmingham yesterday, Farage said there needed to be “an attitudinal change to working from home”, adding that “people aren’t more productive working at home”.

“It’s a load of nonsense. They’re more productive being with other fellow human beings,” he said.

The Reform leader also said there needed to be “an attitudinal change to hard work rather than work-life balance”.

As Farage reignites the culture war over working from home, it has been noted that Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, who divides his time between the UK and Dubai, has significant interests in office space.

Tice is a director of property investment companies Quidnet REIT Ltd and Tisun Investments, which own and manage commercial office space.

One X account, The Purple Pimpernel, said: “Richard Tice is a property developer with huge interests in inner-city office projects. Working from home is a huge threat to men like Tice. Not that Reform have any ulterior motives of course!”.

Simon Gosden added: “Working from home: banned. There’s a populist policy, for the managers and the office block owners.”

In the run-up to the May 2025 local elections, Reform said it would not allow anyone working for a Reform council to work from home. Soon after, the party advertised regional director roles that offered a work from home option.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

 

Socialism from Bernie to Mamdani

By Dan Chiasson, Graham Culbertson 

February 7, 2026

Source: Everyday Anarchism

Dan Chiasson joins me to discuss his combined Bernie and Burlington biography, Bernie for Burlington, and the connections between Bernie’s socialism and Mamdani’s socialism.

You can purchase Dan’s book here: https://flyleafbooks.com/book/9780593317495

Here’s Dan’s article about Mamdani: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/11/06/have-you-met-z-zohran-mamdani/

And we discuss Corey Robin’s piece on socialist excellence: https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/Email

Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson teaches at Wellesley. His next book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, will be published in February.

 

Fascist Aesthetics Have Come Back with MAGA Politics

By Henry A. Giroux

February 7, 2026

Source: Socialist Project

ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026. (“Agents Shoot Less Lethals on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis” by Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0)

What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as a badge of cruelty. Carefully styling herself in a Barbie-doll register of hyper-femininity, she delivers media performances staged in front of prisons and other sites associated with the punishment and terrorization of immigrants. The effect is chilling: a glossy, pornographic aesthetic fused with images of confinement, state violence, and racialized cruelty. Beauty here does not soften power; it aestheticizes domination and makes authoritarian violence appear natural, even glamorous. This aesthetic of cruelty is not confined to clothing (heavy on tweeds), posture, or setting. It increasingly takes hold at the level of the face itself, where artificiality is no longer concealed but aggressively displayed.

As Inae Oh observes in Mother Jones, perhaps “the most jarring element of this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is its unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectable regimens of Botox and fillers.” Artificiality here is no longer a flaw to be concealed but a badge of belonging, a visual shorthand for power, wealth, and ideological conformity. As one Daily Mail headline bluntly declared, “Plastic surgery was the star of the show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024. The resulting look, widely disparaged as “Mar-a-Lago face,” signals a politics that treats the body as a surface to be engineered, disciplined, and branded, a mask of dominance and emotional vacancy masquerading as strength. The face becomes armor – hard, synthetic, and affectless – training its wearer to project authority while erasing vulnerability.

Traditional Feminine and Masculinist Style

If this surgically enhanced, hyper-feminized spectacle provides one face of the MAGA aesthetic, what Maureen Lehto Brewster has described as “an almost Fox News anchor look” that signals “dressing in [an] overtly feminine way to reassert patriarchal dominance,” its other face emerges in a parallel masculinist style that draws even more directly from the visual grammar of fascism. Shaved or tightly cropped hair, rigid posture, militarized clothing, and the revival of authoritarian silhouettes unmistakably echo twentieth-century fascist pageantry. Consider Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino’s long black trench coat, worn not for function but for theatrical authority. It is costume politics, a visual performance of domination meant to intimidate rather than persuade. As Arwa Mahdawi remarks in The Guardian, “the Zambian bum-stick chimps seem positively sophisticated in comparison.”

