They Want Silence. They’re Getting Whistles.

From Minnesota to Maine, Americans push back as Trump’s immigration crackdown turns openly authoritarian

Good morning! Cruelty is not an error, excess, or misunderstanding, as the Trump administration repeatedly showed this week. In Minnesota, where winter didn’t stop anything. Clergy knelt on the road outside Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, sang hymns, prayed, and refused to move. About 100 of them were arrested, not by federal agents, but by airport staff and local law enforcement, for the crime of public witness. Their demand was simple and radical: that airlines, particularly Delta and Signature Aviation, stop pretending neutrality while ICE uses airports and airport workers as hunting grounds. That image, pastors zip-tied for praying, is now the face of Trump’s “law and order.”

Outside the airport, Minnesota shut itself down. Bars closed, bakeries closed, and workers walked off jobs and marched anyway through brutal cold. Organizers called it a general strike, and for once that wasn’t hyperbole. This wasn’t performative outrage; it was a community saying daily life cannot continue as usual while masked federal agents roam neighborhoods, deploy tear gas, and kill civilians. One of the central demands was accountability for the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, earlier this month as she observed enforcement activity in her neighborhood. Watching ICE has become so dangerous that it can now get you killed.

Hot damn, Minnesota! You make us all proud!

In Minneapolis, resistance has taken on a particular form: whistles, phones, Signal chats, masks. Neighbors track unmarked vehicles, while parents patrol school routes. Protesters gather outside the Whipple federal building day after day, sometimes dancing, sometimes choking on tear gas, sometimes watching photographers pinned to the ground. It feels festive until it doesn’t. It feels absurd until it feels like an occupation, because that’s what it is.

Five years after George Floyd, Minnesota has muscle memory. People remember what secrecy costs. Their tactic of choice is noise. ICE cannot operate quietly if every movement is seen, recorded, and shouted into the open. That visibility is now what ICE is trying to crush.

Across the country in Maine, the pattern is unmistakable. Three days into an ICE surge centered on Portland and Lewiston, DHS bragged about arresting more than 100 people and compiling a list of 1,400 more. Organizers say African asylum seekers, Somali, Congolese, Angolan, are being disproportionately targeted. Schools are emptying. Workers are disappearing. Families can’t find loved ones after they’re taken because Maine doesn’t even have an immigration detention facility, people are just moved, fast, out of sight.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the domestic application of a worldview Trump articulated plainly just days ago on the world stage. At Davos, Trump declared that the West cannot “import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own,” explicitly invoking Somalia, a country he has long derided as a “shithole.” That line wasn’t an offhand insult. It was a thesis. Once entire nations are defined as civilizational failures, their people become suspect by default. Their asylum claims become inconveniences. Their presence becomes framed as contamination rather than refuge.

Seen through that lens, Maine makes perfect sense. Volunteers who legally observe and document ICE activity say agents have begun showing up at their homes, masked, armed, and issuing warnings. “We know you live here.” They tell observers that following and filming them is “impeding federal law enforcement,” despite the First Amendment being crystal clear on the right to record public officials in public spaces. In Minneapolis, observers were detained. In Maine, they’re being threatened. The message is the same: stop watching, or we’ll make this personal. ICE doesn’t fear protesters, it fears witnesses.

Which brings us to the children. Earlier this week, ICE detained a five-year-old boy, Liam, wearing a Spider-Man backpack, in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. Officials claimed they had “no choice.” They lied. School officials were on scene. Other adults offered to take him. His mother was inside the house. ICE took him anyway and flew him, along with his father, to a family detention center in Texas.

Liam’s attorney, Mark Proish, has been unequivocal about what actually happened. “They did everything right when they came in,” he said. “They used the app, they presented themselves at the border, they shared all of their information with the government, and they were following the process.” His conclusion was even more damning: “ICE didn’t care about the fact that they had those pending claims, and just arrested them.”

This detail obliterates the administration’s favorite excuse. This was not a family hiding in the shadows; they were complying with the law, and discovering that compliance no longer protects anyone. School officials who witnessed the arrest say there was ample opportunity to safely hand Liam to adults on the scene. ICE refused, then used the child as leverage, removed him from his community, and transported him hundreds of miles away before lawyers could intervene. The administration isn’t embarrassed by the image of a kindergartner disappearing into federal custody; instead, they want to broadcast it as a deterrent.

Just days later, ICE went further, and crossed a line that is impossible to explain away. Agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis, smashed a car window while the child was inside, refused repeated pleas to hand the toddler to her mother, and then transported both of them out of state. They did so after a federal judge explicitly ordered the child released, citing the “risk of irreparable harm.”

Defying a court order to seize and transport a child across state lines is not enforcement by any ordinary understanding of the word. In plain terms, it bears the hallmarks of kidnapping, and in any other context, moving a child hundreds of miles against a judge’s command would raise immediate questions about trafficking. That the actors here wore federal badges does not change the underlying facts; it only underscores how far the administration believes its power extends.