Together, these aesthetic registers do more than signal allegiance. They train bodies to feel power before thinking about it, rehearsing domination as posture, style, and presence, a lesson that now circulates with particular intensity across digital culture. This aesthetic hardens further in the digital sphere. MAGA men proliferate across TikTok, YouTube, X, and other platforms like a fever dream of authoritarian masculinity. They present themselves as strongmen-in-training: squared jaws clenched in permanent hostility, hyper-muscular bodies forged in gym rituals that double as moral theater, libidinal excess mistaken for strength, and rigid, armored postures that signal domination rather than confidence. Their movements are stiff and rehearsed, their bodies disciplined into what Wilhelm Reich once called crippling body armor, where repression congeals into aggression, and vulnerability is converted into cruelty.

Pedagogy of Violence

This is not merely a style; it is an embodied pedagogy of violence. These men learn power through posture, gaze, and gesture. Clenched fists, growling stares, and exaggerated physical presence rehearse domination as a way of being in the world. Misogyny and hostile sexism are not simply beliefs but bodily dispositions, ways of standing, moving, and occupying space that render women, queer bodies, migrants, and the “weak” as threats to be neutralized rather than human beings to be encountered. It is therefore no accident that this aesthetic and affective training culminates in the celebration of ICE, an updated Ku Klux Klan in military dress, where white supremacist terror is bureaucratized and legalized, folded into official policy, and normalized as the everyday practice of state power.

The MAGA aesthetic is tethered to Trump’s regressive theater of white masculinity, a spectacle of grievance, racial resentment, and performative cruelty masquerading as strength. These bodies are drawn to Trump because he licenses their rage. His performance of white supremacy, racism, and nationalist victimhood authorizes the conversion of fear into aggression and resentment into entitlement. What parades as confidence is, in fact, fragility armored with force.

The MAGA male aesthetic is saturated with an evolutionary fantasy of domination: a Hobbesian survival of the fittest worldview stripped of ethics, solidarity, and care. Etched into their faces is a sneer aimed at the “weak,” the feminized, and the racialized other is not incidental; it is central. Violence is already present, normalized through repetition. These bodies function as rehearsals for cruelty, training grounds for a politics in which empathy is viewed with disdain as a weakness, democracy is feminized, and power is proven through the capacity to humiliate, exclude, and harm.

What we are witnessing is more than bad taste or digital bravado; rather it is the corporeal staging of authoritarian desire, a fascist aesthetic that teaches men to feel powerful by hardening themselves against the claims of others. It is violence before the blow, domination before the command, pedagogy before policy.

The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. In Sontag’s terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democratic appeal for spectacle, substituting ethical substance with visual aggression and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.

Nowhere is this aesthetic logic more nakedly visible than in Trump himself, whose body has always functioned as a political text. His appearance is not incidental to his power but central to it, staging domination, excess, and entitlement as visual norms. To read Trump’s look closely is to see how authoritarian values are worn on the body long before they are imposed as policy.

As Jess Cartner-Morley notes, “to critique the Trump aesthetic is not to trivialize abominations, because his values and beliefs run through both. It [begins] at face value, where Trump’s brazenly artificial shade of salmon reflects not only vanity,” but a grotesque misunderstanding of authority, as if a three-week Caribbean cruise tan were an appropriate look for a man entrusted with the gravest responsibilities of public office. His oversized suits and perpetually overlong ties do similar symbolic work. The ties hang like exaggerated phallic markers, extending well past the belt line, signaling not elegance but compulsion, a visual overreach that mirrors his politics. They do not finish the outfit; they dominate it. The result is a body styled not for restraint or dignity but for excess, spectacle, and domination, a supersized ego draped in fabric and color.

All of this is engineered by a president who wears ill-fitting designer suits, commandeers cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center to impose a politics of vulgarity, and casually announces imperial ambitions, from Greenland to Venezuela. It would be easy to dismiss him as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, and has worked to create a personal Gestapo-like police apparatus unaccountable to law. He has elevated staggering levels of inequality and white supremacy into governing principles, funded the genocide in Gaza, and aligned himself on the global stage with war criminals. He appears most animated when humiliating others or inflicting pain. He is the embodiment of an ugly ideology clothed in an equally ugly aesthetic. And in ugly times, such symbols are not incidental; they are warnings. 

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

A New Era of Political Mobilization Is Dawning

From the Avenues of Paris to the Streets of Minneapolis, the Power of Broad-Based Movement Building Is Becoming Evident

by Ida Susser / February 9th, 2026

Born in South Africa just a few years after the end of World War II and reared by activists in the anti-apartheid movement, I witnessed my parents’ struggle against fascism and its accompanying racism in both my country of birth and Europe. This created in me a sense of the fragility of democracy and fear of losing civil rights and collective values. The wave of brutal ICE raids and the Trump administration’s assault on political and legal norms prove this fear well-founded.

At the age of five, my father told me, “We fought fascism in Europe and then came home to see it develop here.” He explained that one of my relatives had fled Germany for South Africa, escaping alone as a young Jewish boy, and refused to run away again when, in 1948, fascists were elected to power there (by the white minority who could vote). He and his wife ended up in jail and, for decades, under house arrest. Left alone, their teenage son committed suicide. Unlike these cousins and other friends, my parents left South Africa after they lost their jobs and were blacklisted, and before they were arrested. I grew up in exile in England and the US.

As I watch unidentified ICE guards with faces obscured, protruding gas masks, bulging army fatigues, and guns, I am convinced that we are witnessing a new form of fascism in the making. How should we react, and does popular resistance in the streets make a difference? What types of organizing are most effective? As an anthropologist who studies social movements, I’ve spent much of my professional life grappling with these questions.

That’s why I found myself studying the Yellow Vest movement that erupted on the streets of Paris in 2018. I embedded with this movement—which took its name from the yellow security vests participants donned—from its earliest stages and have continued to study it and its aftermath. The Yellow Vests were composed of “ordinary” citizens who were outraged by government policies to raise the gas tax, and whose anger quickly morphed into opposition to cutbacks in state transportation services, healthcare, and education. “They are stealing the state” was a popular refrain to describe the selling or privatizing of services and taking away the right to social welfare. Americans might not use the same language, but surely the spirit of this complaint registers as we watch shocking ICE raids, Trump’s gutting of public institutions, and the skyrocketing cost of essential items and services.

The Yellow Vests faced the kind of massive opposition from the state that we see on the streets of Minneapolis. Police in full military gear, with plastic shields and Lanceurs de balles de défense (LBDS) or “non-lethal” flash ball lancers, surrounded protesters, using facial surveillance to make arrests while the government tried to ban the photographing of police. Yellow Vests lost eyes, feet, and hands as they were hit by the missiles. They still didn’t back down, and they inspired future action. Their protests gave way to massive union marches and even more resistance. In the 2024 snap elections, a united progressive front, Le Nouveau Front Populaire, won the most seats in the National Assembly. The threat of fascism remains strong as Marine Le Pen’s party now holds the second largest number of seats, but the French mobilizations in the street, the unions, and in the ballot box are building an alternative vision.

In studying the Yellow Vests and their impact for nearly a decade, it became clear that the movement’s power lay largely in its ability to draw from a wide cross-section of society. Young and old, people with disabilities, people of all races and sexual orientations, and men and women found a home in the movement.  Most weren’t usually politically active, and they hailed from all over France.

Critically, the Yellow Vests did not demand rigid ideological conformity. They allowed for disagreement and debated each other without losing sight of their common purpose. Past voting records or political affiliation mattered less than their commitment to ending the policies that robbed them of dignity and eroded their quality of life. A vibrant exchange of ideas fostered a robust intellectual climate that many protesters said benefited them both personally and politically. Participants commiserated about how they felt ashamed of their poverty and burdened by debt. In earlier elections, some had voted right and some left, but they looked beyond that to assert a common humanity and develop a cohesive set of demands that served the many instead of the few. As they built diverse communities in traffic circles across Paris, they raised questions of social justice and broader humanitarian visions; they tested their ideas; they challenged traditional political and identity categories to nurture solidarity and construct a durable front against 21st-century authoritarianism.