If the rule of law means anything at all, it cannot stop at the border, or at the doors of a detention bus. The Guardian’s reporting makes the broader picture impossible to ignore. ICE booked about 3,800 minors into family detention in the first ten months of last year alone, including toddlers, with more than 2,600 apprehended inside the United States. Instead of a border surge, it’s a domestic dragnet. Families with pending asylum claims, work authorization, even refugee status are being detained anyway. Legal process has become a registry, not a shield.

This is a deliberate revival and expansion of family detention, a policy halted five years ago because it was recognized as abusive and unlawful. Republicans are now openly trying to scrap the Flores Settlement, the legal framework that limits how long and under what conditions children can be detained. The detention budget has exploded. As one child-advocacy lawyer put it: this is “100% unnecessary and 100% designed to hurt kids.”

All of this is happening while Donald Trump struts around the world pretending to be a humanitarian. From Air Force One, returning from Davos, Trump claimed that his threats alone stopped Iran from executing more than 800 protesters, a claim Iran flatly denied as “completely false.” He boasted about sending an American “armada” toward Iran while posturing as the defender of human rights abroad. The grotesque irony would be funny if it weren’t so deadly: the same administration threatening war over protesters overseas is zip-tying clergy, threatening witnesses, and flying toddlers across the country as leverage.

The economic reality Trump tried to shout down in Switzerland keeps intruding. Housing is collapsing, pending home sales just cratered, inflation is creeping back up, and disposable income is falling. Consumers are spending more, but mostly on health care, housing, energy, and debt, not signs of prosperity but of survival. Foreign capital is still pouring into U.S. equities, not because the economy is healthy, but because American markets are a liquid parking garage for global wealth. Treasury demand is weakening, and allies are hedging. Canada, of all countries, just made a highly public break toward deeper partnership with China, a signal that the world is adjusting to a United States that no longer acts like a reliable anchor. Trump responded by whining that Canada should be “grateful.” The bully is discovering limits.

After all this, I am ready for schadenfreude with my coffee. In a rare moment where power was forced to blink, a federal judge openly questioned whether Trump has any legal authority to demolish part of the White House to build himself a $400 million ballroom. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon appeared unconvinced by the administration’s attempt to justify the project through a legal Rube Goldberg machine involving obscure Interior Department gift rules and Gerald Ford’s swimming pool. “The president is a temporary resident,” one lawyer argued. Leon agreed, reminding the courtroom that Trump is a steward, not a landlord, and that Congress does not hide elephants in mouse holes.

The White House is still trying to plow ahead, of course, stacking review boards with loyalists and insisting the ballroom is “important to the president,” which now seems to be their entire constitutional theory. But for one afternoon, it was nice to watch the law clear its throat and say no.

And finally, in news that surprised absolutely no one except perhaps the people who greenlit it, Melania, the glossy biopic meant to rebrand the former first lady as a misunderstood icon of elegance and endurance, landed with a thud so loud it could be heard echoing off the East Wing Trump still isn’t allowed to knock down. The film debuted to weak ticket sales, brutal reviews, and an audience response best described as polite confusion followed by immediate disengagement. Critics struggled to identify a narrative arc, emotional core, or reason for existence, while viewers appeared unmoved by yet another attempt to launder the Trump brand through soft lighting, somber music, and the insistence that silence is depth. In a week where Americans are watching children dragged into detention and clergy arrested for praying, the market delivered its own verdict: the public is not in the mood for revisionist fluff about a woman who spent four years saying nothing, doing nothing, and then quietly cashing checks afterward. Even the culture industry has limits.

It is humiliating that this country elected a convicted felon who governs through menace, lies, and collective punishment. That shame is real and earned. But it is also true, and deeply heartening, that Americans are standing up anyway. Clergy kneel, neighbors blow whistles, and teachers escort kids home. Parents show up at bus stops, lawyers file emergency petitions through the night, and superintendents break protocol to tell the truth. Ordinary people refuse to let terror operate quietly.

Authoritarianism feeds on inevitability, on the lie that this is unstoppable, that nothing can be done, that cruelty is just the weather now. But that lie is cracking. The resistance is real, it is growing, and it is coming not from abstractions but from people: clergy kneeling on cold pavement, neighbors blowing whistles, teachers protecting kids, lawyers filing through the night, communities refusing to let terror operate quietly.

And here’s the part the GOP would very much like you to forget: they can end this. This isn’t an act of God, it’s policy. Budgets can be cut, and oversight can be enforced. Republicans in Congress could stop the detention of children, rein in ICE, and restore the rule of law tomorrow if they chose to. Every day they don’t is a choice, and they should be made to own it loudly, publicly, and relentlessly.

So keep the pressure on. Support the groups doing the work on the ground. Make it impossible for this administration, or its enablers, to hide behind silence, process, or cruelty dressed up as inevitability.

Marz and I are sending our moonbeams full of love, pride, and solidarity to all the real Americans out there doing the hard, scary, necessary work of protecting our democracy. You are not alone or invisible. You are the reason this story is not over yet.