My research on the Yellow Vests shows that change came from a mutually reinforcing combination of street protests, unions, and political parties fighting for common rights to the streets and social welfare. In the US, we see the beginning of such resistance: Minneapolis called for an unprecedented general strike, supported by students, unions, churches, small businesses, and even corporate leaders. As in France, a broad swath of Americans is uniting based on a common desire for justice, freedom, and dignity. We see here the potential to stop the destruction of democracy in the US through mass mobilization emerging from street corners and neighborhood networks throughout the country. They are forcing political representatives, at least among the Democrats, who have withheld Senate approval for the funding of homeland security. Minnesota-based corporations, including Target and General Mills, have signed a petition calling for the de-escalation of tensions. Even the Republican political representatives have begun to call for an investigation of the shooting of activists.

The overlaps between the Yellow Vests and the protestors on the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US are clear to me. Americans have learned similar lessons about the importance of broad-based organizing from their successes in confronting police brutality and racism after the murder of George Floyd. Demonstrators all over the country are fighting to stop the obliteration of fundamental social norms and what appears to be Trump’s unfettered private army. Such a protest can generate a wider mobilization with the power to fundamentally alter the political landscape. We saw that in France, and we are starting to see it here. As the government pulls back slightly, popular counter-movements have already demonstrated their potential to stop repressive policies from the ground up.  “After months of community resistance, the president backed down. Leadership from below succeeded when politics as usual failed, Aditya Chakrabortty recently noted in a Guardian article about the Minneapolis protests. He pointed to the expulsion of Gregory Bovino, the president’s immigration chief, from Minneapolis and the now precarious political future of Kristi Noem.

This is only the beginning, but signs of hope are emerging. In France, the Yellow Vests heralded a new era of popular resistance. Here, the people of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Maine lead the way.

Ida Susser is a cultural anthropologist and Distinguished Professor at CUNY and Hunter College. She is the author of numerous books, chapters, and articles, including The Tumultuous Politics of Scale (Routledge Press, 2020) co-edited, and Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her book AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) was awarded the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for research in women and health by the Society for Medical Anthropology (2012). From 2015-2025 she conducted ethnographic research into social movements in France. Her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century, will be published on April 1, 2026. Read other articles by Ida

Minneapolis Epitomizes Dangerously Empathetic Samaritans

There is nothing more dangerous to ruling class interests than people getting in touch with their inborn sense of empathy and acting as their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

by Gary Olson / February 9th, 2026

Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. — Heinz Kohut

The ongoing face-off between federal immigration agents and well-organized neighborhood resistance in Minneapolis reminded me once again of the parable of the Good Samaritan and of how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently invoked it in his sermons.

According to Luke 10:24-37, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan as part of a Socratic dialogue with an expert in Jewish law. Jesus had said something about “loving your neighbor,” and the lawyer (probably trying to stump Jesus) asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In response, he heard the now-famous parable.

In brief, “a certain man” is walking on the seventeen-mile road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a treacherous area where bandits and robbers were known to prey on travelers. The Samaritan sees a man who has been severely beaten and left half-dead, lying by the side of the road. The Samaritan administers first aid, takes him to an inn, remains with him overnight, and even pays the bill.

In his sermon of April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, King preached about the parable and noted that two others had earlier bypassed the man lying beside the road after having asked themselves, ‘If I help this man, what will happen to me?’ But the Good Samaritan reverses the question and asks, “If I don’t help this man, what will happen to him?’ King was asking people to put themselves at some risk in service to what he called radical altruism, and I’ve chosen to call “dangerous empathy.” Recall that when King was murdered, he was in Memphis to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers. He was asking, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

However, we can’t underestimate a major cultural impediment to putting dangerous empathy into widespread practice. Setting aside the 2 to 3 percent among us that can be classified as psychopaths (those at the highest levels of government, business, and the military), we see a society that has generally displayed an anesthetized conscience toward the suffering of others at home and abroad, especially if they’re not white.

We hear “the cry of the people,” but the moral sound waves pass through cultural baffles as capitalism deadens natural feelings of empathy and moral responsibility. It’s an awkward turn of phrase, but I’ve described this as culturally acquired empathy-deficit disorder, having its roots in our dominant socioeconomic system. The late primate scientist Frans de Waal captures the system’s need for this callousness when he asserts that “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

Given this reality, it’s my sense that King would be fulsomely praising the actions of the brave citizens of Minneapolis as they respond to their immigrant neighborhood communities living in constant fear and dread of deportation. He would undoubtedly commend them for modeling their law-enforcement monitoring on tactics first employed by Black activists in Watts in 1965, the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the American Indian Movement, which was founded in Minneapolis.

Along with counseling massive, nonviolent civil disobedience involving arrests, King would encourage activists not to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that require dangerous empathy, that, in his words, “it’s better to cure injustice at its source than to get bogged down with a single individual effort.” He was raising deeper questions about how dangerous empathy should proceed when he wrote, “For years I have labored with the idea of refining the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

In Minneapolis, ordinary citizens are asking themselves, “If I don’t help my undocumented neighbors, what will happen to them?”I want to believe that their practice of dangerous empathy in confronting Gestapo-like thugs portends promise for wholesale structural change in the country. We should remain open to the possibility that a particularly egregious event will create a tipping point toward our biological predisposition for empathy and, with it, a further step toward working-class consciousness.

Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: glolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.

What Do Minnesota and Venezuela Have in Common?

The governing logic of the Trump administration increasingly treats both Democratic-controlled U.S. states and neighboring countries as spaces requiring imperial pacification rather than democratic self-rule.

By Richard W. Coughlin

February 9, 2026

Source: FPIF

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) | Illustration credit: Mike Goad/Flickr, public domain image

Former President Donald Trump has begun to speak openly about placing the federal government in charge of overseeing elections in as many as 15 states where, he claims, corruption is rampant. What might Minnesota and Venezuela have in common under this framing? The answer points toward an emerging imperial logic of rule—one that increasingly displaces the constraints associated with the United States as a constitutional republic.

Trump’s approach follows the logic of the South’s Lost Cause, now scaled up to the national level. This logic implies not merely the containment of the civil rights revolution, but its reversal. Where federal authority was once deployed to dismantle segregation and discrimination by limiting states’ rights, it is now mobilized against Democratic strongholds—not to advance civil rights, but to entrench Republican power. Pushing the analogy further, blue states are recast as the new rebel states: jurisdictions that resist the rightful initiatives of the federal government and must therefore be brought to heel for the sake of a Trumpian “union.”

Under this logic, blue states come to resemble Venezuela. They are portrayed as places incapable of ordering themselves, whose autonomy produces unacceptable political outcomes and therefore justifies external intervention. This framing helps make sense of the federal assault on Minneapolis, which has taken on the character of domestic gunboat diplomacy—implemented not through naval force, but through federal enforcement agencies such as ICE. Notable here was Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reported offer to Minnesota officials: hand over voter rolls and the pressure will stop.

In this emerging order, blue states are transformed into an internal frontier, directly analogous to the status long assigned to Venezuela and other “failed” or “rogue” states abroad. Recalcitrant regions are no longer treated as legitimate political communities with divergent preferences but as unsettled territories requiring pacification to be integrated into the dominant political order. When elections do not produce the “right” results, the conclusion is not political disagreement, but corruption, criminality, and disorder. What once applied to countries in the Global South—Guatemala in the 1950s offers a clear historical example—is now applied to domestic political opponents.

What had been a relatively stable federal system is giving way to a regime of revanchist political ordering. Political space is no longer organized as a constitutional republic of coequal states but increasingly as a frontier to be subdued. This transformation reflects deeper shifts: the exhaustion of neoliberalism, the discrediting of the elites who attempted to manage its contradictions, and the emergence of a new nationalist project that operates through coercion rather than consent. The frontier is no longer external to the polity. It has become the organizing logic of U.S. power both at home and abroad.

What unifies these domains is the collapse of restraint. Liberalism once functioned as a set of constitutional limits on power, binding legitimacy to law, procedure, and universal principles. As those restraints erode, power no longer needs to justify itself in neutral or inclusive terms. It is exercised openly, territorially, and punitively. The United States begins to resemble less a settled constitutional republic embedded in a rule-governed international order than a frontier empire turned inward. The same repertoire—delegitimation, exceptional measures, and moralized coercion—is deployed against foreign states and domestic political opponents alike. Blue states become internal Venezuelas; neighboring countries become buffer zones to be bullied into compliance. Elections themselves are recoded as tests of territorial loyalty rather than expressions of popular sovereignty.

These new exertions of imperial sovereignty have not gone uncontested. Residual commitments to constitutional federalism remain, as illustrated by Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s reluctance to pursue national control over state elections. Trump’s political standing has also weakened during the first year of his presidency. Yet what he retains is access to the coercive apparatus of the state—federal law enforcement agencies and, ultimately, the military. Whether these institutions become the battering rams of a new imperial sovereignty remains an open and deeply consequential question.

More Unions Are Saying ‘ICE Out’

By Alexandra Bradbury

February 8, 2026

In Portland, Oregon, the state labor council and two dozen unions backed a “Labor Says ICE Out!” march and rally January 31. Thousands of people turned out, many wearing union gear and carrying their union banners. Photo: OFNHP

More unions across the country are taking a stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement since the January 23 mass strike in Minneapolis and the January 24 killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse and union member.

Pretti was a member of the Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3669, working in the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Hospital. His death at the hands of Border Patrol agents has shocked and outraged people across the country. Health care and V.A. workers have felt it even more keenly.

National Nurses United, which has 225,000 members, became the first national union to call for the abolition of ICE, holding a week of actions beginning January 26 on that theme.

AFGE held a nationwide day of remembrance for Pretti on February 1, with vigils outside V.A. hospitals in 22 cities. The union called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for branding Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

A GROWING CHORUS

The day of Pretti’s killing, the AFL-CIO called “for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota.” The Communications Workers (CWA) soon did too.

They joined unions that have been making similar calls since the January 7 killing of Renee Good, including SEIU, which has called for “ICE out of our communities,” and the Postal Workers (APWU), which has called for “an end to these dangerous and disruptive ICE raids” and objected to the use of postal facilities as ICE staging areas.

Even some more conservative unions felt the need to say something about Pretti’s death. The Electrical Workers (IBEW) condemned the administration’s “excessive use of force and government overreach” in Minnesota. The Building Trades (NABTU) said Pretti’s killing “has raised serious concerns about excessive force, as multiple videos and eyewitness accounts contradict federal claims about the moments leading up to his death.”

Pretti’s union, AFGE, is in a complex position. The National Border Patrol Council is an AFGE affiliate, and put out an immediate statement the morning of his killing falsely claiming that he had been “brandishing” a gun, and asserting that officers had “utilized justifiable force in eliminating the threat.”

AFGE Local 17, which represents workers in the V.A.’s central office, has demanded that the V.A. offer grief counseling and mental health support, lower flags to half-staff, and apologize for blaming Pretti’s death on Minnesota’s insufficient compliance with the deportation machine.

PUTTING WORDS INTO ACTION

In Portland, Oregon, the state labor council and two dozen unions backed a “Labor Says ICE Out!” march and rally January 31. Thousands of people turned out, many wearing union gear and carrying their union banners. The Northwest Labor Press reported that marchers filled the streets for nine blocks.

Though the march was family-friendly, with plenty of kids and elders participating, when some protesters approached the ICE facility the police attacked with teargas and projectiles. The gassing was so intense that the effects lingered in the air for days, even indoors in nearby buildings, including a hospital.

The same day in Seattle, workers organized three union-backed “ICE out!” rallies—one for educators, one for health care workers, and one for tech workers—and converged for a joint march of thousands.

Some unions, such as the Chicago Teachers, have answered the call from Minneapolis activists to hold protests outside and inside Target stores nationwide. The retail chain Target is one of the biggest companies headquartered in the Twin Cities, and it has been allowing ICE to enter its stores and arrest employees. Other corporate targets are the hardware chain Home Depot, Enterprise car rentals, Hilton hotels, and a home builder called DR Horton.

In Minneapolis, labor solidarity has continued after the monumental strike. Teamsters Local 120 sent its food truck to support AFGE’s vigil at the V.A. At another hospital, nurses and doctors told the press that ICE was clearly lying about how a construction worker got his skull shattered. (ICE claimed he had deliberately run into a brick wall.)

And members of the Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 9 passed a resolution January 27 declaring that ICE activities on their delivery routes pose a major threat to members’ safety, and encouraging carriers to report it as a safety hazard when management tries to send them out in dangerous conditions.